AMA: DocuSign Sr. Director, Global Solutions Marketing, Paul Rudwall on Solutions Marketing

At its simplest, I think product marketing typically focuses on "What does this product do?" whereas solutions marketing typically focuses on "How do they come together for you?" Taking a step back, I think the need for solutions marketing arises when a company transitions from a single-product company to a multi-product company. At this stage, you typically begin to run into situations where different types of customers require an expanding number of different permutations of products, services, and integrations. This requires a different approach from many traditional product marketing roles. So, what's different?: * Focus: Solutions marketing is typically focused on a specific audience (industry, line of business, segment, geography) whereas product marketing is typically focused on a specific product or service. * Approach: Solutions marketing is product-agnostic, starting from the customer use case and mapping multiple products, services, and integrations to that use case. In contrast, product marketing is product-specific, starting from the product and mapping it to the pain points it solves. * Company Stage/Product Mix: Solutions marketing is typically only needed at multi-product companies. Product marketing remains critical at both single-product and multi-product companies. * Internal Alignment: Solutions marketing often aligns most closely with Sales and Marketing, with Product Management as a secondary internal stakeholder. Product Marketing often maintains the closest relationship with Product Management, while also maintaining relationships within Sales and Marketing. That said, it's important to not overrotate on the differences. Some things that are really important to remember: * Solutions Marketing and Product Marketing need to be joined at the hip. * Both need to focus on customer outcomes and great storytelling. * Both need to be connected to Sales, Marketing, and Product Management - just to varying degrees. Ultimately, when done right I think Solutions Marketing and Product Marketing are highly complementary functions, meeting distinct needs at a multi-product company.

To move to verticals, you need verticals large enough to support a dedicated GTM strategy and distinct enough to justify dedicated resources. Essentially, is the vertical unique enough to need its own Sales and Marketing team, and is the opportunity significant enough to warrant full-time attention? At Docusign, we face this question frequently. While virtually any company can use our technology, certain verticals like Financial Services, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Public Sector, and Real Estate have unique requirements and often regulations relating to agreements. In each case, these are also sizeable verticals where agreements play an important role in what they do. Balancing between industry-agnostic and industry-specific is tough. Here's how I think about it: * Vertical Sales and Marketing Alignment: If you have a vertical marketer, you need a vertical sales team. This ensures effective planning, aligned incentives, and strong feedback loops. * Combination of Vertical and Horizontal Focus: Depending on the number of verticals, you might still need people focused on horizontal solutions. For example, four vertical marketers are manageable, but fifty aren’t. At Docusign, we balance this by dedicating teams to Lines of Business, Industries, and International. * Lines of Business: Develop industry-agnostic content, mapping to our GEO (non-vertical) sales org. * Verticals: Create industry-specific content for unique processes or regulations, mapping to industry-specific sales teams.. * International: Produce regional-specific content and adapt content from LoB and Vertical teams to fit regional needs, mapping to our regional sales teams. * Unique Value Proposition: Ensure you provide unique value for the audience before creating those teams. Are you offering industry-specific functionality or just tailoring a horizontal story? * Choose Proven Verticals with Promise: The vertical should be established yet offer significant future opportunities. Look for referenceable customers, substantial revenue, industry-specific partners, and a large TAM with growth potential. * Focus on a Few Verticals: Start with a few verticals and excel in them rather than trying to support many at once. Effective focus is more impactful than spreading efforts too thin. Avoid the pull to support the long-tail of verticals. Focus and strategic alignment are crucial for successfully moving to verticals. Starting small and scaling based on proven success is more effective than trying to support too many verticals from the outset.

