How do you make the transition from disparate products to a platform?

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.

From a messaging perspective, you need to consider what's the "1+1=3" story. Part of this entails understanding when in the funnel to message on platform/solution-level benefits vs. more product-specific benefits, i.e. developing campaign messaging hierarchy so there's a red thread narrative that ties it all together. This also needs to be reflected in a holistic approach to pricing & packaging, otherwise you risk the perception of nickel & diming your customers with add-ons.

Consider campaign messaging frequency -- Look to optimize the customer experience by streamlining communication, instead of bombarding their inbox with disparate notifications.

Another consideration is how your audience needs may vary -- e.g. How do your smaller customers value/perceive "platform" differently than your larger customers? Smaller customers may feel 'oversold' or that the entire platform is far more than what they actually need on a day-to-day basis.

Org structure is also an important element of transitioning into a platform company. The challenge of "shipping one's org chart" often stems from teams operating too much within their respective business unit/product silos. It takes conscious effort to exercise & scale new x-functional collaboration muscles and so frequent alignment on priorities is key.