Investigate Adoption Differences Across Labs Before Planning Expansion

When one laboratory in an account shows heavy use of a workflow and a sister lab barely touches it, a strategic account manager faces a real test. The instinct is to treat the quiet lab as a discipline problem, something the operations director can fix by telling staff to comply. That instinct usually sends the conversation in the wrong direction, and it can cost you the trust you need before you propose any expansion. The better move is to find out what is actually happening at the lab level before anyone talks about adding seats, workflows, or scope.

Why This Conversation Goes Wrong

Adoption gaps look like a compliance issue from the account side, but they rarely are. A lab with low usage might have a different sample volume, a different instrument setup, a supervisor who never attended training, or a manual process that already works well enough that nobody sees a reason to change it. When you walk into the account review and ask the director to force compliance, you skip past all of that. You also put yourself in a position you cannot actually hold, because you do not manage the director's staff and you cannot make anyone in that lab do anything.

There is a second problem. If you accept the premise that the lab is simply reluctant, you stop looking for the real barrier. Maybe the workflow does not fit the lab's data format, or the training session was scheduled at a time nobody could attend, or the lab lead never heard the workflow existed. Once you propose expansion on top of an unexamined gap, you are building a plan on a guess. If the director later finds out the real cause was something fixable, like a scheduling conflict or a format mismatch, your account plan looks careless.

How to Prepare

Before the review, pull the usage records for every lab in the account, not just the one lagging behind. Compare participation rates, training attendance, and support tickets side by side. Numbers alone will not tell you why a gap exists, but they tell you where to look. If one lab logged zero training sessions, that is a specific, checkable fact. If a lab has high support ticket volume but low usage, that suggests people tried the workflow and hit friction, which is a very different story than a lab that never tried at all.

Check whether a technical mismatch could explain part of the picture. Some labs run older instruments or export data in formats the workflow was not built to handle, and that is worth ruling out before you sit down with the director. The post on Review Data Format Compatibility Before a Technical Demonstration walks through how to check this kind of technical barrier before you assume the problem is people or process.

Also decide in advance what you are not going to do. You are not going to direct the lab's staff, set their priorities, or promise a fix before you understand the cause. Write down two or three neutral questions you can ask the director, questions that invite facts rather than assign blame. Something like which measure matters most to them, or who on their team could describe what the lab's day to day workflow actually looks like.

What to Say

In a review meeting, the operations director points at the dashboard and says, "Why is the west lab not using this the way our other three sites are. Can you get them to just adopt it."

You can respond directly without accepting the framing that this is your job to fix. "I cannot direct your staff, and I would not want to guess at the cause without checking first. What I can do is look at what the records actually show and bring the west lab's supervisor into a short conversation with us. Right now the data shows no training attendance from that lab. Is that the real gap, or is there a handoff step happening locally that we have not accounted for."

The director might push back, "I do not have time to chase down every lab's excuse." You can hold your ground while staying useful. "This is not about excuses, it is about knowing what we are actually solving before we plan anything bigger. If the issue is training, that is a quick fix. If it is a workflow mismatch, expanding before we address it just repeats the problem at a larger scale. Can you loop in the west lab supervisor for fifteen minutes this week."

Notice what this exchange does. You decline to act as an enforcer, you name a specific data point instead of a vague impression, and you ask for a specific next step that keeps the director in charge of their own team. You are not promising a solution. You are proposing a way to find one.

Mistakes to Avoid

The most common mistake is agreeing to "handle" the lab yourself, whether that means emailing the lab directly with instructions or promising the director you will get adoption up by some date. You do not manage that lab's staff and a promise like that will come back on you.

A second mistake is treating the usage number as the whole story. A low adoption number by itself tells you almost nothing about cause. You need training records, support tickets, and a conversation with someone who actually works in that lab before you know whether the gap is a scheduling problem, a technical mismatch, or something else.

A third mistake is skipping straight to expansion talk once the director seems satisfied with your answer. A defined barrier and an agreed owner for the fix should come before any conversation about adding scope. If you propose growth on an account with an unexplained gap, you are asking the director to buy more of something that is not fully working yet, and a sharp director will notice that.

Related to this, resist the urge to rank every adoption gap the same way. Some gaps matter more than others depending on what the lab itself cares about, not what looks worst on your dashboard. The article on Prioritize Research Adoption Issues With the Laboratory's Own Criteria covers how to weigh these gaps using the lab's own standards rather than your internal metrics.

How to Practice and Score It

A manager coaching a strategic account manager on this scenario can set up a simple exercise. Show the trainee a dashboard with one site trailing the others and ask them to draft five questions they would ask the director, without seeing the answers first. Then review the questions as a group.

Score the questions against three criteria. First, does each question ask for a fact rather than assume a cause. A question like "why is your team ignoring this" fails immediately, while "who on the west lab team could walk us through their current process" passes. Second, does the trainee avoid offering to fix the problem themselves before they understand it. Third, does the trainee propose a specific next step, such as a short conversation with the lab supervisor, rather than a vague commitment to "look into it."

Run the exercise again with a different account structure so the trainee is not just memorizing one script. Practicing this kind of exchange with an AI counterpart, such as through DealSpeak's Biotechnology practice conversationsgives a trainee repeated reps at holding this line without waiting for a live account review to test it.

A credible expansion plan always follows a defined barrier and a named owner for the fix, not a hunch about a reluctant lab. Get the facts and the right person in the room before you talk about growth. That order protects the account relationship and it protects your own credibility the next time you bring a plan to the table.