Understanding Customer Progress Drives Product Adoption

Part 1 of 2. The practical follow-up: Four Steps to Unstick a Stalled Deep Tech Deal.

I made this mistake for years at CloudMade. We had built an ML platform we believed belonged in cars, and I spent every customer meeting walking automotive buyers through what the platform did - the model architecture, the accuracy numbers, the inference cost. I thought I was selling the technology. What I was actually doing was making the buyer’s job harder, because none of it answered the question they were really asking: “If I bring this into our stack, what does my team have to change, and what does it unlock?”

The founders I work with at VECTOR fall into the same trap, and it’s understandable. The technology is hard-won. It’s the thing you can talk about most confidently. So you lead with it. But your buyer doesn’t buy the technology. They buy the progress it makes possible for their business.

The mistake plays out everywhere. A founder will say “Our encryption is provably stronger than anything else on the market” when what their buyer actually needs to hear is “We drop into your existing identity stack in an afternoon and your security team doesn’t have to retrain.” Both sentences can be true. Only one of them gets the deal across the line.

One talks about features. The other talks about the job the customer is hiring you to do. The second is the sentence that closes deals.

This is where the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework comes in - covered in depth in our buyer psychology reference. At its core, JTBD shifts you from thinking about what your product does (supply-side thinking) to understanding what your customer wants to achieve (demand-side thinking). Customers “hire” your product to solve a problem or make progress. Understanding the forces that influence that hiring decision is the difference between stalled deals and fast adoption.

The Four Forces of Progress

When a customer evaluates whether to adopt your solution, they are weighing four forces: the Push of the Situation, the Pull of the New Solution, the Anxieties they hold about the new way, and the Inertia of the Present. The same four forces govern whether they respond to your email or take your call.

Push of the Situation

This is the dissatisfaction your customer feels with their current solution. In deep tech, it might be a CTO running a system that has become expensive to scale, or an MLOps lead watching data bottlenecks blow out training cycles. The more intense the struggle, the stronger the push to find an alternative.

Pull of the New Solution

Pull is how clearly your product solves that problem. Edge computing that cuts latency. A platform that handles workloads the customer’s current stack cannot. Pull must show not just incremental benefit, but a transformative leap. And critically, pull is rarely just technical. It shows up in the business metrics your buyer is measured on: revenue, profit, cost, time to market.

Anxieties About the New Solution

Anxieties are the deal-killer in deep tech adoption. Buyers worry about hidden costs, complex integrations, and the learning curve for their teams. When you are proposing something genuinely new - novel cryptography, a custom silicon stack, an unfamiliar AI architecture - fears about security risk and operational disruption are rational, not paranoid. Addressing them upfront is what moves deals forward.

Inertia of the Present

Inertia keeps customers tied to tools they know are suboptimal. They may complain about their current system, but their workflows are already built around it, and the hassle of change feels worse than the cost of staying. A DevOps team that knows cloud-native would serve them better but cannot bring themselves to migrate off legacy infrastructure is the classic shape of this.

Balancing the Forces for Adoption

For your product to gain traction, the combined Push and Pull must outweigh Anxieties and Inertia. When they don’t, you get the excitement-without-traction cycle that stalls so many deep tech companies.

A pharmaceutical company I worked with shows the pattern clearly. Their drug discovery simulations had crept from three months to nine months over two years, blocking the rest of the pipeline (Push). The quantum platform we were positioning could run those same simulations in two weeks (Pull). And yet the deal stalled for months.

The hold-up wasn’t the technology. It was anxiety about retraining a specialised team mid-cycle and downtime during migration (Anxieties), combined with £2M of sunk cost in existing HPC infrastructure they were unwilling to write off (Inertia).

To close the deal, the team didn’t need better technology. They needed to reduce the anxieties (implementation support, phased migration, security documentation) and reframe the inertia cost (integration with existing infrastructure, not replacement of it). Once they did, the contract moved.

Features impress. Progress converts.

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Want to run this diagnostic on a live deal? The practical follow-up is here: Four Steps to Unstick a Stalled Deep Tech Deal. Or if you’d rather work through it with us, apply to VECTOR.

Related reading:

• Identifying your customers’ burning needs
• Bridging the gap between product excitement and market traction
• How to run customer conversations that qualify deals