I Learned Adoption Selling Liquor. It Saved a $200 Million SAP Project.

I sold liquor in India before I ever touched an SAP system.

I remember standing outside a small shop in a market I'd never worked before. The owner was already shaking his head before I finished my pitch. He had his own supplier, his own routine, and zero reason to change either.

I put the bottle down on the counter and said one line: "Try it for a week. If your customers don't ask for it again, I won't come back."

He didn't smile. But he took the case.

The lesson that landed that day

That was the moment something clicked for me. Adoption was never about the product being better. It was about whether the person in front of me trusted me enough to change something that already worked fine for them.

A better product doesn't win on its own. A shop owner with a working supplier doesn't need proof that something else exists. He needs a reason to risk what's already working. That reason has to come from trust, not from a pitch.

I carried that lesson with me long after I stopped selling bottles door to door. I just didn't know yet how far it would travel.

The same lesson, on a 200-million-dollar SAP rollout

Years later, on a 200-million-dollar SAP rollout, I watched that exact lesson save the program.

A regional plant head refused to move off his legacy process. No amount of technical justification was moving him. I could show him the architecture, the timelines, the business case. None of it mattered. He'd heard all of it before, from people who never stuck around long enough to understand what he was protecting.

So I stopped presenting features. I spent two weeks working next to his team instead, learning what his process actually protected. Not what it looked like on paper. What it actually did for the people running it every day.

Once he trusted that I understood what he'd lose, everything changed. He changed how his team worked, and the rest of the plant followed him within a month.

No new slide deck made that happen. No stronger business case. Just the same thing that worked outside a liquor shop years earlier: trust, earned by showing up and understanding what someone stood to lose.

Why this order matters

Most leaders learn adoption last. After the architecture. After the budget. Even after the go-live dates. By then, adoption becomes a problem to fix instead of a foundation to build on.

I learned it first, standing outside a shop with nothing but a bottle and a promise. That order made all the difference.

Every system, every rollout, every change I've led since has started with the same question I asked myself outside that shop: what does this person stand to lose, and have I earned the right to ask them to risk it?