Buy-In and Budget: How to Greenlight Ignition at your Company

So you dig Ignition. You’re stoked you found a go-to-market tool that’s got everything you need to research, plan, launch, and iterate successfully. It’s a dream. 

Although Ignition is powerful enough that you can leverage it all on your own for successful launches, it’s ideal to get some buy-in from your stakeholders so everyone is working in lockstep. And, of course, you’re going to need a little budget too. 

Easier said than done, right? It may not be as hard as you think. 

We’ve put together a two-part guide that will walk you through the winning approaches for those crucial buy-in and budget conversations and a short roadmap for a seamless rollout. 

Let’s dig in.

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How to Get Internal Stakeholder Buy-In for Ignition

Wow ‘Em With a Demo Launch Plan

Many people struggle with conceptual learning, meaning they crave tangible examples or visual demonstrations when striving to understand a new idea. To set yourself up for success, don’t enter into stakeholder conversations and just talk about Ignition—show it to them. This is the hands-down best way to get buy-in.

Showcasing a launch plan within our intuitive, visually compelling platform will help you easily convey just how powerful Ignition is. If you don’t have a launch plan that you can easily plug and play, don’t stress—we’ve got a demo template you can use. 

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Three Compelling Points About Ignition

Before we dive into approaches you can use to get buy-in from your product, marketing, sales, and executive teams, there are three elements of Ignition that benefit everyone involved, regardless of department or role:

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1. Ignition successfully supports launches without requiring everyone to use it.

One of the coolest things about Ignition is that stakeholders don’t need to use it directly to benefit from it. Ignition is designed to push information out to stakeholders via Slack or email, so other teams don’t need to overhaul their processes or learn how to use a new tool.

Make sure your stakeholders know that adopting Ignition won’t require them to do any heavy lifting—or light lifting, for that matter. Ignition’s seamless integration with tools like Slack, Jira, and Salesforce enables you to gather info and keep everyone informed, even if they’re not using Ignition directly.

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2. Ignition is much more than a convenience tool—it’s a vehicle for more ROI. 

Tell stakeholders that your choice to roll out Ignition is an ROI-driven decision rather than one of convenience. Ignition saves your organization ample time and money on everything from market research and internal comms to asset development and launch playbooking. 

In fact, it’s estimated that Ignition saves 20 hours per person, per launch. 

The ROI goes well beyond time saved though. Better launches = more revenue. And fewer headaches = better morale. Your stakeholders will feel the positive effects of Ignition throughout the entire go-to-market process and product cycle. 

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3. Ignition improves visibility for every stakeholder. 

Ignition becomes your Single Source of Truth, housing and tracking every moving part of the product and launch cycle—capturing market insights, storing launch calendars and playbooks, publishing release notes and collecting product ideas.

This saves you and your stakeholders hours of back-and-forth. No more time spent resolving discrepancies between multiple documents or mismatched messaging approaches. 

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Win Over Product with Higher Adoption and Better Roadmaps

Since you’re primarily collaborating with Product, you definitely want them in your corner. Luckily, Ignition was built to mobilize product marketers and product managers so there are countless benefits for product teams.

Ignition makes product teams more successful in three key ways: 

1. Driving higher adoption, thus proving ROI on dev efforts
2. Informing roadmaps by directly connecting them with user insights
3. Making it easy to communicate product changes and updates to stakeholders

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Higher adoption, better ROI, easier communication, and more strategic roadmaps—those are a lot of headaches that can be alleviated by improving the go-to-market process and product cycle. Be sure to emphasize these points when you talk with Product. 

You’ll also want to highlight the features your product team will find most helpful: 

• User-nominated feature voting boards
• Integrated personas, insights, and roadmaps
• Automated launch impact and measurement reports
• Branded release notes and easy changelogs

Win Over Marketing with Clear Visibility and an Information Hub 

Next up on your buy-in list is Marketing, since you’ll need to partner with them for launches. 

