We bought a CRM once. We used it for about two weeks, then we abandoned it. But we kept on paying for the rest of the year.
Then we did it again. And again. For six or seven years, Greg and I tried just about every system you can imagine.
I’d run one for a while, then he’d run one, and we’d go back and forth. The whole time, the way we actually ran our sales was a whiteboard with cards we moved around by hand.
Somewhere out there, on some software company’s dashboard, we were listed as a green light customer.
Every month we renewed. We were a retained customer making their recurring revenue look like they were killing it.
Here’s the thing, we weren’t customers, we were revenue.
Is it held in your business’ zombie revenue?
We’ve started calling this zombie revenue – money that keeps showing up from people who stopped showing up a long time ago.
The account is alive on your side of the transaction and dead on theirs. But what makes it dangerous is nothing about it looks like a problem.
Nobody complains. Nobody churns, at least not this quarter. Finance is kept happy. The board deck is fine. You will never get a support ticket that says “we bought this eleven months ago and haven’t opened it since.”
The people in the chute are already inside your building
The concept of non-consumption is where people want to make progress but they can’t. There’s a struggling moment, there’s energy, there’s a real desire to be better… but there’s usually something in the way.
That could be access, knowledge, price, maybe even time. These people are caught in a world of workarounds, and the struggle never actually goes away.
I think of it like a horse at the Kentucky Derby who are in the stall, in the chute, ready to run. All that energy, right there, but the gate just hasn’t opened.
Most companies, when they hear about non-consumption, immediately look outside.
They explore new segments, new geographies, up market… down market. That’s fine. But I’d start somewhere cheaper and closer: the people who already gave you money and still haven’t made any progress.
Because buying isn’t progress.
Buying is the moment somebody decided they wanted progress, that’s it. That’s a down payment on a struggle they’re trying to resolve. If the struggle is still there ninety days later, they’re not a customer who’s underutilizing the product.
Instead, they are a non-consumer standing in your own chute, with your logo on the gate. Oh, and you own the gate.
Why you can’t see them: you can’t see them because of the direction you’re thinking in.
Engineering teaches you to start on the left. Here are the inputs, here’s the system, here’s the output.
Product roadmaps run the same way. “We shipped the feature”, “the feature is the output”, “the output must be the value”. Then somebody says “our activation rate is low” and the conversation turns into onboarding tweaks and email sequences.
That’s supply-side thinking.
It’s the same trap the camera companies fell into. They kept building better cameras, going up market, adding features, while the actual non-consumption was sitting right there in front of them: how many people want to take a picture and don’t have a camera with them?
I remember standing at my kids’ soccer game knowing exactly how to take a great photo and not having the camera on me. A lousy phone picture was better than no picture. The camera market fell more than ninety percent in under ten years.
Nobody in those companies was lazy, they were just reading the system left to right.
At Re-Wired, we work right to left:
- What is the outcome we want?
- What outputs have to happen to produce that outcome?
- Only then — what do I have to build in the middle?
It sounds like a small reordering, but it isn’t, it changes who takes on the trade-offs, and that’s a big shift to make.
When you start on the left, every gap between what you built and what someone needed becomes the customer’s problem to solve.
They configure it, they invent the workflow, they get trained. You’ve quietly handed them your trade-offs and branded it as flexibility. When you start on the right, you have to absorb those trade-offs yourself, as the producer. That’s where better products come from.
Treat the system as dynamic
The other piece I want to really highlight is treating the system as dynamic, not static. As engineers, we tend to map systems as fixed things. We’re after causal mechanisms – e.g. what actually makes behavior happen, and what stops it.
Look at why we never used those CRMs.
It wasn’t because of the features, the push was there: slow months where we’re asking where the next lead is coming from, and busy months with twenty proposals out and no idea which ones land.
The pull was there too. What killed it was habit; twelve years of moving cards on a board that worked – and anxiety, because how do we get a bunch of different people to think about this the same way?
Most of the products were rigid where our process was different, or so flexible we didn’t know how to set them up.
Some marketing teams will think in that situation is to add more push and more pull. More urgency, more features, more demos, but none of that touches habit or anxiety. It just makes the person feel worse about being stuck.
Teams in this situation, who are serious about exploring non-consumption could really do with a perspective change – and to start looking at things from a right to left perspective.
Your homework
Imagine a third of your paid seats haven’t been active in ninety days, and a fifth of your accounts never finished setup. At a hundred grand a month in subscriptions, a meaningful slice of that is zombie. It renews until the day someone finally cleans up the budget, and then it looks like sudden churn. It wasn’t sudden.
So, three things to consider here.
- First, personal. Think of something in your own life you want to do and haven’t. Not something inconvenient, something you genuinely want. Now name the habit and the anxiety holding you there.
- Secondly, pull the list of accounts paying you and not using you. Don’t send them a survey. Call ten of them and ask what was going on the day they bought. Who was involved, when it happened, where they were, why then. You’re looking for the struggling moment, and then for the exact place the gate stayed shut.
- Thirdly, take one of those accounts and run it right to left. What outcome did they hire you for? What outputs would prove they got it? What would you have to build, or stop building, to make that happen?
I don’t believe you can convince anybody of anything, you certainly can’t persuade people to buy. People convince themselves. Those customers already did, and they bought. They’re still standing in the chute, waiting for somebody to open the gate.
It’s your gate.