Many manufacturers have already taken the first steps towards XaaS. They've launched new service offers, invested in the right technology and tested the market through pilot projects.
On paper, everything looks ready. But scaling is where things become difficult. Pilots remain pilots. Growth slows. Different parts of the business move at different speeds. And what seemed like a commercial challenge quickly becomes an organisational one.
Sales teams continue prioritising capital equipment deals. Service organisations struggle to move from reactive to proactive ways of working. Regional teams optimise for local targets instead of the broader transformation, while digital tools remain underutilised.
The obvious explanation is that people resist change. It's also the wrong one.
In our experience, people rarely resist transformation simply because they prefer the status quo. Much more often, they respond rationally to the environment around them.
When performance measures, management routines and financial incentives continue rewarding yesterday's behaviours, employees will naturally optimise for those outcomes, even when leadership is asking them to do something different.
Behaviour follows incentives
This is why communication, while essential, rarely delivers lasting behavioural change on their own. Employees may understand the vision perfectly, but they will ultimately focus on what defines success in their daily work.
Consider a salesperson who has spent years selling industrial equipment. Their objectives have always been clear: maximise quarterly revenue, increase equipment margins and close as many deals as possible before the end of each reporting period.
The organisation now launches a XaaS offering and encourages the sales force to sell subscriptions instead of ownership. Yet commissions are still based primarily on upfront revenue.
The outcome is entirely predictable. Most salespeople continue selling equipment, not because they reject subscriptions, but because the organisation continues rewarding equipment sales. The strategy has changed, but the system governing day-to-day decisions has not.
This principle is reflected in the experience of Decathlon. In an episode of the Product-As-A-Service Champions Podcast, Yann Carré, Leader of Circular Business Models at Decathlon, explained that one of the biggest challenges in launching subscription services wasn't convincing customers to rent instead of buy. It was ensuring sales teams had a reason to promote subscriptions.
Moving from a €200 product sale to a €12-per-month subscription required rethinking how sales performance was measured and rewarded. Otherwise, salespeople would naturally continue prioritising traditional product sales because those remained the behaviours the organisation incentivised.
Training doesn't create adoption
One of the most common responses to slow adoption is to provide more training.
Additional workshops are organised. New user guides are published. Refresher sessions are scheduled after go-live. Learning management systems report excellent completion rates, giving leadership confidence that employees are fully prepared.
Yet platform usage remains disappointing.
Why?
Because training explains how to perform a task.
It doesn't provide a compelling reason to perform it consistently.
This is particularly evident in CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) implementations supporting XaaS. As manufacturers shift towards subscription and outcome-based business models, sales teams must manage not only the initial sale, but also renewals, upgrades and contract changes throughout the customer lifecycle. CPQ enables this by providing a consistent way to configure, price and quote increasingly complex recurring service offerings.
Yet many organisations find that salespeople still prepare quotations in spreadsheets before manually entering the information into CPQ, or bypass the platform altogether.
The immediate assumption is that employees need additional training.
A better question is whether the surrounding processes encourage them to use the platform in the first place.
Does CPQ genuinely make their work easier? Are approval workflows efficient? Can distributors access the same commercial logic? Does the platform support regional variations without creating unnecessary complexity?
And perhaps most importantly, do managers expect opportunities to be created and reviewed in CPQ, or do they still accept spreadsheets and manual quotations?
If your KPIs reward yesterday, don't expect tomorrow
Perhaps the clearest indicator of transformation readiness is the organisation's KPI framework.
Many manufacturers still evaluate commercial performance using metrics that made perfect sense in a product-centric business:
- Quarterly equipment revenue.
- Gross margin per unit sold.
- Factory utilisation.
- Billable service hours.
- Number of installations completed.
These metrics remain valuable, but they no longer provide a complete picture in a XaaS environment.
A subscription business creates value differently. Success increasingly depends on customer retention, recurring revenue growth, contract renewals, service quality and long-term profitability rather than individual transactions.
That shift requires different questions.
How much Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) are we generating? Are customers renewing? How quickly are they adopting additional services? Are connected assets delivering the promised outcomes? Is customer lifetime value increasing?
Global rollouts succeed locally
The challenge becomes even greater for multinational manufacturers.
Global headquarters often designs an operating model intended to create consistency across regions. Standard processes are documented, technology is deployed centrally and training materials are translated for local markets.
Yet adoption rarely happens uniformly.
Each country has its own commercial practices, distributor relationships, regulatory requirements and customer expectations. A rollout that works seamlessly in Northern Europe may require significant adaptation in North America or Asia-Pacific.
Successful organisations recognise this early.
Instead of treating local teams as recipients of change, they involve them in shaping how the transformation works within their market. Regional champions provide practical feedback, identify barriers before they become major issues and demonstrate successful use cases that colleagues can relate to.
Quick wins that reduce resistance
Large-scale transformation takes time, but momentum is built through small, visible successes.
Rather than focusing exclusively on long-term objectives, organisations should identify practical improvements that demonstrate immediate value.
Celebrate the first successful subscription contract publicly, not just the largest equipment order of the quarter.
Measure CPQ adoption alongside implementation milestones to understand whether commercial teams are genuinely changing how they work.
Review incentive structures before launching new offerings rather than waiting for adoption problems to emerge.
Simplify approval processes that slow down subscription quotations and encourage employees to return to spreadsheets.
Most importantly, ensure managers consistently reinforce the behaviours the organisation wants to see. Employees pay far more attention to what leaders recognise in weekly meetings than to what appears in a transformation presentation.
