Around sixty percent of patients prescribed life-saving heart medication don't take it consistently, if at all. If doctors can't get people to take a pill a day to stay alive, what chance does your product have of getting them to adopt a new workflow? Most teams never even reach a competitive fight; they lose to nothing, to the anxiety and inertia prospects feel about changing at all.
Nopadon Wongpakdee shares a playbook drawn from Systm and 500 Startups: people don't resist new products, they resist change, so the job is to find the specific source of inertia and dismantle it. He maps six common sources and drills into the most acute, with tactics like identifying stakeholders' competing outcomes (a shift that lifted one team's conversion fourfold), habit-stacking new behaviours onto existing routines the way Dropbox and Calm do, lowering emotional and technical switching costs, and getting users to a moment of value as fast as possible.
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We're gonna start off a little story time, little bit of a quiz. So there was a recent a scientific study that found a certain percentage of patients who were suffering from severe heart conditions were prescribed life saving medication. And a percentage of these people didn't take it.
Have a look. Have a think. Have a guess. What do you think? Show of hands, one percent didn't take their meds. Good count. Okay. Ish. Yeah. Five. Twenty. Yeah it's about right. Sixty, it's ridiculous. Sixty percent. But that like I don't know if any of you were as shocked as I am when I saw this.
Let's put this into perspective. This is people with life threatening heart conditions being prescribed life saving medication. Not CBD gummies like the the real deal. Right? But yet sixty percent didn't take it consistently if at all. So this isn't about access. This isn't about money.
This is fundamentally about human behavior and our resistance to change. I want you to consider this for a second. If doctors can't get people to take a pill a day to save their lives, what chance do we have at getting people to adopt new workflows, new behaviors to use your software or apps.
Pretty poor. This is the power of inertia and I'm gonna talk to you today about how to overcome it. So when I was working with a VC fund called five hundred Startups, I saw loads of teams coming up with new and innovative software.
Yeah? A lot of them which were better than the existing incumbent solutions, but was anyone using them? Not really. And that's the story of every dead startup. So why does that happen? How many of you have heard someone on your, I don't know, sales team or marketing team say, we didn't lose to a competitor.
We lost to nothing. And you should give them kudos if they said it with that much energy and enthusiasm. So let's be real. Only a small percentage of teams will grow in scale to the point where you earn the right to lose to competitors.
Most teams struggle to get enough traction, to get enough adoption, to even enter into a competitive situation. They're struggling with getting over the doing nothing. My name is No Padan. I'm a co founder of a company called Systm. You've seen some of the of the people who who work at Systm today.
Sarah Gordon, you saw her yesterday. Hannah Parvaz. Lots of System alumni in here. System, so we've worked with about three hundred teams. We help them identify, their big growth levers and pull them. Before that, I was with a venture firm called five hundred Startups where I collaborated with close to about a hundred companies.
What people don't realize is there's this there's a whole playbook of tactics that you can utilize to overcome this inertia. If you can just do a few of them, you will unlock significant growth. This is the slide. This is the main point. You can take a photo and then you can doze afterwards.
People don't resist new products. They resist the change itself. Duolingo doesn't need to get you to use their app. They need you to commit to learning a language. Noom doesn't get you know need you to use their software. They need to get you to commit to changing your diet, getting some exercise.
You know how hard that is? Their entire premise, their ability to sell software and services relies on their ability to get us to change our behavior and that is so hard. Winning isn't about better marketing, it isn't about better features, it's about overcoming this inertia.
Yeah? So we often obsess, and I say we because I do it, with our competitors. We take a look what's going on with their features, what are they doing with their pricing, what are they doing with their socials, what are they doing on LinkedIn.
Right? But I'm here to tell you, your competitor probably isn't a product in your category. It is the anxiety and the inertia that your prospects feel about your product. I've seen this play out repeatedly across dozens of teams that I've worked with and collaborated with.
