When you launch a new integration, do you tease the release, celebrate with fanfare, and involve partnerships across every aspect of your organization?

G2 and ZoomInfo did. And they crushed it.

We sat down to talk with Rachel Gianfredi about how her team at G2 partnered with Zoominfo to absolutely nail their integration launch.

Great integrations start with something boring–research

We don’t build any integration without doing the due diligence. We ask, does their product market fit? Does it make sense for the use cases of our data? – Rachel Gianfredi

For Gianfredi and the G2 Partnerships team, it was never about just getting more integrations.

It was about launching an integration that made sense and drove a ton of value. If the integration wasn’t going to move the needle, it wasn’t something her team was interested in.

And it started with doing heavy research.

G2 had its marketing audience engagement down to a science and ZoomInfo had sales honed unlike any other. Between the two of them, it made sense to leverage their strengths on the launch.

Start experimenting

It was kind of an experiment. I came up with this idea to build a lot of hype around this. We knew that a lot of our customers were wanting this. So, I was like: ’why don’t we create some teaser content?’ – Rachel Gianfredi

Once G2 and ZoomInfo decided that an integration would make sense, they came up with a plan for pre and post-integration. She wanted to ensure that users would be notified early so they could start using the features from day one of the release.

Tease the release

We had a pre-launch and post-launch strategy outlined to both prime our internal teams and the market. – Rachel Gianfredi

To Rachel, it was obvious that a single touch drop about the integration wouldn’t cut it. She started working to get a pre-launch webinar scheduled, focused on thought leadership and establishing G2 and ZoomInfo as aligned in the market. In that webinar, speakers hinted at the release of something big.

Inside the webinar, participants heard that there was an impending partnership and integration.

Gianfredi told the speakers,

Don’t commit to anything, don’t say anything. Just say that you have seen, inklings of an integration partnership that’s coming up.

The webinar wasn’t just a boring presentation about an upcoming integration. It had real value. It was focused on information that customers would love, whether or not the integration ever happened.

Turns out, the webinar generated a significant amount of pipeline because of its high-quality content.

Drop it like it’s hot

Gianfredi’s design team created awesome teaser videos and began dropping hints on social media about “something big” that was coming from both G2 and ZoomInfo.

A pre-launch waitlist joined social posts as a way to experiment and capture early interest in their impending integration. Both teams sought to generate a similar sort of buzz that is common in B2C brands.

Hints on social media and the prelaunch waitlist generated buzz and excitement, just like our favorite consumer brands create pre-orders or waitlists for new product launches.

As a bonus, a few days before launch, they soft launched for mutual customers on the waitlist, giving them advanced access to the integration.

Don’t stop to rest; partner across your orgs

They even partnered up on their paid ad strategy. G2 ran display ads and ZoomInfo ran paid social through their MarketingOS platform. Partnering on this ensured they didn’t cannibalize each other in ad channels.

We were able to split the channels and do the lead sharing, which is another huge learning that I took away…there was a bit of an imbalance there because the engagement on different channels is always going to vary. – Rachel Gianfredi

Once the integration was launched, they didn’t rest on their heels. G2 and ZoomInfo teamed up to get out a press release, write blogs, and publish dedicated landing pages.

They also hosted a post-launch webinar with clear calls to action that went into the specifics of the integration. Plus, it featured both orgs’ CMOs which demonstrated executive buy-in and got great engagement from each of their networks.

Following that, G2 sent a 30/60/90-day email campaign encouraging integration adoption, among other post-launch engagements.

Experiment, but keep learning

It’s important not to adhere to a menu or a playbook every single time… it gives you the opportunity to be creative with it. And that’s really where I most enjoyed this go-to-market launch. – Rachel Gianfredi

Measurement was a challenge. Influence came from many directions. Gianfredi worked with Marketing Operations to create clear tracking. But because the waitlist page was redirected to the launch page on the go-live date, it caused some metrics to get lost.

The key was that they ran the experiment. It successfully attracted MQLs. While some lifecycle touchpoints got lost in the mix, Gianfredi uses the learnings to get better results for future launches.

Gianfredi hopes that other partner marketers can learn from her experience. It’s important to understand what can be measured, and how it will be done, from all areas of the cross-functional team. Product, Marketing, Partnerships, and Sales can all work together to proactively set the measurement function early on.

Research, experiment, partner up; then crush it

Creating hype and working with partners across G2 and ZoomInfo’s orgs made the integration a major success. The key to the successful launch was the support and heavy buy-in from leadership, and the partnership approach of working across departments.

The success of the G2 and ZoomInfo integration took a lot of orchestration. Much of the team’s pre-work continues to move joint goals forward with numerous Slack channels, email threads, new relationships, and continuous alignment.

None of it could have been done by a single company in the partnership. The partnership approach was complex and indispensable to the outcome.

Prefer to listen? Subscribe to our nearbound.com Audio Articles Podcast. Text-to-speech provided by our partner Voicemaker.in.