Digital Adoption in Today’s World

Shownotes

This episode of the Sunny Side Up Podcast features Kristopher Clark, a Silicon Valley visionary who has built his career on the results-oriented product, project, and business relationship management for consumer-facing products. He’s uniquely positioned to talk about something top-of-mind for companies across every enterprise sector: Digital Adoption. The conversation covers both tactical and strategic issues, including insights from Kristopher’s current work as Head of Digital Adoption & Content at ServiceNow and throughout a career that has also encompassed important roles at Allergan, Genentech, and Silicon Chef. He has a passion for what he does that will inspire you to reconsider all things Digital Adoption – and more!

About the Guest

Kris has 13 years of experience in the biotech industry working in product management, project management, software development, data analytics, and organizational behavior.

He’s worked with companies like Genentech, Allergan, and Baxter and he considers himself a full-time techy professional and a part-time futurist, economist, and studier of human behavior.

Connect with Kristopher Clark

Key Takeaways

• Background about the roots of Digital Adoption, which for Kris lay in his early involvement with systems and program management as well as data management.

• Digital Adoption takes tasks – from onboarding and training to sales presentations and corporate reviews – and renders them user-friendly.

• Retention rates for standard screen experiences (such as training modules) are abysmally low, in the single digits when it comes to assimilating information. Digital Adoption turns the old models upside-down, designing platforms that engage.

• As with all new concepts, Digital Adoption can sometimes bump up against an “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it” mentality. But Kris’s enthusiasm and approach easily scale that wall.
• Pandemic has been an inflection point and opportunity for Digital Adoption to shine, demonstrating the ease with which it’s possible to communicate powerful messages in ways that are entertaining and, ultimately, easy to integrate and deploy.

Quote

“You can build the best system in the world but you won’t necessarily get people to use it. That’s the hard part.”

Highlights From the Episode

What is Digital Adoption exactly?

Back in the early days, Kristopher was part of efforts to recruit Digital Adopters with extravagant incentives, which weren’t ultimately cost-effective or impactful. So he went in search of alternative models and has since come to position Digital Adoption as a Superpower. When designed correctly, it turbocharges any kind of application, enabling it to do things it otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. The objective is to engage and draw users into the system as compellingly as possible so that they organically onboard information.

Tell us about your journey to date and how you landed in the Digital Adoption pace?

Kristopher found his niche in the realm of Digital Adoption as a result of his lifelong interest in human behavior and how people interact with variables. He loves having a platform to introduce different scenarios and connect with end-users by various means to promote and enhance digital experiences.

How does Digital Adoption change the effectiveness of Go-To-Market personnel and leaders?

Sales and Go-to-Market personnel were spending vast amounts of time doing things that Kris didn’t think were particularly effective. Retention rates are typically very low – with lectures only netting 5% and audiovisual only 20%. To Kris, this was a training failure and something he felt could be improved with game-changing Digital Adoption tools, which are pure value-add with time savings. The first hurdle, however, is getting past resistance to change.

How did the Pandemic impact and change the landscape?

The pandemic completely upended business as usual. How do you showcase your product suite and compel savings – or train up new personnel – when the world is grounded? Kris has been focused on playing a critical role, using Digital Adoption to bring people up to speed.

What challenges do you usually face while getting an organization to migrate to Digital Adoption?

The challenges depend on understanding and channeling the spheres of sales enablement and marketing/comms/training systems world. Kris battles entrenched “old school” mindsets and the human tendency to maintain practices in a particular way because that’s the way things have always been done. Digital Adoption is about breaking through some of the training and in-person outreach traditionally used to rev people up. Instead, he focuses on identifying other areas where there can be a different – more effective – style of engagement with all kinds of (financial and efficiency) benefits.

Any innovative ideas that you’ve implemented at ServiceNow and would like to share?

Kris considers himself an entrepreneur within the organizations for which he works. He is constantly scanning the horizon, always incorporating the perspective of advertisers trying to evoke from their audience a fun, engaging, stimulating experience. When people think that what they’re interacting with is fun, it automatically enhances their ability to retain information. Digital Adoption at its heart is about creating new avenues for capturing people’s imaginations and enticing them to connect.

Recommended Reading/Resources

• “Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration,” by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace. (About creativity, leadership, and focus.)

Shout-Outs

Mica Eades Mayo – VP Operations, Digital Innovation & Transformation at ServiceNow.