Marketing teams are often frustrated by lack of visibility into timelines, product launches, or feature updates—which makes it challenging for them to craft and coordinate their campaigns. Another marketing struggle is information chaos: Data and insights are often spread across multiple tools and documents, resulting in inconsistencies and confusion. 

Using Ignition for go-to-market solves both of these problems: 

• Predictive launch calendars and product roadmap integrations keep everyone clear on timelines and feature updates
• Integrated documentation, asset management, and tasks make Ignition a Single Source of Truth so information stays consistent and stakeholders stay informed

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This all makes it easier for product and marketing teams to communicate, collaborate, and plan. And since the go-to-market process becomes more operationalized and repeatable, it becomes much less of a hassle for everyone involved. 

Win Over Sales with Deal-Closing Positioning and Messaging

Sales loves anything that can help them close more deals, so this is where you focus. 

Sales representatives leverage go-to-market playbooks to help them position the brand and get customers excited about the product. They also don’t like getting blindsided by surprise launches because it can put them in a tough spot with customers—how can they close effectively if they can’t answer questions or outline the product’s benefits (or didn’t even know the product had shipped in the first place!)?

When approaching the sales team for buy-in, focus on the fact that Ignition will enable you to give them clear, thorough information and do so within a convenient timeline. This reassures Sales that they’ll have visibility and won’t get blindsided by any surprise launches.

Here are some key benefits of Ignition to share with your sales team: 

• Product updates are pushed directly to email or Slack for better visibility
• Clear launch calendars and roadmaps eliminate surprises so Sales has plenty of time to prepare
• Automated competitive battlecards sync with Salesforce, offering Sales tighter positioning alignment and enabling them to compete more effectively 

Win Over Executives with ROI 

Senior leaders want to understand the value of any time and money that’s invested in the organization. For executives, there’s nothing more convincing than rock-solid ROI. 

Ignition is designed to improve your go-to-market strategy and messaging, which improves your launches, which drives higher adoption—all of that results in high ROI. 

But Ignition also saves the company time and money by correcting operational inefficiencies: Stakeholders spend significantly less time chasing down details, trying to figure out which document houses the most current information, and repeatedly asking or answering the same question. This frees up the team to focus on the higher-level, strategic work that’s going to bring real gains. 

It’s estimated that Ignition saves 20 hours per launch, per person. If you really want to win over your executive team, run the numbers for them. List out everyone who supports your launches and calculate how many hours would be saved with Ignition. To take it a step further, estimate hourly rates and put a dollar sign on it—that should get your executive team’s attention and buy-in.

How to Get Budget Approval for Ignition

Once you’ve gotten your stakeholders rallying for Ignition, there’s one final conversation you need to have: the budget talk. 

The last line of approval is always Finance because they sign off on budgets. 

Finance teams are interested in dollar signs so talk money. The points about ROI that you shared with the executive team all apply here but there’s another smart approach too: Cost-cutting or consolidation. Ignition will likely enable you to ditch the tools in your tech stack that aren’t serving you or that are made redundant. 

For example, competitive intelligence platforms like Klue or Crayon typically cost well north of $50,000 per year. But Ignition includes competitive intelligence, making the old tool irrelevant. Review your current tech stack and licenses to see where you can consolidate (hint: your competitive intel tools, SEO research tools, roadmapping tools, and changelog tools). Chances are, you’ll find a list of items you can ditch now that you’re streamlining your go-to-market process.

Next Step: Full Speed Ahead with Ignition

Congratulations, you made it! You’ve got buy-in and budget. 

Now all that’s left to do is roll out the tool and roll up your sleeves. Remember that rolling out Ignition means you’re rolling out a new and improved go-to-market process, so you can look forward to some killer launches. 

We’ve got plenty of resources to support a smooth rollout and support articles to help you make full use of Ignition’s suite of features. Be sure to check them out. And if you have any questions, the Ignition team is always here.