A Go-To-Market Launch I’m Proud Of

On my very first day on the job, my boss said to me, “I have a big project for you.”

A week later, I was off and running — planning, strategizing, and aligning teams around the launch of an entirely new product line.

What followed was one of the most dynamic and rewarding projects of my career.

It was a chance to shape not just a launch, but an entirely new market category for the company.

I built out the go-to-market foundation from the ground up: from positioning and pricing to sales enablement, campaign strategy, and customer adoption.

Below is a snapshot of my launch strategy. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it highlights the core components that brought this product to life and the cross-functional collaboration that made it a success.

The Launch

A new product line called Travel Risk Management.

Product Naming

“A name is the primary handle for a brand; it captures and communicates meaning, sets expectations, and provides the basis for recognition.”

As one of the most nuanced steps in any launch, naming is both creative and deeply strategic. My goal was to create a name that reinforces our brand, communicates value instantly, and scales across a growing portfolio. I wanted something that would feel intuitive to our customers and align with our broader brand architecture.

We explored multiple directions — should it be branded to tie directly to our platform, or descriptive to make its purpose immediately clear? I partnered closely with Product Marketing, Brand, and Product to evaluate each option against key criteria: clarity, differentiation, scalability, and emotional resonance.

In the end, we landed on a straightforward name that clearly conveys what the product does. It’s simple, unfussy, and easy to remember.

Pricing & Packaging

Product Narrative & Positioning

Market & Competitive Analysis

Early Access

Sales Enablement

Integrated Marketing Campaign Strategy

Product Adoption & Engagement

Ongoing Roadmap Influence

Business Goals & Success Metrics

For this product, I partnered closely with our CMO, Finance, and Product teams to build a pricing and packaging strategy that balanced customer value, market competitiveness, and business goals.

Goal: Understand where the product fits and what customers are willing to pay for. Create a value-based pricing model that’s transparent, scalable, and easy to sell.

Focus areas: 

→ Align pricing with value 

→ Ran pricing research to gauge perceived value 

→ Determined which capabilities are part of the core package versus add-ons

→ Determined pricing levers (i.e. total workforce, travel coverage, number of locations)

→ Annual vs. multi-year pricing incentives 

→ Pricing for travel management system integrations

My launch brief serves as the single source of truth for how we tell our product story — connecting the “why” and the “what” to the company’s broader vision. It defines our market positioning, competitive differentiation, and value messaging in a way that resonates with customers and aligns every team around a shared narrative.

It also outlines our messaging architecture, guiding everything from web copy and campaigns to sales enablement and customer communications. The result is a unified story that ensures every touchpoint reinforces the same clear, compelling message.

Ultimately, the launch brief acts as our north star for go-to-market storytelling — empowering marketing, sales, and product teams to show up consistently and confidently in the market.

You can check out my Travel Risk Management Launch Brief here. It’s lengthy but worth the read (at least a skim!).

Words of affirmation:

“Kudos are most certainly due for Darby Dupre’s incredible work on the marketing brief. I’ve read it multiple times while working on collateral for this game-changing solution, and I find myself more impressed with each read. The depth of thought, attention to detail, and sheer effort that went into it are truly exceptional—and as a copywriter, I appreciate every bit of it. Incredible work, Darby!”

When we looked at the market, one thing stood out— every one of our core competitors offered a travel risk management solution. It’s a critical part of the picture for any organization trying to understand risk across all their assets — offices, employee residences, mobile users, and now, travelers. Without that view, there’s no true way to see where your people and operations might be impacted.

But as we dug deeper, we saw a clear gap in how those solutions worked. Most were disjointed, hard to use, or failed to bring everything together in one place. Customers wanted a single, intuitive platform that could show them all of their assets, all of their risks, and help them act quickly when something went wrong.

Our strategy was twofold: 

  1. Build best-in-class technology that delivers real-time visibility, automation, and contextual intelligence across traveling employees

  2. Partner with a leading service provider to offer travel and medical assistance services, ensuring customers receive support in moments of crisis.

This positioned us uniquely in the market. By combining our technology with trusted services, we created a solution that helps organizations both see and respond to global risks — something competitors hadn’t fully solved. This approach closed a major gap in the market and differentiated us from legacy providers.

Leading EA programs is one of my favorite parts of any product launch. It’s the stage where you get to validate your product, gather feedback that shapes the roadmap, and watch customers interact with a nearly finished experience for the first time.

This EA program was especially complex. Every customer had a different way of ingesting their traveler data into our system, which meant there was no one-size-fits-all onboarding path. To manage that, I designed a tiered, phased approach that grouped participants by data integration complexity and readiness.

We onboarded 20 customers, focusing on those who were engaged, collaborative, and eager to co-create. Throughout the program, we maintained a steady feedback loop with Product to capture insights, track adoption barriers, and translate real-world experiences into actionable product improvements.

The results:

  • ~90% adoption rate among EA participants during the program

  • 11 Closed/Won deals, resulting in $285k ARR

  • Strong advocacy from key accounts, including quotes like:

    “This product filled a critical gap in how we manage traveler safety — it’s intuitive, powerful, and built with real-world challenges in mind.”

Complex? Yes. Challenging? For sure. But also incredibly rewarding. We not only validated the product, but built lasting customer relationships and market confidence before launch.

