How Cvent turned product updates into $100K+ in account expansion
Cvent is a global meetings, events, and hospitality technology company that helps organizations manage events, engage attendees, and connect hotels and venues with group business opportunities. The company supports a large portfolio of event marketing, management, and hospitality solutions, serving enterprise customers across in-person, virtual, hybrid, and webinar programs.
Product updates that close deals
At Cvent, product updates do more than keep customers informed. Sales reps pull up LaunchNotes in client meetings to show what's shipped and what's coming, and it has paid off in revenue.
In one meeting, an existing enterprise client saw that Cvent was building the features it needed and bought more than $100K in additional software.
We used LaunchNotes in a client meeting to showcase recent releases. The client had purchased a product they weren’t fully using because of feature limitations, and they quickly saw that Cvent was investing in the technology and listening to their needs. It changed the entire conversation. From there, we moved forward with deployment and adoption. The annual impact: north of $100K.
Chad Waldrop, VP, Enterprise Sales, Cvent
It happened again with a global life sciences company that was holding a contract until one specific feature shipped.
We used LaunchNotes to share a critical update with an enterprise customer waiting on a key feature. It was a global life sciences company that wouldn’t renew until this feature was released, so we shared the roadmap update during a quarterly check-in and subscribed them to receive updates for that feature. It made the difference in securing a $50K+ order on the spot.
Chad Waldrop, VP, Enterprise Sales, Cvent
Before: product releases escaped, they didn't get launched
Cvent is a global leader in meetings, events and hospitality technology. It went from one product and three releases a year to 90 sprint teams shipping every week across 20+ products.
Communication didn't keep up. Every product line announced releases its own way: some in a Slack channel, some by email, some in stakeholder meetings and PowerPoints, some on a wiki. Customers had to dig through a community site that was never built for release notes. Account teams often didn't know what had shipped.
At Cvent's user conference, product managers kept hearing the same two things from customers: “I didn’t know you’d released that,” and “I feel like I’m only using 10% of the software I’ve licensed.”
Before LaunchNotes, the joke in sales was that product releases escaped from Cvent. They didn’t get launched. We usually found out about a release from a customer, which put us in some really challenging situations.
Chad Waldrop, VP, Enterprise Sales, Cvent
The breaking point: release notes in front of the executive team
Quality was the final straw. Stakeholders started collecting examples of Cvent's release notes and bringing them to leadership.
It took an internal meeting where stakeholders brought screenshots of our release notes to the executive team. They didn’t represent product or product marketing well. That was the moment we said, we’ve got to fix this.
McNeel Keenan, VP, Product Management, Cvent
The stakes were hard to ignore.
Our R&D budget is $100M+ a year. If customers don’t know what we’re building, that’s a lot of wasted spend. Failing to communicate it feels like tripping at the finish line.
McNeel Keenan, VP, Product Management, Cvent
The solution: one hub for every product change
Cvent's Product Operations team rolled out LaunchNotes in stages. They started with internal teams, grouping releases by product so each person subscribed only to what mattered to them. Then they opened it to customers, launching at Cvent's user conference and signing up more than 1,000 customer subscribers within a couple of months.
Targeting and categories let the team alert the right people automatically, through three channels:
- Targeted posts, so each audience sees the updates that matter to them
- Custom email digests, built with LaunchNotes templates and the SendGrid integration
- Slack notifications, reaching internal teams where they already work
Amy Walsh, Sr. Manager of Customer Retention, built templates for each product grouping so every send has the same sections and branding. Senior product managers publish internally, and product marketing owns everything that goes to customers.
Customers used to have to check our community, read an email or call their client services rep. Now everything is in one place. To me, that’s gold.
Amy Walsh, Sr. Manager, Customer Retention, Cvent
The results: more revenue, more readers, fewer surprises
- $100K+ in strategic account expansion from one enterprise client, plus a $50K+ order tied to one feature release
- 15% higher open rates on LaunchNotes emails than Cvent's average email sends
- 3,700+ subscribers: 1,700+ customers and 2,000+ internal stakeholders, tracked in LaunchNotes dashboards
- Fewer meetings: product managers and product marketing write release narratives together in LaunchNotes
People open these emails because they want and need them. So many of our other emails have fluffy marketing titles.
Amy Walsh, Sr. Manager, Customer Retention, Cvent
Customers also noticed that Cvent now shares what's coming, not just what already shipped. As Amy puts it, that's exactly what they had been asking for: “Don’t just tell me yesterday that you launched something. I need a little bit of advance notice.”
How Cvent runs it now
Every release across Cvent's 20+ products goes through LaunchNotes. About 60 product managers and 5 to 10 product marketers shape the story together, and updates go out twice a month instead of whenever a team got to it. Targeting sends each one to the right audiences, and sales uses the roadmap on client calls to show how Cvent's plans line up with each customer's goals.
Our customers are happier, and happy customers buy more. My team is more informed, and it makes us look better.
Chad Waldrop, VP, Enterprise Sales, Cvent
