Why Is Nobody Talking About GTMs for Feature Launch

If you throw a stone at a SaaS crowd (especially these days, with SaaS conferences going on worldwide in full swing), someone will wrap it with a GTM playbook and throw it back to you.

At the same time, I have, time and again, failed, and burnt my fingers in finding a great strategy to launch a feature.

You Can Not Overlook Features Enhancements Anymore

The Modern SaaS Consolidation Conundrum

The reason feature launches need a better strategy lies in the modern SaaS consolidation conundrum. The number of SaaS tools businesses use has increased over the years. But that growth is slowing down now. There was a remarkable 400% jump from 2017 to 2018. Now, the YoY growth is just a little shy of 19%.

Also, the SaaS ecosystem is seeing more M&A than ever. 126 deals in the last 3-4 months. To put it in perspective, 2022 saw around 100 SaaS M&A. Bigger fishes are acquiring smaller ones. And a symbiotic relationship forms where more prominent SaaS companies are safety nets for smaller ones. On the other hand, smaller companies provide the necessary foray into a new space for bigger ones. There’s Build vs. Buy for SaaS buyers, and there’s Build vs. Buy for SaaS sellers.

All this alludes to a super important trend: SaaS companies want to be more comprehensive with their offerings. People want more from their SaaS stack, and more importantly, people want to do more with what they have. Hence, building feature stacks that provide incremental value is super important.

Ship More, Ship Faster, and Ship Value

The beloved poster boy of modern marketing and CS SaaS, Intercom’s VP of engineering, says shipping is your company’s heartbeat.

New features, upgrades in the existing stack, and continuous improvements are what propel your company forward. But shiny, new advances are as good as their distribution. Distribution for Top of the Funnel is already a commodity, but enough attention needs to be given to the bottom of the funnel and beyond.

I believe your Service Obtainable Market (SOM) grows with people extracting more value from your product, day in and day out. Hence, ensuring you have enough value to give is always a good idea.

But most SaaS miss out on this. We have always been great at launching products, but not with features. That’s why a bland feature launch strategy, or a lack thereof, is the biggest roadblock to providing that incremental value.

Let’s dive deeper into how to create a feature launch strategy.

The Groundwork

The Scale of Feature Launch

Not every feature deserves a full-on Feature Launch GTM. An RBAC rollout might not warrant the same effort as a superset-based reporting and dashboarding rollout. Since there is no SI measure of the effectiveness of a feature in the SaaS world, I have a few abstract concepts to determine if your feature deserves a Launch GTM.

1. For Young Startups: Can you launch this feature on Product Hunt*?

2. For Mature Organizations: Can you PR it?

If it ticks the above boxes, you can go ahead and prepare a full-on Feature Launch GTM strategy.

* I am not a fan of launching every significant feature on Product Hunt. Take this as a unit of measurement rather than an advice. Even if you don’t embark on PH, ask yourself if it is launch-worthy.

Who Should Own This: Product Managers

Inclusive or Incremental Personas

Your PM and PMMs should discuss whether current user personas will leverage the new feature or if it will throw a new user persona in the mix.

For example, an open API rollout will attract developers to a marketing automation platform. Or introducing invoicing will attract accounting personas to your payment systems.

Things are simple when you are affecting existing personas with your new feature. You can follow the checklist given in the subsequent sections.

But with new personas come new responsibilities. You need to:

Refine the Personas

Ameliorate your buyer personas to include their demographics and psychographic information. Apart from your regular persona questionnaire, two questions that have always helped me understand the personas better are:

1. What keeps them up at night?

2. What drives the growth in their careers?

Define Messaging and Positioning for the New Personas

The massive problem with building ICPs and personas is that we rarely put them to work. Some points to keep in mind while defining messaging for the newly introduced personas:

1. First, bucket them into buying roles: User, Influencer, Decision Maker, or Economic Buyer.

2. Refine product messaging based on your research - what keeps them up in the night and what drives their career paths. Keep iterating on it.