And the teams that understand the psychology, identify the sources of inertia, will always outperform the teams that just focus on product and feature differentiation. Does that make sense? And today, I'm gonna show you how how to do this. Yeah? We we have a natural tendency to stick with with what we know.
There's so much legacy tech that we live with today. Like doing research for this talk, I came across the fact that something like seventy to seventy five percent of all medical communications still occur over fax machines. Fax. When's the last time you saw a fax machine?
Ever. Back in the late sixties, they developed a programming language called COBOL. Go home and ask your grandparents about it. COBOL was used by the government and financial institutions. Something like eighty percent of global financial transactions still touch COBOL code today. Shocking. We've got loads of cognitive biases, Endowment effect, sunk cost fallacy, loss aversion.
These aren't minor psychological quirks. These are completely fundamental to human decision making and have earned brilliant economists Nobel Prizes for their work in this area. These biases just don't influence our decisions. They dominate them. When brilliant economists spend the past decades sort of unpicking, unraveling why we cling irrationally to the status quo, you know they've touched upon something so profound and at the core of our human nature.
Okay. Enough. So what's this look like for you? What's this taste like? What's this feel like in your company? So for b to b teams, it's pretty simple. It's like, take a look in your CRM. It's deals that are stuck at eighty ninety percent confidence that haven't moved in months.
It is these no decision outcomes in your CRM. It's your prospects saying, let's revisit this next quarter. I get it. I I see this all the time. Teams are say to me, we have to hire ahead of growth or or or do something.
B to c, what's this look like for you? Well, is pretty straightforward. These are loads of page views with really really poor conversion rates. Right? It's really high trial abandonment rates. It is features that get explored but never fully habituated or worked into sort of a routine.
And the pattern is completely frustrating because there isn't someone you can position against. There isn't someone you can look against. Okay. Ryan talked this morning, Sarah talked yesterday, Hannah and we mentioned something called jobs. Everyone's talking about jobs. So just really quick show of hands.
Who's familiar with jobs to be done? Great. Pretty much everyone. For those of you who aren't aware or don't know, here's like the ten thousand foot view. Jobs is a a methodology used favored by product people, and it sort of explores the conscious and unconscious motivations of why we make change, and how and that how that relates to products.
The reason I'm telling you this is here we have something called the four forces of change. It's a part of the model. And all I need you to understand is that when each of one of us wants to make progress in our lives, wants to make a change.
There are two positive forces that are propelling us towards that change that are helping us. And then there are two forces that are smacking in you in the face simultaneously saying, not sure. So the push, this is easy. The push is the unmet need your prospect feels.
Something happened your prospect is like oh, I should solve this. Right? That and that and that is propelling them towards your products and services. Pull, this is where you come in. Super simple. This is the promise of that new future. This is the attraction of that new solution.
Does that make sense? Anxiety, and I'm I'm gonna tell you your prospects, we, all of us, feel these forces simultaneously. It's not sequential. We feel it all. And so the anxiety is like the fear of that new solution. So it could be anxiety in use. That looks super complicated.
My team's never gonna use that. It could be anxiety in product category. Oh, great. Another AI startup that says they do this. It could be anxiety in you as a startup. I don't know who you are, fintech from Edinburgh. Why am I gonna give you my pension? Right?
Inertia. This is where ninety percent of the talk is. This is where we're gonna spend the next twenty minutes. This is the warm couch that says, you don't need to go to for for that run today. Stay with me. Couch is great. This is people who are stuck in ****** jobs.
These are people who get stuck in bad relationships. This is the inertia. So before you can overcome inertia, you need to understand the source. And we've identified about six and because each of these six requires a slightly different tactic, we need to sort of call them out.
Now, what I wanna do is when I read through these, I want you to think about which one you guys are dealing with, your product, your company. Spoiler alert, you're you'd be all of you are gonna deal with multiple. Two, three, potentially even four. Don't stress out. Relax.
