AMA: Dell Boomi Former Director of Portfolio Messaging, Div Manickam on the Evolution of Product and Solutions Marketing to Portfolio Messaging

As product marketing is part of the product organization, we look at data analysis and north star metrics to help in our decision-making process. Customer research and market analysis help to identify the unique pain points to develop the differentiated value proposition.  CRM data analysis, buyer persona research (interviews with customers and external) and competitive intelligence (with sales, customers, partners and win/loss) help articulate the right value at the right time for the right seg ...Read More

A micro category is relevant for specific product/service as it provides a niche use case that the offering supports.  A macro category for a company is the high-level category that aligns with customer needs and expectations in the industry. Both micro and macro categories co-exist and it’s crucial to help teams understand the dimensions needed for both categories. Macro category can have breadth while a micro category needs more depth.  Eg: If the macro category is Integration Platform as a Se ...Read More

Often times, we say our platform has unlimited possibilities, it's the art of the possible -- because it truly is. But it doesn’t help the customer understand our unique differentiator vs any other option in the market. Starting with themes has been helpful to simplify the messaging hierarchy. We need to simplify the message, so it’s memorable. If we cannot do that, no matter how great the messaging sounds, it will be forgotten the next second. We developed a messaging and positioning framework ...Read More

Today, portfolio, platform, ecosystem and suite are used interchangeably depending on the use case or scenario. Every technology company wants to be a platform today that encompasses multiple products/services/offerings.  Portfolio is a collection of products, industries, solutions, and services that focus on the buyer persona needs within a target segment.  Platform is a group of products/services that builds the foundation or acts as the technology backbone and have synergies for customers to ...Read More

This is something we would like to get better at within our team. We aspire to be persona-led and data-driven, but don’t have processes/tools in place to perform the right testing for messaging and positioning. Today, we are able to test messaging and positioning with the sales teams(joining customer calls for customer feedback), Customer advisory board. We have identified champions across sales, presales, etc. for focus areas or use cases (by solutions/products/industries) to help us test the m ...Read More

It is recommended to start with one segment to test/iterate, to completely understand the buyer needs/value proposition and then build messaging for the other two segments. If it’s not unique for each segment, then it will be hard to position one overarching message. It will be challenging at first, but once you have the value proposition for each segment, you will naturally see the synergies and patterns. If the message is too broad, it wouldn’t mean anything to any specific persona. Always tes ...Read More

When we had one product marketing manager (2015), we had the product knowledge to articulate business value and simplify technical concepts. With addition of solution and industry marketing managers, we evolved to product and solution marketing(2017), and we started to focus on buyer personas and customer pain points. This led to the evolution of portfolio messaging as the anchor for our team to help showcase our value and differentiation as compared to product management or marketing, where we ...Read More

Our messaging and positioning starts with this framework below. We combined messaging and positioning into one document and have it built out for each product, solution, and industry. We engage with product management to start and confirm the value proposition, key personas and their pain points based on current learnings from customers. Then we validate our messaging with sales, presales to gain insights into prospect conversations.  This has become the guide for the content/editorial team and ...Read More

Category creation is a unique messaging and positioning initiative when your startup is providing a differentiated value that doesn’t exist in the industry today. When I think about new markets like the subscription economy or SaaS platforms, these categories didn’t exist a few decades ago.  Every startup should look at existing categories and NOT try to fit into a category if that isn’t the value for customers. Often times, customer advisory boards help guide and share perspectives on the ecosy ...Read More

Our team, Portfolio Messaging (product, industry and solutions) are part of the Product organization (I report to the Chief Product Officer) to help build synergy with Product Management and solutions team. We work closely with Product, Marketing and Sales to meet business needs. We have the process and team interlocks across Boomi from Demand Generation, Sales Enablement, Business Ops, Sales Ops etc. Here is a good read for the holidays on how to think about where product marketing would sit. I ...Read More