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

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 platonic ideal of an ICP to survive, and late-stage companies that don’t spend money or resources marketing to their base are risking losing that base when they churn to solutions that they feel want their business. The “Goldilocks approach” is to prioritize one vertical in the early days of growth but learn to strike a balance because you’ll constantly need to solve for both at any stage of company maturity. Early-stage companies should determine an MVP set of resources (Landing pages, Sales Presentations) that can be tailored to different verticals/personas so that sales can navigate those conversations. Late-stage companies shouldn’t overhaul their brand identity around new verticals they want to sell into. Instead, they should run targeted campaigns highlighting messages or features that appeal to new verticals and slowly integrate them into their core brand as they gain traction and the makeup of their base begins to change. 

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, and competitive research. The Product & Solutions Marketing team is responsible for platform & persona messaging and positioning, launch campaigns, sales enablement, and analyst relations. The teams work very closely on programs where product messaging and persona storytelling intersect, such as product launches, demo enablement, and analyst presentations. 

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 your product and the alternative approaches won’t move buyers off of the solution they are familiar with because you haven’t earned their trust. Use case messaging is the art of storytelling in words that your personas use every day to demonstrate you understand their problems. Just like telling a child who had a bad day at school a bedtime story where they are the hero overcoming dragons that represent the mean teacher or school bully. Every marketer knows “The Hero's Journey", that’s why structuring it as a use case and using the right tone is crucial. Your tone must be conversational, with just the right amount of jargon sprinkled throughout your messaging to build credibility. Use Case Messaging is the most effective way to bring a platform to market because platforms usually have multiple capabilities used by various personas. If you try to speak to every capability and every persona, your message gets confusing. Instead, define a handful of use cases highlighting how 1-2 personas use specific parts of your platform to achieve their goals. When you map use cases to personas, you are able to tell multiple stories clearly, which will help you reach the wider audience you need to sell a platform. 

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” the way the terms “Inbound PMM” and “Outbound PMM” were used 5-10 years ago: having Product Marketers work with the Product org on pricing/packaging and adoption and having Solution Marketers work closely with Sales and Go-to-Market teams on Messaging, Sales Enablement, Campaigns, Content and Events.

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 of their work. A product roadmap or new messaging can be the difference between making or missing revenue targets. Still, it’s hard to see that ROI on a dashboard, so PMMs need to understand the business’s goals clearly and get into the weeds to surface their wins and shine a spotlight on them so the world can see. If new messaging targets specific personas - use the Demand Gen team’s dashboards to track response and conversion rates at the top of the funnel to see if marketing campaigns built with the new messaging attract and convert that persona at a higher rate. Set up search alerts in your conversation intelligence tool for key terms from your messaging to see if sales use the messaging in sales calls with prospects. Share clips of those calls on company slack channels as best-in-class examples when those prospects are associated with opportunities and revenue. If the sales team brings you in for roadmap presentations on late-stage opportunities, keep a list of the accounts you present to and check CRM at the end of the quarter to see which of these opportunities were marked closed won and share a readout with company executives of the aggregate amount of pipeline and revenue your team influenced. Stand up, and don’t be humble! :) 

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/segments or industry achieve their specific goals and outcomes. I also work with the other Solution Marketers on my team to translate that messaging into Marketing Campaigns and Sales Plays. Each Solution Marketer is mapped to one of our sales segments, creating resources that a specific segment needs to bring our platform to market. For example, our commercial segment has a shorter sales cycle, so they need a simplified pitch deck, demo, and enablement. In contrast, our enterprise segment has more complex deals. Hence, they need to be enabled to speak about our platform to a broader audience and need playbooks to help them collaborate with our customer success team to help expand customers beyond the initial purchase.