I don't think there's a significant difference. Ultimately, creating a category is about: * Identifying a customer problem * Reframing the way they think about it * Presenting them with a fundamentally different and more compelling way of solving that problem. The fundamental goals are the same, regardless of the level at which the work is done. That said, I do think it can look different depending on where a company is in their evolution. For example: * Phase 1: Initially, a company may start its category creation journey by trying to create a category for an individual product. * Phase 2: As they grow into a multi-product company, they may end up participating in multiple categories that correspond with each product they build and sell. * Phase 3: Over time, the company might seek to create a new overarching category that includes the existing categories as sub-categories. * Phase 4: Eventually, the overarching category may subsume the individual product categories so they become less relevant or cease to exist. I think you can see an evolution like this taking place in the marketing space where companies like Salesforce and Oracle have developed Marketing Clouds that include sub-categories like ESPs and social media marketing tools that were once standalone categories but have been absorbed by the larger Marketing Cloud category. At the end of the day, I think the work you're doing is pretty much the same, just applied differently.

Start with the customer. If you start anywhere else, you're likely to run into a lot of issues. While there are a number of contributing factors here, the core of it is you want to start with what your buyers think matters, not what you think matters. That said, I think a big part of the Product or Solutions Marketing role is to aggregate information from a variety of sources and distill it into simple and compelling messaging that generates customer demand and arms GTM teams to turn it into revenue. That involves talking with Customers, Sales, Product, Customer Success, Marketing, and a variety of other teams. But, when in doubt you should always start with the customer.

I think it's helpful to consider the following following: 1. Focus on What Matters to the Customer: Understand your customers' primary needs and pain points. What aspects of your platform directly address these concerns? Prioritize these features in your messaging. 2. Highlight Purchase Drivers: Determine what will lead customers to choose your product over others. This includes the benefits that help them deliver more value to their business, advance their careers, and make their jobs easier or more fulfilling. Everything else is secondary to these critical questions. Avoid falling into the trap of discussing every feature your platform offers. Customers are primarily interested in how your product will help them achieve their goals and solve their problems. Effective messaging connects your platform’s capabilities to these outcomes. A question I like to ask is, "How do they make money?" The answer often provides surprising insights into what drives an organization. Understanding this can help you tailor your messaging to show how your platform fits into their success metrics. Identify where in their process your platform can add value or alleviate breakdowns, and focus on communicating these points. Additionally, emphasize how your platform uniquely solves their problems. Your messaging should guide buyers on what to prioritize in their decision-making, highlighting the unique strengths of your solution. If your messaging doesn’t make a compelling case for choosing your product, it's probably doing that work for your competitors. In summary, you need to tell a story that addresses problems your customers care about and showcases how your platform uniquely delivers solutions. Ruthlessly edit out any messaging that doesn’t reinforce this narrative.

Yes, we aim to gather quantitative feedback whenever possible. While I don't believe it's necessary for great messaging, it can complement existing efforts and help reduce the risk of bias interfering with your messaging. There are really two areas that my team thinks about research: 1. Market Research: Gathering data, either from 3rd-party sources or from customers, in order to identify market opportunities to pursue in your GTM strategy and product development. 2. Messaging Research: Gathering input from customers and prospects to better understand what matters to them and how your messaging resonates. Both types of research are valuable. However, good research is difficult to do and it can be quite expensive. So, it's critical to go into the project with a clear idea of what you're trying to achieve. Taking on too much or spreading too thin can make effective research difficult. Some of the things that I think are important to success are: * Quantitative + Qualitative: Ultimately, asking a large number of people structured questions to get quantitative feedback is very valuable. But, if you can complement that with qualitative interviews from a smaller subset of customers you'll often gain contextual insights that are easily missed by pure quantitative surveys. * Enough of the Right Customers: Be honest with yourself about what you're trying to achieve and how many customers you need. I've seen a number of situations where a decision was made to go small with the sample size. This isn't always bad, but the smaller you go the more you need to discount reliability. * Don't Lead the Witness: The reason you do research is to validate your intuition, not prove it. If you go into research set on getting a specific outcome, you'll probably find a way to achieve it. But, research should be as much about identifying incorrect assumptions and things you've missed as it is about proving you're right. * Focused vs Shallow: Good research can be quite expensive. But, you're likely to be much better off opting for fewer research projects that are more thorough and better conducted, as opposed to several shallow ones. An example that I think highlights where this can go right was a research project we conducted a couple of years ago. One of the things we tested was a four-pillar framework for describing the value we deliver. Despite internal feedback that it didn't resonate with customers, we were shocked when 97% of those surveyed said the framework resonated well. However, qualitative interviews showed that one of the four terms wasn't very helpful. This helped us 1) determine we should keep the framework, and 2) set the stage for moving from four pillars to three over time. Without research, we may have landed in a much different place. While research alone doesn't guarantee great messaging, it can significantly enhance an already effective product marketing process.

