AMA: Canva Ecosystem Marketing Leader, Indy Sen on Platform Product Marketing

What a great question, and having seen this shift happen at a few companies, I don't think it was necessarily just a messaging effort that caused the mindset to shift. To be sure, there was a combination of go-to-marketing strategy and storytelling we needed to bring to the table, but it was above all the output from our ecosystem that really kicked off the flywheel: from the insane business potential coming out of our ISV partner ecosystem at Salesforce, to the innovation fueled by our developers at Box, to the interoperability provided by our integration partners at Google Workspace to help us meet our customers where they are. The key was how we sourced and stimulated that output. A couple of vignettes for you: * At Salesforce, what I think worked best was that we had tried and failed a few times to make the AppExchange marketplace work for us. Despite being on the right track from a product concept/offering standpoint (hey, let's make the App Store, but for enterprise), our packaging and presentation layer was wrong. Prior to 2009, nobody had skin in the game, and due to channel conflict issues, we made it hard for partners to collaborate with our own account executives... so much that we earned the internal moniker of "CrappExchange". But once we figured out a way to properly monetize partner apps in a way that incentivized our AEs, and on top of that put a new spin on how we went to market with partners, that paved the way for explosive growth. It also helped that from that point on, we could grow our own marketing and sales operations and treat our division as a business within a business. * At Box--by contrast we had the right offering and packaging pretty much in place from the get-go. We had a modern stack of APIs that was timed precisely right for the market. This was in 2012 where Stripe, Twilio, Parse were all emerging as API-first platforms and APIs were leading a cambrian explosion in software development. From an enablement perspective, it was pure gold and we didn't have issues getting the right developers aligned. But figuring out who those right developers were and how to acquire them was the hard part. We had an API, but so did Dropbox. Our company ended with -box, so did Dropbox! And they had so much more brand awareness than we did! So we had to think about our story and how it was applicable to the developers we wanted. Dropbox customers were on the consumer/creative side, whereas Box was focused on enterprise. Dropbox had an order of magnitude more users than we did, and so naturally attracted way more developers. We knew it wouldn't be realistic for us to target the same. But what we could do was help developers who were focused on enterprise to partner with us because we had that focus that Dropbox didn't. We went for quality vs quantity. So while our integrations weren't necessarily the eye candy you'd see on the consumer side, we were very strategic to position ourselves as the enterprise startup that helped other enteprise startups. We not only enabled our developers with APIs and tools that focused on security and user-level permissioning, but leaned precisely on the stuff that was unsexy to consumers but sexy to the enterprise. That's what put us on the course of expanding our ecosystem of apps and even generating revenue from them in under two years.

Great question, and always exciting to be at a juncture where you're considering expanding your GTM to address specific verticals and opportunities. Getting a vertical right is not always easy, but when you have the right structure and offerings, the work across other opportunities is very repeatable. There are several ways to think about this from a marketing approach: 1. Picking the vertical: Spinning up a vertical marketing strategy within marketing is a big bet because you have to orchestrate a lot of bespoke programs and content across demand gen, content marketing and sales enablement, to name a few. So stack ranking and picking the right bets will be essential. The way I've seen us pick verticals, whether it was at Google or Matterport was to keep our ear to the ground with sales and other customer-facing parts of the organization as to where we were seeing repeated requests from a particular industry or functional area. This could be financial services or retail (industry verticals), as much as it could be marketing or sales (functional verticals). Seeing where the chatter is can help you prioritize. If those teams are busy you can also analyze the opportunity data yourself, and look at deals that might be stuck in a particular area for lack of a solid product offering. Ideally, sales leadership should have that information and as a marketer you should make it a point to be across those weekly touch-points. Having the right hygiene in salesforce about this will be key for everyone, but in a pinch, you can also hopefully quickly scan recordings of those sales calls to further validate which areas could be ones of opportunity. That's the best approach in my mind as it's organic and rooted in the reality of the conversations you are currently fielding, but perhaps not crushing. The other way of picking the vertical is to do the market research and opportunityr leadership team and develop sizing with you a strong view of where you could go next. You'll have to sift through a lot of opinions there, and as a product marketer, you'll need to be very aligned with the product team on what the product is ready to tackle to enable sales to have the most authentic conversations. I'll leave you with one anecdote here. Google Sheets didn't have page numbers enabled for printouts for the longest time. Not surprisingly, that was the number one complaint we got from customers in financial services for not adopting the tool, because it meant we didn't understand the needs of that particular vertical. They weren't wrong. For all our talk and focus on moonshots, we shot ourselves in the foot by not clamoring for those table stakes. 2. Focusing on one or two verticals at the most: A common pitfall when adopting a vertical marketing strategy is taking on too many verticals at one time. Sure, you might have hired an industry solutions whiz, or brought some capabilities that should be replicable across several verticals, but you still have zero flight time going deep in understanding what makes those customers tick, how they procure things, who do they trust, etc. You have to get the psychology right, and then, if you're doing full stack marketing against those opportunities you have to obviously get the physics right. That's very very hard to nail all in one go, let alone across multiple verticals. So my recommendation is to start small but go deep. It might take a quarter or two to land that first big vertical customer, but when you do, you'll have a goldmine of insights on how to knock out the others. At Matterport, we started with a lofty goal of "Winning the Verticals" and had all the right people involved in terms of building an encompassing strategy to go after them. We had a robust plan, but were spread to thin. We then shifted to a Win a Vertical strategy, and that then helped set the stage for great, repeatable work. 3. Nailing the offering in a way that's replicable: We talked about focusing on the few vs the many, I'd argue that's also the outlook that product marketing can advocate for with product in terms of what will be the set offerings that are bespoke and essential to acquiring those verticals. It'll be tempting to go after a particular vertical and advocate for a whole set of features that cater to them, but the key ones are more foundational. Are you FedRamp/ISO/HIPAA compliant. Ironically, a lot of industry-based stage gates to penetration are process-driven vs feature-driven. There are checkboxes you'll need to seek out and make sure your offerings can meet before being considered a serious contender. Of course you also need to build the right features. That's where understanding the psychology and workflows of the users you're targeting will matter. Which leads me to my last recommendation 4. Accelerating your execution via SMEs: A total cheat code for accelerating your vertical penetration is to hire or consult with a SME from that industry who either was in sales or in BD there, but may be looking for a job or advisory gig in tech. Sounds crazy, but anyone who has that industry experience will help you understand the psychology and physics of that industry in record time. I learned that from my consulting days where a key-opinion-leader or KOL provided us with all the right inputs on how to frame our analysis. Ideally you want to have someone like that across each vertical. You don't have to hire them, but if you're serious about that vertical, they're worthy every penny.

