How to introduce a new GTM process internally

After finding the perfect solution to your team’s needs and getting approval and budget to buy it, you get to ride that wave of excitement as you roll it out to the whole team. But how do you get everyone to adopt it in a way that’s purposeful and not overwhelming to them? 

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Don’t worry– we’ve been there, and we want to set you up for success introducing a new process internally. That could be anything from a go-to-market process to a competitive intel process, or even something as simple as a customer survey process. You get the idea. 

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The secret? You don’t have to do everything, everywhere, all at once. Start with key team members and grow purposefully from there.

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Here’s how. 

The framework you need to succeed 

Any good internal process should be built on good bones. For this approach, we recommend the Crawl, Walk, Run framework. (Fly at your own risk, Icarus.) 

Crawl

Start with your own, immediate team and organize your process. If you have a bigger team, you could even just start with yourself to get everything up and running before you introduce it to key members of your immediate team; those one or two champions you work closest with.

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The key to starting this small is to be able to actively demonstrate “what good looks like” with the new process so that any skeptical collaborators can see the value right away when they do start collaborating. 

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Next, use what you’ve built to publish updates outwards. We recommend that you start simple; publish minor launches and collect feature ideas via Release Notes (bonus if you’re getting budget pushback: this is free forever!). From there, you can organize your own repeatable process that you’ve been building with your team for 2-3 upcoming key launches and have the proof you need to eventually take the process to the wider team. 

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It’s important that you don’t go beyond your team just yet– use Ignition’s email and Slack automation and export capability to push information out to other teams, so they never even have to access anything new. 

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Ignition also has 20+ integrations you can tap into in order to sync with other teams’ existing workflows without any disruption. 

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Lean on Ignition to customize your templates– they’re more customizable than it might appear at first! There are two ways to customize your own templates in Ignition: 

1. Create your own launch plan and then use the "Save as Template" button in the lower-left corner to save a static template.
2. If you'd like to adjust the dynamic Copilot workflows, we can import your template for you. To do this: 

1. Make a copy of the template linked above
2. Fill it in for your primary type of launch
3. Send the completed doc to us and we’ll import it within 24 hours for you

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A bonus? Even if nobody else on your team or in your organization ends up adopting Ignition, you can still get incredible value with the planning and research tools as a single user. 

Walk

Once you’ve gotten everything established and working smoothly within your own team, it’s time to introduce the new process to a close collaborator team. If you’re a product marketer, reach out to the product management team, or vice versa.

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You want to work with some key collaborators from that team on an end-to-end process to use as an example case study you can point the rest of the company to when you finally roll the process out to everyone. We recommend starting with handoffs from insights to product roadmaps to GTM plans and experimenting with Connections to ensure context flows smoothly between these stages.

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From there, you can use measurement and retrospectives to prove the ROI of the new internal process to key stakeholders (like execs). Our pro tip for maximum impact? Do a retro on existing processes before running with Ignition, so you can show clear results to everyone post-adoption. 

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Emphasize that this also establishes a central source of truth for customer and competitive intel, making it easier for customer-facing teams to find exactly what they need, streamlining and enhancing their workflows. 

Run 

Now it’s time to spread the good word of the new process to the whole company! With your own team and your close collaborator team now seamlessly using the new process, you have plenty of advocates to help everyone else adjust. 

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Emphasize how little work it will be for them to use the new process. 

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Send a roll-out email like the one above with a similar message in Slack to reassure everyone that their workflows won’t change significantly and that most of what they might need to find within Ignition will be in Mission Control. 

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That includes all key assets and product information in one single, organized place, saving everyone time from hunting through several different tools (or worse, interrupting you several times a day) to find what they need. 

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Even better, almost everyone will be able to get the answers they need using Ignition’s new AI chat feature. 

The three keys to success 

You’ve got your framework, now you just need the magic behind it that really makes it stick as you implement it strategically. 

1. Don’t ask for permission

It can be hard to get everyone excited about a new tool when they already feel stretched thin, or are attached to the workflows they’ve already established. By demonstrating the value upfront, your team and organization will be much more likely to get excited when they see a new platform in action with a real life example– especially one that doesn’t adversely impact their workflows.

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Just show key stakeholders what it looks like once it’s done, then build a bigger and better case study using your close collaborator team as you move from crawling to walking. 

2. Show, don’t tell

Demonstrate how simple it will be once it’s all implemented: show key collaborators, then key stakeholders how things will be pushed out to them. Make it clear that it will be with minimal interruption to their existing workflows– they can ask questions directly in Slack, for example, and get the answers they need without ever going anywhere else. 

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Only once they’re confident and comfortable with that should you show them Mission Control, if they want or need to dig a little deeper into the process. 

3. Delivery style 

Finally, success can be all in how you deliver the news. While you might be extremely excited to get rolling, be patient, especially outside of your immediate team where enthusiasm may not run as high for the implementation of a new process around something that’s not as important in their mind as their daily to-do list already is. 

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Be sure you make the whole process fun where you can, infusing your company’s brand voice and internal comms style and sense of humor into all of your communication around it. 

Final thoughts 

Creating new internal processes doesn’t have to be hard with the right framework in place and a little bit of that “show, don’t tell” attitude. 

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Let Ignition guide you every step of the way.

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