Chill. It's all good. What we're gonna do is we're gonna find the one that is most acute. Right? Come up with a ways tactics to overcome that inertia. And then once you have that sort sorted, you look at the secondary tertiary sources. Okay?
So the first one, stakeholders. That's probably the easiest one to understand. If you have multiple people in that decision making journey, it's diffused responsibility. It's difficult to get buy in. Do you require your customers to change their behavior or workflows to adopt your solution?
If so, that's that's a big challenge. Sequencing. Sequencing happens when people feel that there's an order in which things have to happen. So for instance, it's complicated deals like let's say in a b to b situation, the startup might feel that they have to get their financial house in order before they can use your accounting software or they before they can use your cash flow forecasting solution.
B to c, it plays out with, smart home tech. People delay buying it until they get better WiFi or they refurb their house or whatever. So people have a a distinct preference of how they want things to roll out. Inability to try. Inability to try doesn't mean give them a free trial.
It's got nothing to do with that. It is can you get them to value quickly? Can you get them to the moment quickly? And for a lot of us, people have to start using our product and services for a while until they get the benefit.
Right? Switching costs. Not so much about cost, but financial cost. But switching costs can be emotional, they can be technical, and, yeah, obviously, financial costs. New product category. This one, some of you are actually doing something that's super new and innovative like there's no category that exists.
Okay? What that means is your prospects don't know where to put you. They have no frame of reference. They don't know what to compare you to. They lack expertise. Over the next twenty minutes, we're gonna spend time on just these three. We don't have enough time to go into six.
And I'll share tactics on how you can overcome them. And I focused on these three because they're the most acute that I see with tech tech companies. Yeah? Multiple stakeholders. So when you have multiple people involved in a decision making process, for those of you who are b to b, I I know you feel this in your bones.
Gartner group came out with something stat that said like, ten years ago, we had four and a half stakeholders involved in a b to b transaction. Apparently, that number has crept up to six point eight which is insane. It's so ****. Six point eight people that like we're gonna have to like deal with.
But the the the key here isn't so much about the number of stakeholders. It's about identifying their outcomes. So you have to figure out within this deal, within this journey, who has an opinion? And what is their outcome? Outcome is simply, well, how do they view success?
What are they how do they want this to play out? Now, extra credit, in that journey there's gonna be some people with competing outcomes. The outcomes don't align. Those are the people we need to figure out who they are, and then once we do that we can align, and create value for everyone.
Let me tell you a story. So we worked with a team called, Scanbot. They are a scanning SDK. If you've ever used DocuSign, you would have used them. And when they came into the program, they had what we found quickly was they had misidentified their stakeholders.
And so they thought they were selling to product owners. And so their marketing, case studies, testimonials, everything was geared towards the market I'm sorry, product people. When we started doing the customer conversations, it became apparent that it's completely wrong. It was actually the technical stakeholder.
It was the developers that were in charge of this decision making journey, had that loudest voice. And with more customer interviews we also found that developers have a Is there any developers in this room? Is Do you guys have a strange quirk? In that you think all marketing is ********.
And that you are very highly skeptical of marketing. Is that true? Does that seem seem appropriate? Yes. Paint you with a wide brush. So we had to replace anything that looked like a testimonial, a case study and replace them with developer resources. GitHub, all of these things right?
Like anything that looked like marketing replace it. Second thing we had to do was remove ninety five percent of the form fields for them to get in. The traditional first name, last name, mother's maiden name, whatever. Right? The only thing that developers needed to put in was the app identifier ID.
And the hardest part of that journey was convincing the sales team to remove ninety five percent of the identifying information. But by doing that, from the top of the funnel all the way through to purchase, they increased conversion by four x, which is ridiculous.
Ridiculous. Massive success for them. IKEA. IKEA has figured this out. So they have a creche and they've somehow figured out that your children are powerful little stakeholders in the family decision making journey. And so they've turned this thing into like I can't go shopping today because my you know my my kid's gonna turn to when a monster into this positive differentiating thing.
