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Gartner: Majority of Technology Purchases Come with High Degree of Regret

As technology continues to become more critical to the business, technology customers have access to more options and information than ever before leading to more instances of buyer remorse.

56% of organizations said they had a high degree of purchase regret over their largest tech-related purchase in the last two years, according to a new survey by Gartner, Inc.

"The high regret feelings are at their peak for tech buyers that have not started implementation, indicating significant frustration with the buying experience," said Hank Barnes, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner. "In the past, it was relatively easy for product leaders to predict who buyers were, but no longer. Buying team dynamics are changing and customers can find buying to be a real challenge."

Barnes identified key changes in tech buying behavior: "There can be significant downside to regret associated with enterprise technology decisions. The survey found that the organizations that indicated they had high regret for their purchase took, on average, 7 to 10 months longer to complete that purchase. Slow purchase decisions can lead to frustrated teams, wasted time and resources and even, potentially, slower growth for the company."

According to the survey, 67% of people involved in technology-buying decisions are not in IT which means that anyone could be a tech buyer for their organization. In this environment, a new technology adoption chasm is emerging. This new chasm divides organizations that are confident adopters and buyers of technology from the vast majority that are not. High-tech providers need new approaches to identify and engage these different types of B2B customers and predict which type of customer they are dealing with to improve the odds of winning good business.

"To shift strategies, we need to think about psychographics beyond the motivations for buying to also include how decisions are approached and which groups are driving the strategy," said Barnes. "Gartner has developed a psychographic model called Enterprise Technology Adoption Profiles (ETAs) that revealed seven specific customer segments. Using ETAs is one element that can help high tech providers move from a product/market fit strategy towards a product/customer fit strategy."

Enterprise Technology Adoption Profiles (ETAs) are a proprietary model developed by Gartner that assesses the psychographics that drive how and when organizations make technology decisions.

Additionally, high tech providers should create a model to help identify "best fit" situations and "should avoid" situations. "Best fit" situations should be captured in an ideal customer profile — an enterprise persona — which focuses on the characteristics of the organizations being targeted, not the individuals within those organizations. It can include a variety of factors including the technologies they use, their business situation, the resources available to them and psychographic ETAs.

"There will be a big grey area in between that you have to be thoughtful in evaluating whether to commit to pursuing the opportunity. This is all about improving your odds and allocating resources and investments effectively," said Barnes.

Having a keen understanding of the ideal customers will help high tech providers shape their strategies. With this insight, Gartner recommends that high tech providers do three things:

1. Focus the bulk of investments and effort toward supporting the "best fit" situations with the right offering, the right messaging, and the right type of content and engagement activities.

2. Train customer-facing teams on how to recognize the customer characteristics that indicate a "best fit."

3. Train customer-facing teams on how to adjust their approach when encountering prospects that fall into the grey area between "best fit" and "should avoid."

Methodology: In November and December 2021, Gartner surveyed 1,120 respondents in North America, Western Europe and Asia/Pacific to understand how organizations approach large-scale buying efforts for enterprise technology. Respondents were required to be at a manager level or higher, aware of large-scale buying efforts for technology occurring during the past two years, and directly involved in the evaluation or selection of products or services for technology projects.

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Gartner: Majority of Technology Purchases Come with High Degree of Regret

As technology continues to become more critical to the business, technology customers have access to more options and information than ever before leading to more instances of buyer remorse.

56% of organizations said they had a high degree of purchase regret over their largest tech-related purchase in the last two years, according to a new survey by Gartner, Inc.

"The high regret feelings are at their peak for tech buyers that have not started implementation, indicating significant frustration with the buying experience," said Hank Barnes, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner. "In the past, it was relatively easy for product leaders to predict who buyers were, but no longer. Buying team dynamics are changing and customers can find buying to be a real challenge."

Barnes identified key changes in tech buying behavior: "There can be significant downside to regret associated with enterprise technology decisions. The survey found that the organizations that indicated they had high regret for their purchase took, on average, 7 to 10 months longer to complete that purchase. Slow purchase decisions can lead to frustrated teams, wasted time and resources and even, potentially, slower growth for the company."

According to the survey, 67% of people involved in technology-buying decisions are not in IT which means that anyone could be a tech buyer for their organization. In this environment, a new technology adoption chasm is emerging. This new chasm divides organizations that are confident adopters and buyers of technology from the vast majority that are not. High-tech providers need new approaches to identify and engage these different types of B2B customers and predict which type of customer they are dealing with to improve the odds of winning good business.

"To shift strategies, we need to think about psychographics beyond the motivations for buying to also include how decisions are approached and which groups are driving the strategy," said Barnes. "Gartner has developed a psychographic model called Enterprise Technology Adoption Profiles (ETAs) that revealed seven specific customer segments. Using ETAs is one element that can help high tech providers move from a product/market fit strategy towards a product/customer fit strategy."

Enterprise Technology Adoption Profiles (ETAs) are a proprietary model developed by Gartner that assesses the psychographics that drive how and when organizations make technology decisions.

Additionally, high tech providers should create a model to help identify "best fit" situations and "should avoid" situations. "Best fit" situations should be captured in an ideal customer profile — an enterprise persona — which focuses on the characteristics of the organizations being targeted, not the individuals within those organizations. It can include a variety of factors including the technologies they use, their business situation, the resources available to them and psychographic ETAs.

"There will be a big grey area in between that you have to be thoughtful in evaluating whether to commit to pursuing the opportunity. This is all about improving your odds and allocating resources and investments effectively," said Barnes.

Having a keen understanding of the ideal customers will help high tech providers shape their strategies. With this insight, Gartner recommends that high tech providers do three things:

1. Focus the bulk of investments and effort toward supporting the "best fit" situations with the right offering, the right messaging, and the right type of content and engagement activities.

2. Train customer-facing teams on how to recognize the customer characteristics that indicate a "best fit."

3. Train customer-facing teams on how to adjust their approach when encountering prospects that fall into the grey area between "best fit" and "should avoid."

Methodology: In November and December 2021, Gartner surveyed 1,120 respondents in North America, Western Europe and Asia/Pacific to understand how organizations approach large-scale buying efforts for enterprise technology. Respondents were required to be at a manager level or higher, aware of large-scale buying efforts for technology occurring during the past two years, and directly involved in the evaluation or selection of products or services for technology projects.

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The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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