Behind the Scenes of Our Launchpad Launch

A few weeks ago, we debuted Launchpad, a centralized portal for SEs and AEs to manage and send demos early in the sales process.

While we’ve rolled out big features before, this one was different. It meant:

1. Speaking to a new persona (sales engineers)
2. Driving new user behaviors (accessing, modifying, sharing, and tracking demos from one place).

So instead of just focusing on channels and noise, we focused on alignment and storytelling: why Launchpad exists, how it makes an SE’s life easier, and its core benefits, shorter sales cycles and better buying experiences.

Here’s how we did it:

The story we were telling about Launchpad needed to resonate with a newer persona for us, SEs.

So first, we spent a lot of time interviewing our CEO and co-founder, Neil McLean. Before starting Navattic, he was an SE at Oracle, which inspired him to create an interactive demo platform and eventually, Launchpad.

We used the transcripts from those conversations and from sales calls with early SE prospects to help build out the messaging in GetWhys.

Once we felt like we had the story in place, we created an “Everything You Need to Know” Notion doc with:

• The story behind Launchpad
• Persona-specific use cases and messaging
• Feature mapping to common sales challenges

We also included an all-encompassing interest-level Interactive demo so whoever was looking at it could see Launchpad in action.

We also built a custom GPT to serve as a self-serve launch resource for the Navattic team and our advisors.

Besides nailing our story, engaging advisors, and sending our demo campaigns, we made a point to make Launchpad as visible as possible.

Here are a few other things we did:

• Added banners promoting Launchpad in the Navattic app.
• Created a custom landing page.
• Put a Launchpad callout on our pricing page.
• Wrote several blogs emphasizing Launchpad features, including How SE Teams Are Using Navattic and How SEs Use Sandbox Demos to Scale Faster
• Had Natalie, Neil, and the team make LinkedIn posts the day we launched, and asked them to keep the momentum going with more Launchpad-related posts trickling out after launch.

Advisor enablement

At Navattic, we’ve built a really active advisor program.

These people are in our ICP or work with our ICP and have well-known brands and the kind of credibility that our audience trusts.

They act as strategic partners – helping promote Navattic in their own channels and networks, and serving as a go-to group of people we can rely on for a “gut check” on our messaging and positioning.

As I was gearing up for this launch, we:

• Sent them monthly update emails to keep them posted on where we were at and to seek honest feedback.
• Invited them to a live session (recorded if they couldn’t make it), walking through new features and our Launchpad narrative.
• Shared the “Everything You Need to Know” doc so they could reference it when talking to peers, clients, or posting on LinkedIn.

Creating the interactive demos

We created two different interactive product demos for launch.

1. 1:1 custom Launchpad interest demo. Let users choose which Launchpad features are most relevant to their use cases to “build their own” demo.
2. Generic overview demo. Showed how a rep would use Launchpad in their everyday work.

We also created a demo just for customer emails by cloning an existing demo on our website and swapping out the final CTA to “Contact your CSM.”

The sales team had already been lightly pitching Launchpad in their calls with prospects, so we worked directly with them to figure out what all of the “wow” moments were.

Then, we built an ugly v1 of each demo to get their feedback. And they really were ugly – there were no Beacons, and we didn’t worry about placement or other customizations.

As we added new functionality to Launchpad, we kept refining the demos and used our messaging doc to finalize the copy. By the time we were ready to launch, they looked polished and matched what we were saying in our campaigns.

Sending data to Slack with audiences + playbooks

We wanted our reps to be able to act on the people engaging with our demos right away.

So we created Audiences in Navattic for customers who engaged with the 1:1 custom demo or the generic demo for over 60 seconds (which indicated pretty high engagement).

Then, we used those Audiences to trigger a Playbook to send a Slack message to an optional company-wide Slack channel. The purpose of this was three-fold:

1. Track which parts of the demo resonated most, so teams could tailor follow-ups.
2. See which customers were most engaged (and who we should send more tailored one-on-one messages to).
3. Get everyone excited about the Launch and traction with key customers.

In total, we sent direct outreach to roughly 2,390 users and 408 companies.

We took a tiered demo approach:

Tier 1: Custom 1:1 Launchpad demos. These were designed for high-fit accounts.

Tier 2: Broad-use overview demos for awareness.

And, as I mentioned, we used a Slack channel to show real-time engagement by account and demo activity.

Here were the results:

• 57% email open rate
• 27% engaged with a demo
• 7.7% viewed a demo for 60+ seconds
• 4% of companies replied
• 30% of those were target accounts

A few things went really well that we plan to carry over into future launches:

• Starting with enablement the Notion doc, the custom GPT helped clarify our messaging and sped up asset creation.
• Taking a tiered demo approach personalized the campaign by segment and led to higher engagement rates.
• Using a Slack Playbook surfaced high-intent accounts instantly so that our team could send a tailored response and keep those leads warm.

Looking back, there were a few things we could tweak:

• Gifting. We ended up sending gifts too early in the campaign, which didn’t create the conversions we’d hoped for.
• Highly designed emails. Turns out casual emails seemed to do well.
• Too many launch docs spread across tools. Next time, we plan to create a centralized Slack workspace to keep everything together.

Want to give Launchpad a try? Run through an interactive demo.