This is my exact experience. Another way to put it is that changing involves two decisions: Whether to change and what change to make. Therefore, there are two

This is my exact experience. Another way to put it is that changing involves two decisions: Whether to change and what change to make. Therefore, there are two sales to make to someone who hasn't decided to change, and only one sale to make to someone who has already decided to change. Given a limited amount of time and energy to invest, you will get the maximum return when you are only trying to make one sale at a time. We can make up numbers all day, but let's pretend I'm a D Evangelist with a 20% close rate. Given 100 prospects who haven't decided to switch languages, I get 20% of them to agree to switch, and then 20% of those to agree to use switch to D. That's only 4%. Whereas if I find 100 people who are looking for a new language, I can get 20% of them to switch to "D." On the whole, it makes sense for me to let other mechanisms convince people to make a change, and put my energy into explaining why D is the right change to make.