Learning Experiences Might Be What You Need to Solve Your Adoption Challenges

If you know me well, you know I’m deeply passionate about helping business leaders use learning experiences to drive adoption in their organizations. This passion comes from seeing firsthand how effective these immersive experiences can be at creating the change leaders aim for, which, in turn, sets the leader up for recognition and career growth opportunities.

One of the most common misconceptions that set marketing, sales and product leaders back from driving adoption is the belief that communication alone can encourage audiences to adopt something new. This mindset fails to address a critical reality: when you ask someone to do something, you’re asking them to change. To make a change, people almost always need more than just information.

For example, here is a common scenario I run into with clients: 
You’re in charge of leading a major initiative at your organization. You may be launching a new product or feature and need to train your sales team and channel partners on the product and how to position it with clients. Or maybe you need to encourage your customers to try the new tool or feature. Or, you need to help your customer success team understand how to best help your customers with this tool.

You invest a significant amount of time into thinking through strategic messaging for each of these important audiences. Then you work with your team to distribute the messaging through thoughtfully selected communication channels.

You receive positive feedback about the messaging from cross-functional leaders, and your team feels good about it. 

But a couple of weeks later, you aren’t seeing the kind of engagement or activity you expected.  You aren’t meeting product adoption goals, and the sales team is veering far off from the right messaging. You think that communicating again or refining the messages to these audiences may do the trick. But after sending more communication, adoption still hasn’t really budged. You’re disheartened and frustrated.

Why communication alone can’t drive the intended outcomes.

These are the types of challenges I help my clients overcome: Marketing, sales and product leaders each feel they’ve done everything “right” when launching a major organizational initiative. They’ve honed the messaging and shared it via all the right channels, but adoption is slow.

What I’ve learned from working across businesses of all types and sizes is that the issue is almost always that the leader is trying to solve the wrong problem.

You may have believed your product adoption challenge was a communication or awareness problem. “If we just communicate more, our customers, salespeople or customer service team will know what we want them to do, and they’ll do it.”

But the real challenge you're up against is a behavior change challenge. When you ask someone to try a new product, process or way of thinking, you are asking them to change their behavior.

Strong communication is a critical part of convincing someone to change a behavior. But relying on communication alone fails to recognize what else it takes to support your audiences through a change. When you launch a new initiative (i.e., a change), your audiences are in different stages of change. Depending on a particular person’s place in the change cycle, they may not be ready to receive and process certain messages.

Learning experiences that are designed to consider where people are in the change cycle can be the difference between you leading a successful initiative and one that falls flat.

How Learning Experiences Can Drive Change

Learning experiences and training programs are immersive and require your target audiences to set aside time to focus deeply on your product and your company and to consider the change you’re asking them to make. Learning programs acknowledge where your audiences are in their change cycle and can include information, exercises and engagement opportunities that will address each stage of change. 

For example, let’s say your product team developed a new feature within the sales portal that changes how salespeople and channel partners place orders for your products. The new feature is a significant improvement but using it requires a very different workflow than what the sales team is used to. You recognize that effective product adoption will require more than telling the sales team and channel partners about the change.  

 Instead of only communicating those changes, why not design a learning experience that includes: 

• A chance to use the new platform and experience new features

• A chance to practice through exercises that use real-world examples they can relate to

• Opportunities to ask questions, make connections between the old and new processes

• Interactive challenges that help drive “muscle memory” and recall; making it easier to remember new steps and build new shortcuts

This mix of learning content and interactive experience helps your audiences engage and address specific aspects of the change. Suddenly, the content actually relates to and addresses their specific adoption barriers.

When done properly, learning experiences not only influence the audiences’ perceptions and attitudes but also drive the key behaviors that result in program or product adoption and deeper brand engagement. This is possible because people who participate in learning experiences have agreed to spend time with you, are fully present and are open to receiving your message. They’re ready and able to immerse in what you have to share with them.

Communication Campaigns vs. Learning Experiences
​While many skilled and experienced communicators recognize how communication must tie to the change cycle, most communication campaigns don’t put this into practice. Most campaigns create a lot of noise but drive little adoption. Here’s how I think about the differences between communication campaigns versus offering target audiences learning experiences:

Communication campaigns:

• Usually include broad messages sent to large audiences

• Can be effective at driving awareness

• Can be ineffective if people aren’t ready to receive a certain message because of where they are in their change cycle

• Can be effective at changing behavior if someone is at a stage of change where more information is all they need to change (e.g., the person has decided they want to do something, but just needs to know how)

Learning experiences:

• Are immersive

• Encourage deep focus from your audience

• Leverage the learner’s/buyer’s stage of change and adoption and design information, experiences and exercises that give them exactly what they need to move to the next change stage

• Empathize with learners; the audience can see themselves and relate the content to their current challenges

• Can drive key behaviors and deeper brand engagement when done effectively

​Communication campaigns supporting major organizational initiatives have always been and will continue to be critical. But when you need to encourage behavior change to support program or production adoption, learning experiences complement communication to more effectively drive intended outcomes.