Turning ClearDent's Competitor Sunset Into A Record-Setting Opportunity

ClearDent is a Canadian dental practice management software company serving roughly 1,500 dental practices. The business was a bootstrapped, vertical SaaS company operating in a trust-heavy healthcare market where changing core practice software could affect scheduling, billing, patient records, clinical workflows, and day-to-day operations.

I joined ClearDent as Head of Marketing and its first marketing leader on the executive leadership team. My role covered demand generation, brand, product marketing, customer marketing, and sales support while building the company’s marketing function from the ground up.

A competing dental practice management software provider announced that it was sunsetting its product. That created a meaningful market opportunity, but it did not guarantee that affected practices would choose ClearDent.

These customers were not ordinary prospects. They were being forced to replace business-critical software, often on a fixed timeline, while trying to minimize disruption to their staff and patients. Their decision was shaped as much by migration risk, onboarding confidence, and operational continuity as it was by product features.

We needed to identify the affected practices, reach them while the opportunity was active, explain why ClearDent was the right alternative, equip Sales for direct competitive conversations, and demonstrate that our onboarding team could support a credible transition.

I treated the sunset as a market-moment opportunity rather than a generic demand-generation campaign. We built a coordinated go-to-market motion across Marketing, Sales, competitive intelligence, and onboarding.