I Built My Career on Adoption at Bullhorn. It's No Longer How Anyone Measures Success.
In 2016, I started the Customer Success function at Bullhorn. The job, as everyone understood it then, was adoption. Get users into the platform, get them doing more inside it, and the renewal took care of itself. I built real infrastructure around that idea: algorithms that flagged distressed accounts before the customer would have called it distress, login frequency dropping, key workflows going untouched, admin turnover, the early signals that someone was drifting. When the model flagged an account, we got in front of the customer and talked through what wasn't being used and why.
It worked well enough that Vista Equity Partners invited us to present it at its user conference, to walk other portfolio companies through what we'd built and how we ran it. For a few years, that program was held up as one of the better examples of proactive, data-driven Customer Success in the portfolio.
I still think that work was good. What I no longer believe is that adoption means what it used to mean.
For most of my career, adoption was the mutually acceptable way vendor and customer agreed to define success. If usage was up, both sides could point to the dashboard and call the relationship healthy. That agreement held because usage and value moved on roughly the same curve. A product used often was, generally, a product working. That shared assumption is gone. Buyers have moved to a different definition of success, one built around a specific, measurable outcome, and a lot of the industry hasn't caught up to how much that changes the job.
Adoption made sense when the product was the destination
None of that work was wrong for its time. When most SaaS platforms were still earning their first real foothold inside an organization, the biggest threat to a renewal was shelf-ware: a tool bought with enthusiasm, then abandoned once the champion left or the rollout stalled. Tracking adoption caught that failure mode early, which is exactly why it became the standard.
That standard has broken.
Buyers stopped agreeing that usage was the win
The break in that shared agreement shows up clearly in how procurement behaves now. Tropic's research on SaaS procurement trends describes buyers as increasingly selective and ROI-driven, with renewal conversations now anchored to demonstrated return rather than price alone. Forbes Technology Council members writing on SaaS pricing this year describe the same shift from the vendor side: budget-conscious buyers want a clearer line between what they're paying and what they're getting back, which is pushing vendors to rebuild pricing around outcomes instead of seats.
Deloitte's software and platforms leader, Ayo Odusote, put the underlying shift in five words when discussing where SaaS value is headed: "Value cannot just be incremental." Buyers aren't looking for engagement anymore. They're underwriting a return.
Even pricing structure is following the money. Dodo Payments' 2025-2026 SaaS industry research found the large majority of buyers say usage-based pricing simply "better aligns with value" than flat seat licenses do, because it ties the invoice directly to what the product produced.
Adoption never measured that. It measured motion.
The flaw hiding inside "you have an adoption problem"
Here's where I think the industry got comfortable with a bad habit. "Adoption" became the go-to explanation whenever a customer wasn't seeing ROI. Low adoption, the story goes, means the customer isn't using the tool correctly, so the tool isn't the problem. That framing is convenient for the vendor and almost impossible for the customer to argue with in the moment.
It also doesn't hold up. If a product is genuinely delivering outcomes, low usage of a handful of features rarely stops the customer from getting the result they bought the product for. And if a product isn't delivering outcomes, driving login counts up doesn't fix that. Adoption and ROI are correlated, not identical, and treating them as the same thing lets a real product or implementation gap get relabeled as a customer behavior gap.
I spent years running the playbook that made this framing work. I understand why it's tempting. I also think it's the reason so many SaaS relationships limp along for years without either side being honest about whether the tool is actually earning its renewal.
Outcomes don't happen on their own
It's easy to overcorrect here. If adoption isn't the measure anymore, the tempting next line is that the tool should just deliver ROI by itself. It won't. Software doesn't drive an outcome on its own. Someone still has to know the product well enough to configure it, run it correctly, and keep it pointed at the result you bought it for.
The mistake is assuming that someone has to be pulled from your own team. Give an internal group a new platform and a deadline, and you haven't solved the ROI problem, you've created a bandwidth problem. The people you need focused on the outcome are now the same people learning the tool from a standing start, on top of the job they were already doing.
The case for a partner, not a traditional consultant
This is the gap Broad & Madison exists to close. Instead of pulling your team off the front lines to become platform experts, engage a firm that already has the playbook: specific, prescriptive steps that get you to the result you're after, built from having run the same problem for other customers already.
That's a different model from the traditional systems integrator, whose business is built around billable hours of "consulting," with the invoice sized to the hours logged rather than the result produced. A firm can spend a long time in your environment without ever being on the hook for whether you got what you came for.
The market is already moving this direction. GoodFirms' 2026 survey on AI SaaS engagements found that 56.8% of agencies are shifting toward outcome-based engagements instead of traditional time-based billing. The firms worth aligning with are the ones with the same end goal you have: the result, not the hours it took to get there.
What should replace it: shortening the line between purchase and ROI
If adoption isn't the job anymore, the job is compression. The distance between "we signed the contract" and "we can point to the specific result this delivered" is the only number that matters to a buyer renewing in this market.
That means:
Defining the expected outcome, in specific terms, before implementation starts, not after the first QBR.
Measuring time-to-first-result instead of time-to-first-login.
Treating a stalled rollout as a signal to fix the path to value, not a cue to run an adoption campaign.
Being willing to say, plainly, when a gap in results is a product or delivery problem rather than a usage problem.
Choosing a partner whose engagement model ties them to the outcome, not one billing by the hour regardless of what you get back.
None of that requires abandoning the operational discipline Customer Success teams built over the last decade. It requires pointing that discipline at a different target, and getting the right people involved to close the gap fast rather than asking your own team to close it from scratch. The distressed-account algorithms I built in 2016 were good at spotting disengagement, back when disengagement was the thing worth measuring. What buyers and vendors need a shared definition of now isn't usage. It's whether the outcome arrived, and how fast.
FAQ
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No. It's still a useful early-warning signal. It's no longer sufficient on its own to justify a renewal, because buyers now want a direct line to a business result, not just evidence of engagement.
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For years, adoption worked as a shared definition of success because usage and value moved together. That link has broken. Buyers now judge software on a specific outcome, not on how much it gets used, so a healthy adoption dashboard no longer guarantees a healthy renewal conversation.
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Time-to-first-result. Measuring how quickly a customer reaches the specific outcome they bought the product for is a better predictor of renewal than how often they log in.
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Not necessarily. Traditional SI engagements are typically billed by the hour, with no direct tie between the invoice and the result delivered. A firm with a prescriptive playbook for your specific outcome, and an engagement model tied to that outcome, will generally get you there faster.
