In SaaS, launches are rarely lost because of bad products. They fail because teams confuse product readiness with go-to-market readiness.
Slides are done, features are shipped, but pricing, packaging, enablement, and targeting come too late. Sales teams start selling before messaging is ready. Marketing scrambles to position. Customer success has no idea what’s coming.
The result is chaos instead of revenue.
Marieke Rodenrijs, Director of Product Marketing at Sana Commerce, has seen both sides — the high of a coordinated launch and the pain of one that stalls. As a three-time founding product marketing leader with over 12 years in B2B SaaS, she has built launch engines from zero and guided international teams through scale.
At SaaSiest Amsterdam 2025, she broke down her BOLD framework — a repeatable system that turns launches into business results, not just busywork.
The BOLD Framework for Revenue-Driving Launches
BOLD stands for:
- Blueprint – Treat every launch as a mini go-to-market motion.
- Orchestration – Align milestones, owners, and deliverables across teams.
- Launch Enablement – If your teams aren’t ready, your market isn’t either.
- Demand and Targeting – Aim precisely, not broadly.
Each step fixes a common failure point and creates momentum from planning to pipeline.
1. Blueprint: Every launch is a mini go-to-market motion
Most companies treat launches like events. Marieke treats them like growth motions — small but complete cycles of positioning, enablement, and demand.
Before building a single asset, she asks three questions:
- What is the business outcome? Is the goal new revenue, expansion, or deal acceleration?
- Who exactly is this for? Not “enterprise” or “mid-market,” but the real personas who will buy, use, and champion the product.
- Why will they care? Translate features into measurable value for each persona.
If you can’t answer those questions clearly, you’re not ready to launch.
To size the effort, she maps business value (revenue, churn reduction, expansion potential) against customer value (how it improves their world). Tier-one launches — those with high impact on both axes — get a formal launch group and full enablement cycle. Smaller tiers get lighter touch, but still follow the same structure.
Treating every launch as a mini GTM motion ensures consistency and stops the pattern of “build first, market later.”
2. Orchestration: The hidden skill of successful PMMs
Most launches collapse not because of ideas, but because of coordination.
“The moment you bring structure, you reduce chaos,” Marike said.
She always forms a cross-functional launch group with clear ownership across Product, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and RevOps. This team meets weekly to track progress through a shared project plan — one that defines stages, dependencies, and sign-off criteria.
The value of this structure is fourfold:
- Visibility: Everyone knows what’s being built, when, and by whom.
- Risk mitigation: Bottlenecks surface early instead of the night before launch.
- Operational rigor: Approvals and reviews happen on time.
- Unified messaging: Shared context ensures the story sounds the same in sales decks and social posts.
Each launch passes through five stages:
- Groundwork – Align on roadmap, dependencies, and final launch date.
- Story and ICP – Define the narrative, messaging, and personas the product serves.
- Readiness – Confirm commercial, marketing, and technical readiness before moving on.
- External launch – Deliver the story to customers, partners, and analysts.
- Evaluation – Measure impact and feed learnings into the next cycle.
This process transforms launches from chaotic events into predictable business motions.
3. Launch Enablement: Internal excitement drives external success
Enablement is where adoption is won or lost. “If your internal teams aren’t ready, your market isn’t either,” Marike said.
At Sana Commerce, launches begin with internal excitement — often a themed launch party where sellers and CS teams see the product first. They receive “launch packs” with everything they need: battle cards, objection handling sheets, use cases, and demo flows.
Training isn’t just documentation. It’s live sessions and gamified learning, giving teams space to test, ask questions, and build confidence before the public rollout.
The results speak for themselves. In the six months after adopting this approach, Sana saw 81% higher usage of go-to-market materials across teams.
Enablement isn’t an afterthought; it’s the bridge between strategy and revenue.
4. Demand and Targeting: Precision beats noise
Too many launches fail because they target “everyone.”
Marieke insists that every launch begins with a shared definition of the right accounts — built collaboratively by marketing, sales, and customer success.
That alignment turns targeting from theory into execution.
RevOps can pull data-driven lists based on ICP criteria, but sales and CS add crucial context: which accounts have intent, which are ripe for expansion, and which are worth ignoring.
The result is sharper focus and a unified motion across teams.
From there, Sana runs account-based engagement (ABX) campaigns for those selected accounts — one-to-one, highly personalized, and persona-specific. In the first month of running ABX launches, they saw 95% engagement within target accounts and 65% engagement from key personas.
Marketing, sales, and CS shared the same account list, the same sequence, and the same message. Outreaches became coordinated. Follow-ups became intentional. Every touchpoint moved the same accounts toward a decision.
Measuring revenue impact
To prove marketing’s contribution, Marike uses four simple, shared metrics agreed upon with the full revenue team:
- Accounts reached – How many target accounts saw your campaigns or ads.
- Accounts engaged – Who interacted with demos, webinars, or product content.
- Opportunities opened – Pipeline influenced by the launch.
- Deals closed – Direct revenue tied to the motion.
By measuring across the full funnel — not just at the end — the team learns quickly which messages and channels convert attention into impact.
The three rules of a launch that pays off
Marike closed her session with a simple reminder:
- Plan early. Start before the product is finished. Build your GTM strategy as you build the product.
- Enable often. Your go-to-market teams are your first market. Train them deeply and frequently.
- Target precisely. Clarity beats coverage every time.
When you apply those three rules, launches stop being stressful deadlines and start becoming revenue systems that scale.
Final takeaway
A great launch isn’t defined by how loud it is. It’s defined by how clearly every team knows who it’s for, why it matters, and how to win once it’s live.
Marieke Rodenrijs’ BOLD framework gives SaaS companies a way to structure for impact — one blueprint, one cross-functional rhythm, and one shared definition of success.
Watch the full session from SaaSiest Amsterdam 2025 here: https://saasiest.com/product-marketing-that-pays-off-structuring-launches-for-revenue-growth/
