How to Inspire People to Use Home-grown Products & Drive Adoption

Problem

My company has two distinctly different departments - the product development/engineering side and the consulting and services side. I'm on the engineering side, but the consulting/services part of our organization was resistant to using our products and was instead using other products. They had not tried the product as much as we would have liked and hence there was some reluctance.

Actions taken

As a company, we were spending a lot of time driving internal adoption but it wasn't very fruitful.

"I decided to take a step back and organized a discussion with leaders from the consulting/services side of the organization to determine why they didn't want to use our product. Some issues they had were genuine, some were easily solvable, and other problems just required a little bit of education about the product's functionalities."

My job is not just to build products but also to sell them. Because of this, I asked to tag along to sales meetings and to drive some of them in order to see what I would say about the product versus what they were saying. Some people were energized by how customers reacted to what I was able to offer to them and wanted to learn more about the product.

I then developed a video training program and an in-person training program for the sales team, consultants team, and the engineering team. People started talking about our product much more positively. I also opened up all of my resources to help them and I started working very closely with them because I knew that if our company's front-end sales team weren't successful, we wouldn't be successful.

Lessons learned

By doing all of these things, we ended up winning an award for the most innovative products of 2017 in the pharmaceutical world by PM360. I learned that when you collaborate with others you build a really positive energy and push. This allows you to accomplish even more than you could have done by yourself.