If you’ve been in business a while, you know that the Go-to-Market (GTM) process for launching new products or features can be overwhelming. From launch planning and research to communication and measurement, there’s a lot to manage.
Ignition provides a single platform to manage all aspects of a launch. It’s specifically designed to help businesses optimize their GTM process. Here’s a breakdown of what Ignition does well, where it could improve, and why your businesses might want to give it a try.
Ignition: The Good and the Bad
Ignition’s biggest benefit is streamlining and automating the entire GTM process. But a lot of trickle-down benefits result from this. It makes your launches more repeatable and efficient, drives better customer understanding, and gives you actionable data to measure your success.
What Ignition Is Good At
Simplifying and Optimizing the Launch Process: A new product launch often requires you to juggle a bunch of moving parts. But Ignition can help take the chaos out of the GTM process.
This is because it serves as a single, streamlined source when it comes to building out your broader marketing plan. Having a single hub simplifies planning, executing, and communicating GTM plans. This also means launching becomes faster, teams align more effectively, and AI can be leveraged to instantly build impactful plans.
Instead of juggling a dozen different tools in different places, Ignition centralizes your plan documentation, tasks, and assets. It does this by seamlessly integrating with the tools you’re already using.
Ignition’s AI copilot further simplifies the launch process. By enabling repeatable and impactful strategies, it reduces the need to constantly reinvent strategies and deploy them manually. The AI enablement alone helps to accelerate planning and automate internal communications.
For example, you can automate stakeholder briefings by scheduling automatic email, Slack, or Teams updates for individuals or teams. This can be used to share key status, strategy, or asset updates.
Beyond internal comms, Ignition’s AI-powered tool can also be used for launches. Their Copilot AI generates personalized launch plans that dynamically adjust based on various factors like launch tier, budget, and GTM motion. This can enhance the effectiveness of your GTM initiatives by ensuring they’re tailored to the unique needs of each launch.
Free Resources and Templates: Not sure where to start when it comes to planning your launch execution? Need help figuring out how to interview customers to gain key insights that will guide future product development? And what about sales battlecards—how can those help you when it comes to finding out how your business stacks up against your competitors?
Ignition provides templates and resources for all of this and more.
These resources are especially helpful for new businesses who are working through their first cycle of product launches. (Though they may have some useful insights to offer those who have been around the block a few times, too.)
For instance, if this is your first time launching a new product and you want to make sure you’re not missing any key steps, you can use a product launch checklist to help your team stay focused and ensure you’re not overlooking any important to-dos.
Ignition offers a helpful editable template for this that you can use as a starting point and edit to fit your team’s specific needs.
These tools are completely free, so it’s worth combing through their resources to see what might be beneficial for your team.
Leveraging Data and Insights: Product and marketing teams need up-to-date and actionable intelligence to stay competitive. But data alone is just part of the equation. How can it drive your product and business forward? Ignition not only harnesses data but also provides you with unique insights to give your team the competitive edge they need.
Ignition is solving a big problem here: the challenge of keeping up with ever-evolving competitors and ever-growing quantities of data. Transforming vast amounts of data from various sources into actionable insights is a time-consuming task. Add to this the difficulty of conducting customer interviews or juggling other responsibilities, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
Ignition helps by automating the collection and analysis of competitive and customer research and then integrating this valuable information directly into the planning process. This not only saves time but also ensures the insights are current and relevant.
Since the process is AI-powered, it’s extremely efficient. It works by tracking competitive signals like news, reviews, and SEO data automatically. Aside from tracking this info, you can use it to create assets for your sales process.
For example, you can effortlessly create templates for sales battlecards that incorporate essential competitor information like revenue figures, SEO metrics, company size, and more.
Ignition can also evaluate win/loss performance across your sales process by integrating with your CRM. You can then directly transfer the insights to your sales team. This gives you an instant analysis of key drivers behind your successes and setbacks in competitive deals.
Of course, no research process is complete without learning from your users themselves, and Ignition shines there, too. It collects user research by allowing you to conduct studies on pricing, persona, and branding.
The platform’s AI capabilities shine here too, as it can import customer conversations from tools like Intercom and Zendesk and use AI to instantly analyze and surface key insights from these conversations.
