AMA: Stripe Former Marketing Team Lead, Krithika Muthukumar on Solutions and Platform Marketing

These terms are used so interchangeably these days—some may argue it’s not even worth separating them out. However, the challenges for each are slightly different and a nuanced approach can change the type of impact PMM and your company can have. Here’s how I think about these: * Suite, portfolio: These are companies that offer a set of products that help solve problems in related areas, but aren’t necessarily interoperable or meant to be used together. Examples include the now-defunct iLife (i.e. GarageBand and iMovie both help you do creative things, but you aren’t meant to specifically use them together) or even Microsoft Office. The big product marketing challenges are that users for a single product may not need the functionality offered by other products in the suite, so cross-sell or company-wide licensing is a big focus. * Platform: A set of products that are interoperable and which build on top of a shared, interconnected layer. These products are typically composable and share at least a common database. Examples include Atlassian (i.e. JIRA and Confluence can be used separately, but work better together and can share data), AWS, or Stripe. The big product marketing challenge is getting customers to buy into the promise of what the unified system can offer over piecing together a solution. * Ecosystem: An open platform or API is extensible by third parties and an ecosystem is the collection of tools, plugins, and products that work with the platform. Examples include Salesforce’s AppExchange or the Slack platform. Ecosystems can really help “lock in” customers since they use multiple tools that are deeply integrated with your product. The marketing challenge is attracting developers and other companies to build integrations and then driving awareness and adoption of those tools. If you want more, Ceci Stallsmith gave an eloquent talk about this challenge.

While you can have really compelling per-product pitches, the real challenge of selling a platform is getting prospects and customers to buy into a vision that unifying their systems is going to be a force multiplier for their company. The value is that 1 + 1 > 2. In selling a platform, it’s imperative the messaging is above-the-line focused because you’re trying to convince customers about the vision. There may be cases where a platform only has 80% of the features that a combination of point solutions have, but still wins out because the sales team was able to align the customer with the idea that a unified platform is better. Tactically, this means shifting your core narrative from having a narrow products focus to having a vision and use case focus. It means creating case studies that span multiple products, etc.

When I was at Stripe, we offered upwards of a dozen products on our platform that go way beyond payments processing—from products for incorporation and billing management to fraud prevention and managing corporate spending. To manage the growing complexity, we introduced the concept of Anchor Tenants at Stripe this year. (This term comes from American malls, where there may be a large store that draws customers and traffic for the smaller stores.) For us, those are our core products: Payments (payments acceptance), Connect (marketplaces and platforms), and Billing (recurring revenue and invoicing). These products serve the most common use cases that customers and prospects approach Stripe with. The rest of our products serve as add-ons to optional tools to help streamline your business operations. Getting this alignment is critical because we’ll focus our go-to-market efforts accordingly. It also helps reduce the cognitive overhead for customers to start on Stripe. We still have a ways to go on this, but I’m excited by the directional approach we’ve begun to take. An example of a company that does this “progressive reveal” really well is Hubspot, often described by users as being there to “catch them as they grow”.

The only advice I can share is that customer insights (when shared in a clear and actionable way) are very hard to ignore. Survey users, talk to prospects, and bring customer insights to the product teams, even if they aren't solicited. I thought I'd share a recent example from Stripe: a few months ago, one of my teammates was paired with a product group that was moving very quickly to deliver an MVP to the market. Because they were moving fast, they didn't invite marketing input. Synthesizing some of the challenges she was piecing together from members of the product group, my teammate was able to quickly survey dozens of prospective users via email and shared the results broadly. The team found it so valuable that they shifted their priorities, added features to the roadmap, and even asked to run more surveys. It can be tough to change organizational culture, but the only way to earn a seat at the table is to have data or direct customer feedback that provide a unique perspective or that aren't otherwise available to the product group.

Solutions can mean very different things for different companies. For example, Salesforce’s Health Cloud is an end-to-end product solution for their healthcare customers—you sign up for Health Cloud, your dashboard says Health Cloud, you’re billed for Health Cloud, etc. There’s also companies that offer bundles, such as Intercom, that provide a discount for using multiple products that work together to help address a job-to-be-done. Stripe falls more towards the Intercom side of the spectrum. For us, solutions serve as new doors into the same house. At Stripe, we’re firm believers in a layered approach; with a broad product footprint, we can’t segment our customers on a single axis—say by size or country or even vertical. For example, you may categorize Lyft as a marketplace or transportation company, but as just one example of how they are innovating, they recently also added subscriptions to foster loyalty. So just targeting them with our marketplace product (Stripe Connect) is not sufficient. We think of solution marketing as a layer on top of product-based marketing, offering a guided tour for certain use cases on the best ways to use the entire Stripe product platform. Solutions can also serve to showcase best practices. As the complexity of our product increases, offering blueprints for success can help drive adoption and usage. We incubated and piloted solutions marketing this year with a dedicated PMM looking across all the products and working with product-specific PMMs to extract the value prop for different use cases. Here are a couple of examples that bring together the story for different types of business models: * Stripe for SaaS businesses * Stripe for software platforms * Stripe for marketplaces Each of these landing pages is accompanied by sales enablement materials like decks, case studies, etc. In the next year, we plan to hire specific Solutions marketers for the use cases that are proven out and investment areas for the company. If you're interested, please apply—we're hiring!