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, even that is not a silver bullet. The only silver bullet is time - it's much easier to enable a new rep on the platform and get them motivated to sell it because it's the first thing they learn. Even if you get traction by working with Moneyball reps, there will be a class that just can't transition off of what they know - whether it's fear of change, a higher degree of complexity, or just being plain stubborn. Those reps will eventually leave and be replaced by new reps who can start fresh with the platform and don't have as steep of a learning curve. Start-ups don't have all the time in the world so as a Platform PMM, the best thing you can do is to make sure that the tranche of reps that need to be replaced is as tiny as possible. Don't go for 100% adoption; your goal should be building enough traction with enough reps to hit company goals in the early days, knowing that you'll eventually build traction when you're able to enable more reps on the platform from day one.

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. 1. When: [Persona] 2. Are: [Job to be Done} 3. But: [Problem] 4. [Your product name]: [Capabilitiy Statement] 5. So: [Positive outcome your product creates, in the persona’s language]* 1. When: Sales Managers 2. Are: coaching sales reps to help them reach quota 3. But: every rep does things their own way 4. Outreach: helps them design, measure, and improve seller workflows 5. So: every rep sells like their best rep. Pro-Tip! Your positive outcome should be both aspirational and specific. This is crucial for making believable claims. Buyers are bombarded with solutions that make broad claims like 'Drive More Revenue' on a daily basis. Such claims lack differentiation and fail to convince the buyer. Buyers know marketing copy when they see it, so it’s acceptable for a claim to be aspirational if you are confident that you can demonstrate to your buyer that your product delivers a version of the outcome. Once buyers see a feasible path to value, they can independently understand how your product can positively impact revenue.

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 sales enablement. Solution Marketers are often Platform marketers because instead of a single product capability, they own Personas, Industries, or Verticals and have to tell stories about how their persona or group uses the entire platform. Product Marketers, Platform Marketers, and Solution Marketers are all responsible for the traditional elements of Product Marketing: Messaging/positioning, product launches, pricing/packaging, competitive intelligence, go-to-market/enablement, etc. Solution Marketing can be the responsibility of a PMM/Platform Marketer, or a dedicated Solution Marketer can work with these teams and focus more on the go-to-market side of PMM as persona subject matter experts. 

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 conversion. PMMs at sales-led growth companies have a more challenging time demonstrating value due to the foundational nature of their work. If you own a messaging house, the easiest way to prove out value is A/B Testing your new messaging against legacy messaging to show it creates a lift - you can do this on places like your homepage, content marketing, and digital advertising - lead acquisition can be your leading indicator and pipeline created can be a lagging indicator, depending on the length of your sales cycle. To the extent that I can influence them, I also look at sales metrics like revenue generated and impact on the sales cycle, but it's more art than science. Sales often dismisses pipeline as a vanity metric for marketing. Still, at the end of the day, marketing doesn't have much control over whether pipeline converts to revenue. If you have enough sample size, you can use closed won revenue as a directional indicator of whether specific marketing messages or programs are working. Still, it takes a lot of data to be confident. Instead, I use our opportunity win rate as a starting point for qualitative validation. If we're winning deals, I need to confirm that messaging contributes to the success or if reps have uncovered a new point of value we didn't identify in research. If we're losing deals, I need to determine if reps are adopting our messaging and it's failing, using it incorrectly, or still selling the old way in order to understand how to adjust our strategy.

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 in your hand is worth more than two in the bush. A new product that’s more complicated sold to a different buyer and comes at a higher price tag represents a risk because, during the learning curve stage, they are likely to make mistakes, which puts their livelihood at risk. That said, salespeople also love to emulate what works, so as a product marketer, if reps aren’t adopting your enablement, the best thing is to provide hands-on coaching to 1-2 reps, even help them navigate deals yourself to show them it works. The ideal state is working with a “Moneyball Rep” - a top performer with an early adopter mentality that other reps will want to emulate. More often than not, reps happily volunteer when PMMs offer to help them with a sales pitch. But if you can’t get Moneyball Reps to adopt your product enablement, the next move is to go to the “Turnaround Rep.” The Turnaround Rep is someone struggling to make quota; they are usually looking for any help they can get. If you can get the turnaround rep to make quota with Platform/Solution selling, the other reps will sit up and take notice.