Designing for Change: Why Adoption is the True Currency of Enablement

In the world of sales enablement, success is often measured by the volume of output: how many programs were launched, how many pieces of content were created, or how many reps attended a training session. However, as Michelle Curtis, Director of GTC Programs at Polaris I/O, recently discussed in her latest webinar, these are vanity metrics if they don’t lead to one specific outcome: adoption.

Adoption is defined as the action of choosing to take up, follow, or use something. The keyword here is choice. You can mandate attendance and require certifications, but you cannot force a human being to choose a new behavior over an old one in the moments that matter. If people don't choose to change, there is no impact, and without impact, the work of enablement is eventually questioned.

Why Adoption Fails

Most enablement professionals have experienced the frustration of building a "perfect" program, socializing it with leadership, sending out clever Slack memes, and providing reinforcement, only to see zero behavior change.

The failure doesn’t happen at rollout; it happens before the program is even built. Research suggests that 60% to 70% of change initiatives fail because they ignore the human, emotional, and psychological elements of change. We often build programs for people rather than with them. People simply do not adopt what they do not feel connected to.

The Adoption Effect: A Five-Stage Framework

To solve this, we must view adoption as a psychological chain. If any link in this chain breaks, the final goal of sustained behavior change will not be reached.

1. Trust (Psychological Safety)

The foundation of adoption is trust, specifically psychological safety. This is an environment where reps feel safe to be honest, admit confusion, or even voice resistance. When reps trust you enough to "vent," they provide the honest communication needed to reveal what is actually broken in the field.

2. Input (Co-Creation)

Once trust is established, you can move to co-creation. By asking reps for their input before building anything, you leverage the IKEA Effect—the psychological phenomenon where people value what they help create far more than what is handed to them. Effort creates attachment, and contribution creates value.

3. Ownership

When people see their own reality reflected in a program, they move from being passive recipients to active stakeholders. You know you have reached this stage when reps stop saying "Enablement wants us to do this" and start saying "This is how we do things".

4. Belief

Belief is the "gateway" to adoption. It consists of three critical components that must be present:

• Relevance: Does this help me with something I care about, like moving a deal forward?

• Efficacy: Do I believe this will work in the "chaos" of my real-life accounts and calendar?

• Priority: Is this worth my attention right now compared to hitting my quota?

5. Adoption

True adoption is when belief turns into consistent behavior. It isn't a one-time trial; it’s a permanent shift in how a rep prepares for a call, runs a discovery session, or uses a tool.

Putting Theory into Practice: The SDR Example

Consider a scenario where an SDR team's outreach sequencing is underperforming. An enabler could simply build a new sequence based on "best practices" and roll it out. However, a more effective approach involves gathering the SDRs in a room, sharing the data, and asking for their help to build the solution.

By workshopping the scripts and emails together, the team develops psychological ownership. Even if the final product is the same as what the enabler would have built alone, the results are vastly different because the team actually uses it.

Conclusion

Adoption is not magic; it is designed. By shifting our focus from the rollout to the very beginning of the "Adoption Effect" chain, we can create programs that don't just exist, but actually drive the impact our organizations need.