The list of things I wish I had known is long, but I'll try to highlight some of the more important ones. (I really wish I had a resource like Sharebird when I was starting out. There was nothing like it back then.) * Lead To Products, Don't Lead With Products: As a PMM it's really easy to get enamoured with the thing you're marketing, especially when Product is telling you it's revolutionary. I've got news for you... Nobody cares about how it works unless they know what problem it solves for them. Great marketing starts from the customer and their needs, not from the product or your company's needs. * "So What?": You should imagine someone asking you this question for every point you make in every piece of content you produce. If you don't have an airtight answer, your point isn't clear enough or you're overexplaining. * What Kind of PMM Are You?: While PMM is incredibly broad, I think there's a spectrum ranging from pure storytelling to pure technical marketing. Ultimately, you need to be pretty good at all of it but figuring out where you fall on that spectrum is important. I'm fairly technical, but ultimately I'm a storyteller. Learning this about myself has helped me figure out the right skills to lean into and the right role to take (and shy away from). * Find a Great Teacher or Place to Learn: Nobody is born a product marketer. Innate ability is helpful, but if you want to become a great product marketer you either need to learn from someone great or you need to learn at a company that does great product marketing. Ideally, find both. * Learn Sales and Respect Salespeople: In most companies, your #1 customer is sales. Understanding their day-to-day work, their challenges, what motivates them, and how to work with them is a huge advantage. Moreover, understand it's a hard job with a lot of smart people. I've never seen anything good come from being dismissive of salespeople. * Saying Yes vs. Saying No: Early in your career, saying yes to many opportunities helps you gain experience and exposure. Later, the key to advancement is focusing on the right opportunities and learning to say no effectively. Mastering this balance is essential. * It's not a pivot = It is a pivot: If you're interviewing with a company and they tell you it's not a pivot, the odds are pretty good it's a pivot. Joining a company that's undergoing a pivot can be a terrific opportunity, but it's better to know that heading in, as opposed to learning after joining. This list is really just the beginning, and the list grows as time goes on. Hopefully, they give you a head start compared to my learning curve!

This is a great question. The conclusion I've come to is that while internal messaging is critical, it's not sufficient on its own to drive a significant shift. Incentives play a crucial role, and aligning them requires a full-company effort. Simply put, messaging alone won't be enough to make the change. That said, messaging is still very important. Here are some key lessons I've learned: * Leadership Buy-In: The shift must be driven by your CEO, with full support from your Executive Leadership Team (ELT). It's a big shift and anything less will likely run into headwinds. * Visionary Storytelling: Develop a visionary story that clearly outlines the benefits for everyone involved in driving the change. People need to know where the company is headed and what’s in it for them. * Customer-Centric Approach: Center your messaging around customers. People remember stories, so ensure everyone in the company knows the stories behind your top 5-10 customers. This has an outsized impact. * Incentives Matter: Having the right incentive structure is crucial. If incentives are misaligned, people won’t respond, no matter how compelling the story is. This applies to Sales, Marketing, Product, and all other departments. * Solutions + Products: Continue to emphasize great marketing at both the product and solution levels. This is a yes/and decision, not an either/or decision. In summary, I think great internal messaging is necessary but not sufficient for making the shift. If you want to be successful, it has to come from the top and everyone in the company needs to be rowing in the same direction.