Decision Effort Is Still Too Hard, But The New Chasm Highlights Differences

In my last post, I shared a direction we are going to evolve they way we talk about The New Chasm (The gap between orgs with more mature decision practices and those with less that requires significantly different approaches for profitable relationships.

As I return from some vacation time, I wanted to continue to explore some of the ideas. That led me to some research we did last year on expansion purchases. One of the things we asked respondents was whether the effort to reach the expansion decision was greater than expected. The graphic tells the tale (I excluded neutral responses):

The immediate insight has nothing to do with The New Chasm--it is still too hard for most organizations to make technology decisions. Whether driven by their own processes and practices our the providers they are considering, even an expansion purchase is too hard.

But the shining lights, those who did not feel more effort was required, comes from those with more decision process maturity. They are almost three times more likely to disagree with the statement. (As a note, the differences for both the agree and disagree columns are statistically significant). On a related note, the more mature organizations are also significantly less likely to experience regret with the expansion decision.

Effort is an interesting thing. Frankly, from other studies, we know that the more mature teams put in more effort: they do more research and engage more deeply. But they are comfortable with that and expect much of it. The less effective often skip steps and then get a lot of extra work and surprises dumped on them.

(Side note on effort: Was speaking with a colleague on a related matter and she told me a story of a company that had what was acknowledged as the most desired product on the market, but they were losing market share. The reason turned out to be onerous T's&C's that frustrated buyers AFTER they had made their recommendation. The group turned things around by dramatically simplifying their agreement (thereby also reducing the effort to finalize the contract) and gained back share.

The effort issue is therefore most impactful to the orgs that want to put in less effort. If they are your targets (because of the maturity of the markets you compete in), then you better be focusing on relentless simplification of everything surrounding you and the decision.

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