Measuring Your Launch’s Impact: Launch strategy is tricky enough, but what about afterwards? How can you tell for sure whether your launch was a success or not? Ignition allows you to accurately measure and prove the impact of your product launches. This is not only crucial for proving your launch’s effectiveness but also for continuing to optimize your launch process in the future.
Ignition simplifies launch measurement by giving you a centralized view of your launch impact across various metrics related to product, sales, and marketing. You can track your progress against Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) by aggregating metrics from various sources, such as analytics tools and CRMs, to gain a comprehensive understanding of your launch.
The visual nature of these insights is another nice touch. For example, you can overlay KPI trends with key milestones from your launches to see what’s driving your metrics:
You can also run cross-team retrospective surveys to collect internal feedback from your team. This will give you diverse perspectives from those who were in the trenches working on the launch.
Ignition’s Potential Drawbacks
Complexity: One challenge with Ignition is the complexity of its user interface. It’s such a robust tool with so many options that some users could find the interface to be a bit overwhelming.
This complexity can make it difficult to navigate the platform and locate specific features quickly. For new users, or even for those who are familiar with the platform, the abundance of options and tools, while beneficial, might also lead to confusion or a steep learning curve.
However, this is likely just a temporary road bump as you get used to using the platform.
Limited Customization in Reporting: Another area where Ignition could improve is the customizability of its reporting features. Although it offers excellent dashboards for managing overall portfolios and for in-depth insights into individual GTM plans, it would be nice to have more flexibility in tailoring these dashboards.
The existing dashboard layouts and the information they provide are great, but having the ability to customize them further to fit specific organizational needs and preferences would be helpful for users.
Enhanced customization options would allow users to focus on the metrics that are most relevant to their specific needs.
Ignition’s Plans and Pricing
Ignition offers multiple plans and pricing options, including a free version. With every Ignition plan, unlimited free viewers are a standard, but if you plan on having more than one editor, you’ll need to upgrade to at least the Liftoff plan. Let’s take a look at some of the other important details you’ll need to know before choosing your plan.
Freemium
As the name implies, the Freemium plan is free. It’s meant to give you everything you need to build a repeatable GTM motion, and it offers AI and automation features like a CopilotAI strategy assistant and internal communications automation, but with limited integrations.
The GTM planning aspect includes up to five GTM plans, complete with launch calendars, timelines, and unlimited tasks and asset management.
For product management, the Freemium plan offers one roadmap with a capacity of 100 items, alongside idea management boards and release note pages. It also includes research and insights tools for competitive intelligence on up to three competitors and unlimited personas, and measurement features for OKR management.
For security and compliance, it maintains SOC-2 compliant security and GDPR compliant privacy. This is the best plan to get your feet wet and see if you like Ignition.
Liftoff
Liftoff is priced at $99 per editor per month, or $79 per editor per month if you opt for annual billing. It encompasses everything in Freemium, plus enhanced AI and automation capabilities like ChatGTM AI enablement, AI insights analysis, unlimited AI copywriting, and unlimited integrations.
The GTM planning in Liftoff expands to include unlimited GTM plans, automated sales rep notifications, and more.
Product management also becomes more robust with unlimited roadmaps, issue sync, and CRM integrations, also allowing the removal of Ignition branding.
Research, insights, and measurement features are significantly enhanced with unlimited competitive intel, customer surveys, analytics integrations, and comprehensive impact reports. Enterprise features and security remain consistent with the Freemium plan.
This is the best plan if you’ve already taken Ignition for a spin and are ready to take full advantage of its features, perhaps with multiple editors on your team.
Moonshot
Finally, the Moonshot plan is priced on a custom basis, so you’ll have to contact Ignition for a quote. It includes everything in Liftoff, but with even more advanced features. In AI and automation, for example, it introduces a custom workflow builder and API access. GTM planning is also augmented with AI brand governance.
The research and insights capabilities now include AI win/loss analysis. Enterprise features and security are further upgraded in Moonshot, offering SSO, audit logs, custom contract and invoicing, advanced permissions and access controls, and dedicated customer support. This is the best choice for larger, established enterprises.
Final Thoughts
Overall, Ignition is an excellent tool if you’re looking to simplify product launches and GTM processes, especially if you’re interested in leveraging AI.
The team at Ignition has created a singular, streamlined hub to simplify a notoriously messy process. If you’ve been searching for a way to simplify launches, optimize the process, and collect data on your launches all in one place, Ignition could be the perfect solution.
