Buying a sales platform takes months. Getting reps to use it is the part vendors now build products and services around. Zoho launched a digital adoption platform on September 24, and Seismic has published the rollout playbook behind one customer’s enablement project.
The cost of software nobody uses
Zoho’s launch post for Zoho DAP opens with a puzzle: the new software works, so why is nobody using it yet? To size the problem, the post cites Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Management Index, which puts the average company’s annual SaaS spend at $55.7 million, up about 8 percent, across a portfolio that stayed at roughly 305 applications. The post says Zylo finds 53 percent of SaaS licenses are unused or not used enough to justify the cost, and adds a Vertice figure of 66 percent, made up of 15 percent pure shelfware and 51 percent running at less than half of what was paid for.
Those are Zoho’s citations of third-party indexes, and SalesTech has not seen the underlying reports. The post itself concedes that not all of it is an adoption problem: companies overbuy, pay for two tools that do one job, and strand licenses when people leave or change roles. What is left, it argues, is software that works and goes unused.
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Guidance inside the screen
Zoho DAP sits on top of the software a team already uses and layers guidance onto the screens people work in. The post lists the pieces: walkthroughs that explain each menu item, interactive videos that let a user click through the real steps in a safe practice version of the product, step-by-step guides for a task, a Help Hub with screen-specific articles and checklists that admins choose, and banners for in-app announcements. An Insights tab shows which guidance gets used.
The post also says what real adoption looks like in a sales team: the rep still running the deal process correctly three months in because something guided them when they needed it, rather than relying on what they remember from a training room. That definition puts the proof in behavior weeks after launch, well past the go-live checklist.
Zoho says it built the product after implementations on its platform went perfectly and users still sat down on a Monday morning with no idea where to start. The design bet is stated plainly: instead of relying on training before people have used the system, DAP puts guidance in the product. Today it works across the Zoho ecosystem, with support for applications beyond Zoho planned.
The other route: a rollout treated as a campaign
Seismic’s July post takes the opposite starting point. It follows Nicole Schissel, director of sales enablement at Regal Rexnord, after a merger of three industrial businesses left sellers struggling to find content, onboarding that could take years, and enablement seen mainly as a content repository. Before evaluating vendors, Schissel spent time listening to leaders and sellers across the business, a process she called going to Gemba. Her team then compared eight vendors against 20 weighted criteria before choosing a platform.
Adoption work started months before go-live. The team invited 70 sellers to a hackathon where they built Digital Sales Room templates for real customer scenarios, which produced 46 reusable templates and a group of internal champions. It ran an internal awareness campaign ahead of launch, then kept going after it with live training, office hours, team meetings and town halls. The post also reports that many sellers first treated the AI like a document search, typing keywords instead of complete questions, and that adoption accelerated once they treated it like a trusted subject matter expert.
Schissel frames the goal in one sentence. “The purpose of sales enablement is to make the sales team more effective and more efficient. Anything and everything we can do to accomplish, that’s our job,” said Nicole Schissel, director of sales enablement at Regal Rexnord, in Seismic’s post. Seismic is describing its own customer and product, and the post gives no outcome figures for the rollout, so treat it as a playbook rather than evidence of results.
Where the two agree
The routes differ. Zoho moves help to the moment of need, on the screen. Seismic spreads it across the calendar, before and after launch. The diagnosis is shared. Zoho writes that “a high login count doesn’t mean real adoption”. Seismic says Regal Rexnord judged success on adoption, behavior change, buyer engagement and strategic business impact “rather than platform usage alone”.
We made a related argument in 100% AI Adoption Is a Meaningless Number, that a universal-adoption headline says little about results. Here two vendors say something similar about the way their own products get counted.
What it means for the sales leader
Treat adoption as a line item with an owner, not the tail end of implementation. Four practical steps follow from the two sources.
- Ask every vendor what adoption evidence it will report at day 90, and reject login counts as the answer. Ask for behavior measures such as the share of deals worked through the intended process.
- Decide where guidance lives. Stable, repeatable workflows suit in-screen help of the kind DAP offers. Fast-changing sales motions still need people, which is the point of live coaching, as in Dealership CRM Vendors Turn Coaching Into a Daily System.
- Recruit a group of sellers to build with the tool before launch. Regal Rexnord’s hackathon gave it 70 of them.
- Teach reps to ask AI tools full questions. Seek out the reps who type keywords and coach them first.
One caution on coverage: Zoho says DAP works across the Zoho ecosystem today and other applications are planned, so a team on a different CRM should confirm support before counting on it.
