How LaunchDarkly Achieved 80% Daily Adoption

Poor Support Prevented Adoption

LaunchDarkly helps enable safe, continuous feature updates, allowing product delivery teams to accelerate their deployments while reducing risk. But without an effective platform to centralize and manage enablement assets, LaunchDarkly faced internal version control and efficiency issues. “Our reps were spending way too much time searching for content,” said Lynne Santangelo, program manager of revenue enablement at LaunchDarkly. “We found that a lot of them were actually using severely outdated content. We also weren’t able to measure or have visibility into the pieces they were using on a regular basis.”Despite having an existing solution in place, there were still a few key qualities missing that were affecting the team’s efficiency. In particular, the LaunchDarkly team found that the customer support provided by the previous solution was lackluster, which ultimately harmed adoption.

Improving Efficiency Through a Centralized Platform

By switching to Highspot, LaunchDarkly quickly found a more accessible – and therefore more effective – platform. The simplicity of the UI was pivotal for the enablement team to encourage engagement and drive adoption. “We had some people on the team that had used the tool before,” noted Santangelo. “So they knew that they were going to be able to get right into the platform and start building Plays and different pages for a lot of the initiatives we wanted to roll out for 2023.”

With this enthusiasm for the platform from the start, Highspot became a crucial tool for generating and managing business-critical content, which helped improve content findability by 92% after implementation. This ability to easily customize content while maintaining brand integrity and shared visibility has helped the LaunchDarkly team have more effective business reviews. “For our internal quarterly business reviews, we have the deck that reps are making copies of, adding all of their relevant content, and then putting it back up into Highspot so everyone has visibility across the team,” said Santangelo. “And then for our customer business reviews, we have external Pitch Styles that we’re using to create these really great, high-quality Digital Sales Rooms that our customer success managers are able to send ahead of time for customers to engage with and then come to a call prepared to have an open dialogue with everything they need right in front of them.”

Highspot also became critical for helping LaunchDarkly orchestrate another large business initiative: its annual revenue kickoff (RKO). “Highspot was extremely instrumental in our revenue kickoff – our first in-person kickoff for almost three years,” detailed Santangelo. The team dedicated all content and updated messaging in an area called the Message House on Highspot with Plays established for the various use cases. “Throughout the four days at our kickoff, people were constantly going into Highspot to get the content they needed,” shared Santangelo. “We had a dedicated RKO page for the agenda, FAQs, and even where we’re having dinner.”

In addition to a friendlier user interface and visibility across all content, Highspot gave LaunchDarkly the white-glove support it hadn’t received from previous tools. “Just knowing we had a dedicated team from the Highspot side that could answer our questions or help brainstorm was imperative,” emphasized Santangelo.

Exceptional Service Boosts Adoption and the User Experience

Implementing a more robust platform has driven significant results for LaunchDarkly. “From an adoption point of view, about 80% of our reps globally are logging into Highspot at least once a day, which is a huge win for us from our previous solution,” shared Santangelo. “Also, since we’ve implemented Plays – just looking at the scorecards, which content people are pitching, how they’re going through the Plays, and really using the messaging – has been a real game changer for us.” In fact, the team has achieved 92% adoption of Plays, representing a 70% improvement. 

Ultimately, the platform provided the visibility and connective tissue the team required. From an unmonitored pool of outdated content, the LaunchDarkly team now had a centralized location with tracking capabilities, where 95% of content is well governed. The team also had the support they deserved along the way. “Our implementation specialists and our account manager are always on the ball and always open to feedback from us. They’re just really strategic thought partners and we love working with them,” said Santangelo.