Customers Trapped in the Status Quo. Overcoming Behavioral Biases to Accelerate Customer Value.

Leaders of high-growth companies know this truth: fast time to value isn’t just nice to have, it’s essential. When it comes to delivering meaningful value to your customers, the real competition often isn’t another vendor. It’s the way people think. When launching new solutions, especially disruptive ones like AI, people resist the opportunity to move to better solutions.

Two powerful forces, loss aversion and sunk cost fallacy, quietly derail the value your solution can provide. They trap decision makers and end users in the comfort of legacy systems, even when change promises higher value. Understanding how to navigate these biases will dramatically speed adoption, improve customer outcomes and increase your company’s growth.

Loss aversion: Why customers resist better options

People feel the sting of loss nearly twice as strongly as they feel the joy of equal gain. In practice, losing $100 hurts far more than finding $100 feels good. This principle, popularized by Daniel Kahneman and emphasized in Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, explains why change generates friction, even when the new option is clearly better.

During onboarding and beyond, your customers are thinking, often subconsciously:

• “I’ll lose time learning a new tool.”

• “I’ll lose the comfort of familiar workflows, even if they’re inefficient.”

• “I risk losing credibility if results don’t appear fast or accurate enough.”

• “What if I lose my role, job, or even my career?”

That fear of loss explains why onboarding stalls, rollouts get delayed, and legacy systems continue to be propped up. Even when your solution clearly delivers more value, people are wired to resist. These perceived losses dominate even when your products offer clear advantages. Career-level anxieties around disruptive technologies like AI explain why customers to cling to spreadsheets, delay rollouts, and stall adoption.

Sunk cost fallacy: Why customers stay stuck

The sunk cost fallacy kicks in when people stick with something they’ve already invested in, even when it no longer works. Consider the classic: you order a large meal, you’re full halfway through, but you keep eating because “you paid for it.” That discomfort creates no value. It only lingers.

Sunk cost fallacy is alive and well in most organizations. Companies continue investing in outdated tools not because they want to, but because they’ve poured time, money, and emotion into them. Leaders and users may say out loud and to themselves:

• “We spent years customizing our current system.”

• “Everyone knows the current workflows and systems.”

• “I’ve mastered my spreadsheets; they work for me.”

In onboarding, sunk cost fallacy keeps customers locked into outdated tools and inefficient processes, no matter how much better your solution is.

Confronting bias and unlocking customer value

Human nature conspires to keep your customers locked in the status quo. However, you can transform these blockers into your advantage by addressing the losses, fears, and pain head-on, shifting the focus to future gains, delivering initial value, and deliberately persuading customers to fire their legacy systems early in the customer journey.

Frame losses to motivate, not discourage

The beginning of the customer journey is a critical time to highlight what’s at stake when adopting your solution. Show what the business stands to lose by not adopting your solution. Customers might miss revenue goals, incur unnecessary costs, lose meaningful opportunities, and fall behind competitors. Business leaders and hands on users need tangible data to move from complacency to action, so quantify the costs inefficiencies, or time drift, and these conversations need to go beyond the sales journey. Track the benefits of using your solution such as reduced time it takes to do key tasks or improved accuracy of reports, then share the results with the customer.

Redirect focus from past investment to future outcomes

Rather than customer teams arguing over past effort, help them reframe the new world they are embracing by using your solution. During onboarding it’s essential to anchor customers in future outcomes, not past investments. Help customer leaders shift the conversation from “look what we have spent” to “look what we stand to gain.” Define clear success milestones, celebrate progress, and connect adoption directly to measurable business results. For example, tie usage of your solution to measurable business results, like increased revenue, productivity, and customer satisfaction, or reduced costs. Let the numbers pull customers forward.

Accelerate time to first value

First value can be transformational for your company. Your early deliverables need to outweigh the perceived losses and prove your solution is worth the effort now, not months later. When users see tangible benefits fast, they move from fearing loss to anticipating growth. Every time you deliver a meaningful win, people's brains release the feel-good chemical endorphin. Endorphin helps your customers feel accomplished and rewarded when using your solution and this helps them to anchor on the new gains rather than to ruminate over their losses.

Don’t let customers have a backup plan

One of the biggest hurdles in driving adoption is getting customers to fire their legacy systems. Too often, I have seen customers continue to run spreadsheets long after implementing sophisticated fintech solutions, double-checking numbers in both tools. This duplication erodes trust, adds costs, creates confusion, and fuels the perception that your product is unreliable. When customers keep one foot in their old system, they aren’t fully committed, and that puts them at high risk of churn.

The remedy is to stop hoping customers move off their old tools and start guaranteeing it. From the buyer journey onward, make retiring the prior system a clear milestone with specific dates. Build it into onboarding plans, reinforcing it during the Embark, Handoff, Kickoff, and Adopt stages, while reviewing progress along the way.

Customers will always default to the familiar unless you set clear expectations and orchestrate a path forward.

Of course, trust must be earned before customers will fire their backup systems. Equip them with proof points and enablement so they can complete their work more accurately and efficiently in your solution. Track whether legacy systems are still in use and tie this to health scores and retention. When customers let go of legacy systems, they are not just adopting a tool. They are committing to a new way of working, and that commitment drives loyalty, renewals, and long-term value.

Turning behavioral barriers into growth drivers

Customers naturally prop up outdated tools, resist onboarding, and stay locked in the past. As a leader, your mandate is not just to sell promises but to ensure those promises are delivered. Loss aversion and sunk cost fallacy are invisible barriers that prevent customers from realizing value, which puts renewals, expansions, and long-term revenue at risk. It is critical you transform onboarding from a painful change process into a powerful growth engine that:

• Delivers first value fast to neutralize loss aversion

• Anchors adoption in measurable business outcomes to overcome sunk costs

• Reframes change as preserving what customers value while accelerating growth

With loss framed, quick victories delivered, and future outcomes highlighted, adoption accelerates, and customer value blooms. You help customers move from clinging to the past to embracing the future, and you create the conditions for long-term value that fuels sustainable revenue growth. Let me know if you’d like help diagnosing these biases in your customer journey.

DONNA WEBER is a globally recognized customer value and onboarding expert with a decades-long track record of success as a strategic consultant to high-growth companies. Renowned for her approach to turning customers into loyal champions, companies bring Donna in when they’re ready to level up by moving fast in the right direction. Her relentless focus on the customer helps them scale smarter by delivering on the lifetime value they promise from day one. Her bestselling book, Onboarding Matters, is considered a definitive guide to post-sale customer success. Learn more at donnaweber.com.