You rolled Pendo out three months ago. The snippet is live, the dashboards are built, and most of your company treats it like the fire extinguisher in the hallway: glad it’s there, no plans to touch it. You’re probably telling yourself the problem is training, or that everyone is too busy this quarter.
It usually isn’t either of those. In the calls I’ve had this year, the pattern behind almost every stalled Pendo account is the same: people didn’t refuse the tool, they refused what they thought the tool meant for them. That’s a fixable problem, and it doesn’t require another lunch-and-learn. Deep breath. Here’s how to work through it.
Resistance almost never shows up as “no.” It shows up as “we’ll look at it after the release,” or a Slack thread that quietly dies. Underneath, each team is guarding something specific.
None of those fears are silly. Write them down, one per team, in their words rather than yours. You can’t answer an objection you’ve paraphrased into something more comfortable.
Self-check: for each team that isn’t using Pendo, can you name the one thing they’re afraid it will cost them?
The natural move is to build an advocacy group out of the people who already like Pendo. Skip it. Those people were coming anyway.
The person you want is the CSM who said “we already know what our customers do” in the kickoff, or the engineer who asked three questions about page load. They have credibility with the people you’re trying to reach, and they’ll spot the holes in your rollout faster than any fan will. Give them a real job: they name one question their team keeps asking and can’t answer, and you build the report that answers it. Nothing else until that’s done.
One composite from a few calls: at a mid-size SaaS company, the most resistant support lead ended up running the weekly Pendo review, because the first report we built answered their question about which feature was generating tickets. They didn’t become a fan. They became someone who got an answer.
Self-check: who on each team would roll their eyes if you scheduled a Pendo training, and have you asked them what question they’d want answered first?
“Better product decisions” is your reason. It is not the CSM’s reason, and it certainly isn’t sales’ reason. Each team needs a payoff they’d notice by Friday.
For customer success, that’s usually one view: which accounts touched the feature they just promised on a renewal call, and which didn’t. Pendo’s own walkthrough on how to measure overall feature adoption gets you that view in an afternoon, no custom work needed. For sales, it’s usage in the last 30 days before a call, so they stop opening with “how’s it going?” For engineering, it’s the end of the “is anyone actually using this” debate, replaced by a number. For leadership, it’s the retirement of one report someone currently builds by hand every month.
Handing a team a dashboard nobody asked for is like handing a groom a shot list. He’ll nod, and he’ll never look at it. (I shot weddings for years. The nod was always very sincere.) Build the thing they asked for in step two, put it where they already work, and let the second thing come from them.
If your CS team in particular has gone quiet on Pendo, I wrote up the specific causes in Why Your Customer Success Team Ignores Pendo. The fix there is the same fix here, just narrower.
Self-check: can each team on your list describe, in one sentence, what they personally get out of Pendo that they didn’t have before?
The urge to launch everything at once is strong, because the contract clock is running and the whole company was on the kickoff call. Fight it.
I’ll own a mistake here. Early on, I helped a client launch guides, the feedback module, and dashboards to three departments in the same week. It looked great on the project plan. (It was a very nice project plan.) Six weeks later, the only person who had logged in was me, and I’d spent the time answering “wait, where is that again?” instead of fixing anything. We started over with one team and one report, and it took off in about three weeks.
Right, so pick the team from step two whose question you can answer fastest with the data you already have. Give them two weeks of real use before you show anyone else. The other teams will hear about it in the hallway, and being asked “when do we get ours?” is a far better position than begging.
This is how we run engagements at DS, and it’s not an accident. You can read the whole approach in The DS Way, but the short version is: narrow first, then earn the right to widen.
Self-check: if you had to launch Pendo to only one team next Monday, which team, and what single question would they get answered?
Adoption isn’t a training problem. It’s a proof problem. People start using a tool when they’ve seen it settle an argument they were part of.
That means your job in month one is to find one moment where Pendo changed a decision, and tell the story in plain terms where everyone can see it. Something like: “Support thought the export feature was dead. Pendo showed 40% of enterprise accounts used it last month, so we kept it and fixed the two bugs instead.” If you want that story to hold up when someone pushes back, pull the number from a stickiness report rather than a screenshot. Pendo explains how to measure stickiness so the 40% means “came back and used it,” not “clicked it once.” One sentence in the company update beats a slide deck of adoption metrics.
Make it a habit. One win, every two weeks, posted in the same place. Boring and repeated is exactly right. The first time someone from a team you haven’t onboarded yet replies with “can we see that for our accounts?”, you’ve crossed over. From there, step three repeats itself with less effort each time.
Self-check: what’s one decision at your company in the last month that Pendo data could have settled, and did anyone hear about it?
Don’t tackle all five. Pick the team that’s been quietest about Pendo, find their loudest skeptic, and ask a single question: “What’s one thing about how customers use the product that you wish you knew for sure?” Write the answer down. Then build that one report. That’s the whole week.
When adoption stalls, our Pendo consultants can help turn the holdouts into regular users.
For a full walkthrough on winning over reluctant teams, see our step-by-step guide to getting your team to use Pendo.
One team using it weekly inside 30 days is a healthy pace. Company-wide habits take two to three quarters, and trying to compress that is usually what causes the stall.
No. Mandates get you logins, not decisions. Answer one real question for the team and the logins take care of themselves.
Retire one manual report they currently receive and replace it with a Pendo dashboard that shows the same number, updated live. Leaders resist new tools and rarely resist getting a report early.
If you’d rather talk through your own team’s situation than guess at it, grab a free Pendo strategy call. It’s free, there’s no pitch, and you’ll leave knowing the one report to build first.