Right? They've turned the I can't stay long because they're beginning to act up into longer dwell times. Right? Which in turn leads to higher baskets. And so it's been success so successful that you know people joke that they go to IKEA for free childcare.
You know who you are. A couple of you. Change in behavior. So remember the patients that wouldn't take the life saving medication? This is the same behavior. This is the same bias that your customers are facing with you, but obviously at much lower stakes.
So if these people resist life saving medication, really think about that for a second. How's that play out for you? So in the book Atomic Habit, James Clear wrote that there's a stat it takes something like sixty six days for a new behavior to become habitual.
And this sort of explains the one pill a day type thing because if you require your customers to change their behavior, you were asking them across this thing he calls the valley of disappointment. And this valley is that frustrating time period where you're doing the work but you don't see the benefits.
He also stated that if you want a habit to stick, you can utilize something called habit stacking. Where you take that new behavior and you stack it on top of an existing behavior or trigger. And there's something like fifty percent more likely to stick with the behavior if you do it that way.
Dropbox. Dropbox did this brilliantly in that it just showed up on your desktop as another folder. No new software to learn. No changes in workflow. It was just another folder on your desktop. And that automatic syncing required no new user behavior at all.
And so it was just there, just work. You didn't have to change anything of how you how you worked. Duolingo, I mean, on. They took something that was so difficult. The the act of committing to learning a language going to classes that were long and hard and turned into into a game.
Right? So the gamification required no new behaviors really. It made like intrinsically rewarding to learn. And they created these streaks to sort of continue to help push you along that journey to show you like this was the behavior that they they wanted to reward.
Calm utilizes habit stacking. That's their whole thing. Right? That's why like their sleep stories are based around bedtimes. So they they have all of their activities based around your existing trigger moments, commute time, bedtime. And so by stacking these new behaviors on existing routines, it sort of establishes those new patterns.
So even when something is objectively better, we're not gonna switch if it feels like work. Yeah? Like I said, switching costs aren't just financial. They can be emotional. They can be technical. So you've got things like sunk cost fallacy. Oh, we've already invested so much time in training, doing it this way.
Social. It can be a breakup, literal. Like, I you might have to get rid of an employee. You might break up with your relationship with your personal trainer because you're using this new service. Right? You might have to sever a relationship. Resource allocation requirements.
B to b that's simple. Like, okay, if we're paying for this, do we have to pull budget from somewhere else? What are we not paying for if we use that? But from b to c, you know, all your streaming services, what budget does that come out of?
Is that your eating out budget? Is that your going out budget? If you're doing something else, you have to make a a choice about where that, expenditure is gonna come from. And these costs often outweigh these perceived benefits. I have a little cat named Squeaky.
Squeaky does not like to go to the vets. And I've been going to the same vet for ten years, Peter, solid. And then I wanted to explore, something new. So I I I I wanted to use one of these mobile vets called Paw Squad.
They like, the vet comes on a scooter, comes to your house. I was, like, amazing. And in their onboarding, the first thing they asked me was, like, what is your what's your vet's name? We need to get, like, the vet medical records. And I was, oh, ****.
Like I I like a gut punch. I was like Peter's gonna think I'm cheating on him. Peter is gonna think I'm unhappy. And I was like what am I gonna do? Like can I like how like I I sat there and I delayed?
I delayed and I delayed. Eventually I did get on the phone with someone from Paw Squad and it was such a simple fix. This is just content. This is storytelling. They said no no, Badan. You're being a responsible pet owner. It's actually more responsible to have your medical records in two different places.
They said that and I was like, oh, you're absolutely right. But initially that that asking me for that was a step too far. I I was I was not willing to go that far. Apple versus Android. Look Apple is super like well known for their like lock ins, their walled garden approach.
