How do you tell a multi-product story through sales collateral?

This is a meaty question with answers that don't fit neatly in this rectangular box, but will try!

First, make sure you are telling a story: Are you clear on who you are serving? Are you clear on the pain points to be solved? What is the change in the world that has caused those pains? How do your products uniquely address/solve/ease those pain points? 

Secondly, within that story, make sure you don't lose the value props of the individual products. Not every buyer is going to be a multi-product sale from the start. 

So think of it as an inverted triangle. Start with the broad story and get more and more specific. Change in the world, who you are solving for and the pain they are feeling, how you are uniquely solving for that at the multi-product level, how you uniquely solve those thigns on a single product level. 

Ooh, this is a fun one and a big one! This is solution selling, and it starts by understanding buyer needs and pain points. Uncover the pain points your buyers are facing, and then map outcomes that your company can deliver on - not individual products - to those pain points to form an outline for your story. Stay away from product and feature names and paint a vision of what is possible for the buyer (e.g., transform the way you do X) if they become a customer. I like to focus on the emotional benefits (e.g., feel more confident about X, empower your team to do Y) along with the organizational benefits in order to make the story more engaging.  

This is a topic I am super passionate about at the moment. We are going through a lot of this with my current team. It can be so easy to find yourself launching and communicating to your customer in the way your product team is organized instead of how that customer experiences your products. Also don’t sweat too much, this is natural because of how most product marketing teams orient themselves to their product and engineering organizations. But let’s be real, it’s a bad habit.

Here is how we are tackling it currently:

1. Give yourself permission to organize based on your customer’s vantage point: For us, this means defining persona ownership for each member of the product marketing team. For some of my other PMM colleagues, it may mean owning specific points in the customer lifecycle like activation or growth and retention. When each PMM is given space to go deep and focus on a specific audience segment’s perspective as they search, discover, use, and hopefully find value in your products, they are able to see your product suite with new eyes.
2. Don’t forget to organize for customer impact: My first bullet may sound too rosey. You can’t forget to support your partners in product management as they release and push updates to the product. What we have done at my company is take a really critical look at our product team and allocate dedicated product marketing coverage only to those squads who are shipping features that have an impact on the customer. In an ideal state, I’d like to see my team spending 75% of their time thinking across our full product suite to make sure we are driving the most impact for their persona, and 25% of their time making sure we stay on top of our product release cycles. Also, build a good launch tiering system for yourself to make sure you aren’t spending too much time on small features. A support article is often enough!
3. Find creative ways for your whole team to get together and repackage: I cannot say enough for how valuable I find it whenever the full product marketing team at my company can get together for creative workshopping time—we call it “the braintrust” on our team. :) It is really easy to only focus on what’s new when you are launching something, but that is not giving credit to the amazing product you are supporting! Any new feature may allow you to speak differently about value when packaged up with all the other goodness already built into your product! Using a visual collaboration tool—like Freehand or Miro—to map out customer segments, what they care about most, and then seeing how your different product offerings fit into those is a really good place to start when trying to think bigger about your customer journey.
4. Be willing to test it out ahead of your sales team: I find that one of the most important ways I build trust with my sales org and confidence in a go-to-market plan is being willing to throw myself in the ring first. Most products often go through some sort of pre-release or beta phase ahead of a GA release and campaign. Use this time to start testing out messaging and value statements on real customers, and think about how it might package up better if you look across products. Get yourself a BFF or two in sales and ask if you can try out early cuts of decks or demos on a few of their customer calls. Most reps are thrilled to have a product expert on with their customers!

Solution messaging is key. It’s not about what the products can do for you, but about what you can do with the products. Does your one product solve for one problem entirely, or do your customers use multiple products to solve for a bigger challenge? If the latter, you should be selling the problem and the full solution to it. Not the product features.

A solution story requires telling a narrative from the perspective of the customer. Utilizing customer journey stories is essential in this approach. Clearly define the problem and map out their journey to solve for the problem using your products along the way. Clearly articulate the benefits at each step and the overall outcome. Use published case studies, customer quotes, and interactive demos where applicable.

Identify use cases where both products come together to compliment one another or build a better solution together. Another way to approach it is by identifying products that share similar/same personas.

As an example, we have a Marketing product and a CMS product. Those two products go together well, because oftentimes marketers are not only in charge of their campaigns, but also the website. We also know that for a marketer to build a proper digital experience / buying experience for their customers, they need to consider all the touchpoints across email, ads, social, AND the website. Bring those together.

Always keep the customer in mind. Ask yourself "why would a customer need both products?" and "how would these two products compliment each other and provide the customer more value than if it was a stand alone?" -- the answers to those will likely lead to some ideas on multi-hub content.