3. Make sure your launch collaterals use this messaging throughout.

4. Also, find out how to reach these people from within your existing buying committee.

Who owns this: Product Marketing

Channel Your Ways ThroughYour Champion

Find out how to reach new personas by leveraging your relationship with users and champions in your target accounts. It might look like a daunting task, but it yields incredible results. It’s easier to pave the way by piggybacking on your champions, creating more intrigue and easier adoption.

Revenue

This is a no-brainer. Not every feature adds to your revenue playbook. But if it does, you must have a launch strategy. Think about how this feature’s adoption is tied to revenue. For example, a CRM launching a Customer Service module would help increase revenue. Hence, it might warrant its own dedicated GTM strategy.

Who owns this: Customer Success or Product Marketing

The Feature Launch Playbook

Once you’ve established the foundations and groundwork, it is imperative to jump with all guns blazing on the feature launch.

I’ve taken a usual Product GTM template from PMA that I have found super helpful and made my own, adding some flavors of feature launch in it. You can find it here.

Let’s expand on a few things from the template here:

1. Web Copy

Create new web copy based on the new messaging and positioning work. Add the new messaging to your feature pages, landing pages, pricing pages, chatbot, and banners.

If you are going for a full-scale feature launch (incremental personas and new revenue), definitely create its own landing page.

I found Mailmodo’s Form in Email page an excellent example of this.

2. Assets

Have multiple assets ready for the launch:

• Images

• GIFs

• Videos (Loom, Animated, Conversational)

• Blogs

• Customer quotes

• Case Studies

• And more…

3. Social Media

Post social media updates in multiple formats highlighting the value and importance of the feature you are launching. Think of product videos, conversation videos, GIFs, blogs, user interviews, case studies, knowledge-base articles, and more.

Backing your feature launch with a good story is always a good idea. Get your entire business and customer-facing teams to run these posts from their LinkedIn and Twitter as well. Team promotion example here from Threado.

This post from Intercom has all the elements of a good feature announcement update.

4. Sales and Success Enablement

This is the often overlooked, fairly under-prioritized, but super-impactful piece of the feature launch puzzle. Features updates target current customers with equal enthusiasm as for the new acquisitions. Hence, making sure sales/success teams are well equipped to showcase the value of the feature to customers.

Here’s what you should enable revenue teams to do their jobs better:

1. Add related technical know-how in your tech docs

2. Add relevant questions in your FAQs

3. Add in your sales decks, solution briefs, battlecards, and other sales enablement assets

4. Modify your demo videos to include the feature

5. Drive Feature Adoption

Everything boils down to this. Growth, product and marketing leaders always fall short of increasing feature adoption to the extent they can. The primary reason for this is ownership. Driving feature adoption is a collaborative effort between growth, product, marketing and, of course, customer success teams.

Here’s what you should be looking at:

• Update your onboarding questionnaire to include the new personas

• Add the feature to your onboarding flow. If required, add a secondary feature onboarding flow

• Add to your checklists

• Add to your changelog

• Push notifications

• Communicate via in-product messaging. For example:

• Communicate via your in-product chatbot

• Update product blogs to include these features

• Add to your feature library

• Add in your email signatures

• Share in your newsletters

• Add to your behavioral email sequences

• 1-1 reach outs via CS teams

• Do a webinar with your existing customers and qualified leads. It would be great if you could add a beta customer to preach the value on your behalf.

KPIs to Track

Launch it and forget it is not going to fly. You need to track metrics to make informed decisions about the success of your launch. Since feature adoption is a perpetual activity, these are some metrics you want to keep your eyes on:

Reach and Intrigue

1. Visits on the feature landing page

2. Engagement with newsletters, behavioral and CS emails

Depth and Breadth of Feature Adoption

1. How many accounts and users were exposed to the feature

2. How many accounts and users saw and completed onboarding cues related to the product

3. Activation rate of the feature

4. Adoption rate

5. How many accounts and users used the product

6. How many accounts and users used the product again and again

7. Depth of adoption within each account

Higher Level SaaS Metrics (Over time)

1. Improvement in overall activation rates

2. Changes in CLTV

3. Revenue contribution

I had fun writing this one. I hope you like it; feel free to share it with your adoption and revenue teams. Once again, you can see the template here.