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 ...Read More

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 a ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 cus ...Read More

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 appro ...Read More