Think of your PMM team as an interface to the organizations they serve. Your org structure can vary from company to company, but I've often said that messaging, if done right, should be like an API across your organization. Same goes with your PMM organization. The more you can optimize for information flow between team members, the more "performant" your API will be. So when thinking about platform solutions PMMs vs product-focused PMMs I go back to the classic vertical vs horizontal services style org chart. Picture an org chart. Across it are what I'd call your vertical PMMs - the SMES across specific products or audience groups. Directly below them are your horizontal PMMs (think common/shared layers like program management, sales enablement, analyst relations, research and insights). I'd push for Platform and Solutions to be part of that horizontal stack as it almost always ties back to specific products. On the Google Workspace team for example, I supported the APIs and SDKs across each core product like Drive, Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets. And while there was a dedicated, product-focused PMM or team of PMMs across each, my team would regularly interface with them so we could cross-pollinate our storytelling, refactor/remix content so as to be across key messaging moments. Crucially we all reported to the same manager at the top level. That enabled us to be across the same operating cadences and business rhythms in real-time, allowing for efficient information exchange and flow.

Two things need to happen when you make that shift from a sales enablement perspective. 1. You need to change your narrative from a product to platform narrative 2. You may need to up-level your sales team and heuristics by bringing on people who are comfortable making the jump to solution selling vs. product selling Product marketing can run with 1.) but you'll need a strong cross-functional handshake with sales and leadership to make two happen. You won't be successful without both. Let's get to the specifics. For the narrative, you'll need to adapt your storytelling and pitch from being a very convincing "From .. To" type of story, to showcasing the art of the possible (i.e. "What if you could run your business in this fashion"). The former is typically centered around FUD, while the latter is typically a more aspirational story. An example of that is Apple making the shift from a product to a platform company and conditioning us to think of them that way. The Mac vs PC campaigns in the aughts was very much about one product being better than the other to the point of ridiculing it. Because that's where they were. Fast forward to the iPod, the iPhone, Apple Watch era, we're intoday, and it's all those things together, bundled as a way of life. You have the world's music in your pocket or your health on your wrist. Of course you need three devices and one subscription plan to aspire to all that, but that's what they're selling you. For solution selling vs product selling, there's a reason why I hinted at your company needing to bring some new blood on board. Not every rep that "got you to where you are", in terms of selling a user login/per month, is wired to be a storyteller, engage in discovery, and lead the prospect into their arms. Deal cycles will get longer but in a proportional way with deal size. It's a longer game with different reward structures, and not as easily done. You might also require some new sales leadership for the reasons mentioned above. People coming in with playbooks in addition to encouraging the propagation of tribal knowledge is how you can set sales up for success The heuristics point remains--there are lot of training methodologies, tools and content that can help fuel that transition like Saleshood, Gong, Highspot etc, and, as a product marketer, you should be in the buyer/evaluator loop for those.

My recommendation in those instances is to start by developing a messaging hierarchy across your overarching offering story and expand it from there. As tempting as it is to rattle off features and benefits across your platform offerings and cater to every use case, having those all ladder up to a consistent core message is always beneficial. Why? Because that will be your true north. * The reason why our API is built this way is because it ties back to our desire to do x for y. * Ah, you want to know why we enable partners in this way vs what others do? Well that's because we believe that [...] Done right, you may end up having a number of messaging hierarchies. You could have: * One for your overall platform * One for every key offering * One for every key persona * One for the platform as it pertains to a particular industry When I was at WeWork, my team and I needed to evolve our positioning and messaging very quickly for enterprise customers, as that's where the bulk of our GTM motion was focusing. Not only that, but we also had to create messaging that would resonate for enterprises in different geos, as well as across different partner and buyers. But we started by building our core messaging hierarchy around WeWork for the enterprise first, because no matter how nuanced things could get downstream, we wanted to make sure that everyone was singing from the same songsheet and that our collateral, and overall value props felt consistent, no matter who we were talking to.