User conferences are awesome. There is a ton of excitement for vendors, partners and customers plus the thrill of prospective customers taking in all the excitement and making the decision to become a customer. But there is almost universally something missing.

In their book Challenger Customer, the authors tell a story of dentists who were presented a cordless drill to replace their old-school and traditional corded drills. Features and function, bells and whistles were presented by the vendor. The dentist were not buying it. They were satisfied with the status quo even though they loved the new drills.

There are plenty of reasons transformation efforts fail. John Kotter all the way back to 1995 in an article for HBR gives us 8 solid reasons to consider, and all of them are still relevant today. But one of them stands out, and to me is not given enough consideration early in any transformation effort.

Normal protocol of a software seller is to do "discovery" to learn about the prospects current situation and pain. The goal is to see if there is a fit so someone can sell software. The problem is that the seller isn't the one who should be discovering.

In professional sales, no one likes No Decision as the outcome of a long evaluation cycle. You spend months, sometimes years navigating all the information that needs to be delivered and the people that need to consume it. Both sides spend a ton of time in meetings that never seem to end.