Sales enablement is where the product story truly comes to life, creating confidence in the field. For this launch, I led enablement efforts across all business segments, creating tailored content and training for both new business and account management teams.

The goal was to ensure every seller could clearly articulate our value, differentiate against competitors, and handle real-world customer conversations. I developed a full suite of enablement materials, including:

  • Training decks that broke down positioning, messaging, and use cases

  • Demo talk tracks with tailored data in a demo environment to tell a cohesive story

  • Playbooks and pitch decks designed for different customer segments

  • Objection handling guides grounded in real customer scenarios

  • Competitive battlecards to help reps navigate head-to-head conversations

To reinforce adoption and consistency, I partnered with the Sales Enablement team to launch a formal Sales Certification process, ensuring every rep could confidently articulate the product’s value and story. The result: 100% certification across all segments.

This program not only equipped sellers with the tools to win deals but also aligned the organization around a consistent story that connects our product’s value to customer outcomes.

Now it’s time to build awareness, drive engagement, and create sustained demand. I helped develop and execute an integrated marketing campaign strategy that connected every touchpoint across marketing and sales to deliver a cohesive, high-impact launch.

Launch day is finally here! Our focus was on visibility and conversion. We rolled out a suite of assets and digital experiences to introduce the product to market and equip sellers with everything they needed to engage prospects. A few of the assets included:

  • A new website product page designed to showcase the product story, core value, and key differentiators

  • Dedicated PPC landing pages optimized for lead capture and search visibility

  • A Key Feature Guide as a polished sales leave-behind for post-demo follow-up

  • Coordinated sales outreach sequences to drive immediate engagement and pipeline activity

Following the launch, we shifted to ongoing demand generation and education, building a cadence of engagement to deepen awareness and accelerate adoption:

  • Quarterly product webinars highlighting new capabilities and customer success stories

  • A website chatbot experience to guide visitors through key use cases and demos

  • An interactive Navattic product walkthrough that lets prospects explore functionality hands-on

  • Demo videos for both web and sales enablement use

  • Targeted sales outreach sequences to nurture leads and re-engage prospects post-launch

This integrated campaign ensured consistent storytelling across channels, kept momentum beyond launch day, and strengthened the connection between marketing activities and sales outcomes, driving both awareness and pipeline growth.

Driving adoption is about moving customers from awareness to recognized value. For this product, I led adoption and engagement efforts designed to educate users, simplify implementation, and build lasting product habits across our customer base.

We focused on clear, consistent communication and empowering customers with the right resources at every stage of the journey. That included:

  • An Implementation Kickoff Deck to help customer success teams lead onboarding sessions

  • Detailed Help Center articles and tutorial videos to guide users through product functionality and workflows

  • In-app announcement messaging to introduce new features right where users engage most

  • Feature launch highlights in a monthly product newsletter to drive awareness and continuous learning

  • Regular release notes to keep customers informed about enhancements and fixes

To measure success, I partnered with Product and Customer Marketing to track adoption and usage metrics, monitoring activation rates, feature engagement, and overall customer health. 

This approach ensured customers not only adopted the product but continued to see growing value over time — turning first-time users into long-term advocates.

The most rewarding part of my work is helping shape what’s next for our customers. My approach to roadmap influence is grounded in the voice of the customer: understanding their needs, validating ideas, and ensuring every product decision measures up to real impact.

I built a continuous feedback loop that blends qualitative and quantitative inputs from multiple channels:

  • Insights gathered from EA, where customer feedback directly informs future features

  • Bi-annual customer surveys to measure satisfaction, uncover unmet needs, and track perception over time

  • A structured customer interview program focused on understanding workflows, use cases, and pain points

  • Collaboration on integration partnership strategy, aligning roadmap priorities with ecosystem opportunities and customer demand

  • Regular feedback sessions with Customer Success and Sales, ensuring frontline learnings feed back into product planning

This ongoing process not only helps us prioritize high-impact features but also strengthens relationships with our customers — they see their input reflected in our roadmap. The result is a roadmap that’s market-informed, customer-validated, and strategically aligned.

Our goals were ambitious, but achievable. The market was ready for a solution like ours, and our customers were asking for a more integrated, all-in-one approach. With strong early interest and a large total addressable market, we knew the opportunity was significant.

From the very beginning, we built a healthy pipeline and set clear, data-driven growth goals for the product line:

  • Pipeline Goals: X

  • Bookings Goals:

    • 2023: $796,000

    • 2024: $1.9M

    • 2025: $2.1M

The results were exceptional. Through coordinated sales and marketing efforts, we drove over $7 million in priced pipeline and consistently hit — or exceeded — our bookings targets quarter after quarter:

  • Q1 2024: 104% to goal

  • Q2 2024: 95% to goal

  • Q3 2024: 101% to goal

  • Q4 2024: 100% to goal

Our average selling price grew from $14K to $18K, reflecting both increased customer confidence and expanded deal scope. We maintained a strong 36% win rate across all segments, signaling that our positioning and story were resonating in the market.

At the time of writing, this product line has generated over $4 million in revenue in just 2.5 years — a testament to the strength of our go-to-market strategy and cross-functional execution. It’s been widely recognized internally as one of the smoothest and most successful product launches in company history.