The Pessimism Problem Continues to Grow

This post originally appeared on the Gartner Blog Network. all comments or opinions expressed hereunder are those of the individual contributors and do not represent the views of Gartner, Inc. or its management.

Back in 2020, I wrote a post titled “The Pessimism Problem.”?We had completed a survey where 54% of respondents agreed with the statement “We regret nearly every purchase we make after the subscription agreement is finalized.”??This was in the context of a survey that explored how organizations approach subscription renewal decisions.

Since then, I’ve talked a lot about regret and generally ineffective and inexperienced buyers.??The natural assumption is that pessimism is likely increasing.

That assumption is correct.

We just did another version of that study on renewal decisions, adjusting it to also go deeper into decisions to expand subscription agreements.?Naturally, we revisited the pessimism angle.?Asking level of agreement with the same statement.

This year, 60% of our respondents agreed with the statement.

We’ve just published two research items for clients who want to dive deeper into this situation.

• “The Problem With Pessimists for Land-and-Expand Strategies” – This looks at the challenges in expansion buying processes for pessimists.?Like other situations with regret, conflict and delays are likely.
• “Data Interactive: Who Are the Pessimist Buyers of as-a-Service Solutions?“- This lets you explore the distribution of pessimists by a variety of factors.?Choose one or multiple of these factors.?At a company level, you can look at industry, country, company size and Enterprise Technology Adoption profile. At an individual level, you can look at their job function, job level, and generation.?There are some fascinating differences to explore.

There are lots of other interesting differences, but one felt worth highlighting.?One of the things we ask in the study was a question about level of involvement in technology efforts.?Three options were given ranging from just being a user, to being a part-time business technologist (where part of the job includes creating or managing tech solutions, to a full-time technologist).

When looking at pessimism by those groups, an interesting picture emerges:

The "user only" group are statistically significantly more likely to be pessimists than either other group. ?(As a note, the full time technology group is statistically more likely to be pessimists then the part-time, business technologist group.

A few possible reasons for this for the users:

• Despite all the talk of the need to provide more consumer-like experiences, this implies that user experience still needs lots of improvement–even for SaaS applications.
• Users struggle with consensus and collaborative decisions, potentially feeling like compromises mean that what they want is never fully realized.
• Users may have unrealistic expectations, or expectations formed from incomplete information, about solutions, leading to regret.
• Finally, their reduced involvement in technology overall may heighten their frustration with the buying experience.

As an industry, we need to solve for pessimism reduction.??It hampers growth.?Pessimistic customers put less effort in themselves, but that means that you as vendor have to exert more effort.??It gets in the way of technology fulfilling its potential.