But Android opposite. Right? They're the ones that have like the one click suck everything from your iPhone into an Android. They even go so far as to allow you to port your subscriptions from, like, your iTunes into the Android ecosystem. So you can see, like, they have to work double time to pull users over.
Okay. Let's get into the recommendations. How do we do this? We're we're rounding the corner. So strategies for multiple stakeholders. I've already told you this. How many people here worked in a corporate? Okay. Can you remember just to get your colleagues to take a freaking meeting with a vendor.
Not choose the vendor, just to take the meeting. Do you remember how hard that was? Do you? Yeah. This is all of that. Right? So you need to map out your stakeholders, you need to understand their outcomes, you need to find the competing outcomes.
Whoever that champion is, you need to equip them for the sales. So work with them to figure out who else that you need to bring into the conversation. Right? B to C, they have like convince your partner charts. They don't call them that, but that's exactly why they're there.
Right? Tailor your demos clearly from B to B, like your websites, you have to know who you're speaking to. Make sure that you don't introduce any anxiety or friction where it didn't belong. That's why you have different role pages. That's why you have different content for different roles and stakeholders.
For b to c, you can offer different sort of product tours based on power users or casual users. Right? By the way, when I'm going through these, it's I'm not saying to do one of them. You have to do all of them. Right?
It isn't like I'm gonna just try this. It's all of it. All over the place. Switching costs. All of them. You have to overcome the actual technical migration services, reduce the emotional, switching cost, and if you can make it economical. So my favorite is, you know, lots of teams use very MVP.
You can create little Loom videos of how to port from a popular competitor that you have or how to's. Right? Because you know where they're coming from. You know where at least where you want to get them from. So you can create those really easy.
Those emotional barriers, again, back to Paw Squad, that's just storytelling. Those are case studies. Those are testimonials talking about how your customer's life was so poor before they met you. Right? Making the switching economical. So ******** b to b, I've seen contract buyouts.
For b to c, you see it all the time. Right? Give them additional features if they transfer now. Right? Allowed them to have subscription pausing. Okay. So the behavior change one is is hard. So, again, all of them, we have to minimize learning.
We have to minimize the disruption to their routine, and we have to try as hard as possible either through content or product or marketing to get them to the moment as soon as possible. My favorite for minimized learning is Figma has something called a switch profile.
So, they know loads of people have used, Sketch or Photoshop, So they allow you to use Photoshop shortcuts. So they say what profile do you wanna use? Photoshop and you can use those shortcuts. You don't have to learn anything new. B to B, you can try to implement your service in the least disruptive parts as possible.
Right? For getting them to the moment quickly, all of you have used Duolingo, Strava, all of these things that require you to change your behavior and not see value. So they create these milestone moments where like you have a hundred day streak or this is how far you come.
Right? So really think about how do you show those people when even when they're not making value, the value the the the progress that they're making with you. Alright. So I'm gonna close with this. So we started today with heart patients who wouldn't take heart medication.
Right? And if doctors struggle to get heart patients to take medications, think about the the struggle we're gonna get to get people to adopt our workflows and software. Based on my work with Systm and at five hundred startups, I can tell you right now, if you pay attention to these tactics, pay attention to these forces, to these barriers, you will absolutely transform your growth trajectory.
You will. So one, people don't resist new products, they resist the change. Two, identify the source of inertia. Once you've identified the specific source of the inertia, three, come up with tactics and plans to overcome systematically. So which of those six is most plaguing you, and what do you think you can implement immediately?
I had fun doing this. I hope you got something out of this. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Nofadan. That was awesome. By the way, so we keep talking about jobs, jobs, blah blah blah. So like every presenter, we've got a resource here.
You can download it. It's got interview questions. It's got chat GPT prompts of of how to use it. We've got a canvas and sort of step by step on how to apply this. Anyway, I got a roundtable at Two fifty five. Fifty five.
I'm I'm super psyched to meet all of you. Thanks so much.
