AMA: Outreach Platform & Solutions Marketing Director, Jeremy Moskowitz on Platform and Solutions Product Marketing

Platform Marketing is an extension of traditional product marketing. Instead of owning a single product or capability,  Platform Marketers are responsible for bringing connected platforms or horizontal capabilities like data infrastructure, AI, or 3rd party integrations to market. Solution Marketing is the art of understanding the problems of different types of users, personas, or industries your product or service can solve and translating that into use case messaging that informs marketing and ...Read More

In my opinion, all Product Marketers are Solution Marketers, whether or not they specifically have the word “Solution” in their title. PMMs don’t call it a day and head home after simply writing down what a Product does; every PMM knows that understanding personas, their jobs to be done, and how the product can help them do it faster, better, cheaper is a table-stakes part of the job. That said, today, many Product Marketing organizations are using “Product Marketing” vs. “Solution Marketing” th ...Read More

The choice is a spectrum, not a binary. As PMMs, we all know that the textbook answer is that if you are an early-stage company, the quickest path to product-market fit is to focus on the needs of one vertical and owning that market. If you’re a later-stage company looking to expand, that’s when it’s time to prioritize releases that unlock a new vertical over finding ways to delight your base.  The realities of business are that early-stage companies need to sell some deals outside of a PMM’s pl ...Read More

As a Director of Platform and Solution Marketing, my role is to be an expert in the jobs that are to be done for the different personas that buy or use Outreach and work horizontally with other PMMs to activate our messaging. I work with a team of PMMs that own specific platform capabilities and create messaging about their part of their platform that I use as input into Use Case Messaging that tells a story about how the Outreach Platform helps different types of users across persona-type/segme ...Read More

Core platform messaging is an input to solution messaging; it may not be in the headline, but it’s definitely in the sub-bullets.  Solution messaging focuses on personas and how they use your product to help them do something better, smarter, faster, cheaper, etc.   I start by writing positioning statements that tell a story about a persona attempting to complete a job but encountering a common problem that we can solve. See the framework and completed example below.  When: [Persona] Are:  [Job ...Read More

Embrace storytelling and focus on use cases and personas rather than brand, features, or capabilities. Going from product to platform is hard. I’ve done it multiple times, and every mistake we’ve made boils down to over-indexing on capability differentiators and not telling enough of a story. It’s not enough to say, “You love [Company], and you use [Product}, we’ll you’re going to love [Product] built with the power of [Company]!” Simply touting the ability or the measurable difference between y ...Read More

I sit on the Product & Solutions Marketing team, which is part of our Core Marketing Organization alongside PR, Customer Marketing, Demand Generation, Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, and Events.  Our Product Marketing & Strategy team sits in our Product Organization with our Product, Design, and Engineering teams. The Product Marketing & Strategy team is responsible for capability messaging and documentation, creating, maintaining & externally presenting the product roadmap ...Read More

Work closely with a handful of reps with an early adopter mentality and highlight their wins so the team has reason to believe in selling something new.  A common misconception about salespeople is that they are automatically incentivized to sell a new product if the dollar value is higher because it means more commissions.  As a former sales rep, I can tell you that’s not true; salespeople like to sell things they are good at selling because when 50-70% of your compensation is variable, a bird ...Read More

The unsexy answer is that it just takes time. I've done the product-to-platform transition multiple times, and it's very challenging. The biggest challenge is upskilling your sales team and getting them comfortable enough to sell your product. There are strategies you can employ; my personal favorite is working with "Moneyball Reps." Work closely with a handful of reps with an early adopter mentality and highlight their wins so the team has reason to believe in selling something new. That said, ...Read More

Find ways to connect product marketing output to metrics that matter to the business and shamelessly self-promote when product marketing influences those metrics, even if you can’t do it in a scalable way. I’m speaking through the lens of sales-led growth rather than product-led, as PLG PMMs can usually tie their success to traditional product metrics related to user growth, adoption, and conversion. Sales-led PMMs have a more challenging time demonstrating value due to the foundational nature o ...Read More

Quantitative validation comes from marketing metrics, and sales metrics indicate where to look to get qualitative validation. I start my day looking at Marketing dashboards to review the top-to-mid-funnel marketing metrics like response rate, conversion rate, and pipeline generated, always by persona type. I’m speaking through the lens of sales-led growth rather than product-led, as PLG PMMs can usually tie their success to traditional product metrics related to user growth, adoption, and conver ...Read More