How is your team making the transition from product marketing to solutions marketing?

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. F ...Read More

At a certain stage of growth you find that your products are being used by quite different user groups - and/or - you decide that you need to start appealing to a different profile of user. This can also include users in different countries.... For the PMM leader this presents a challenge. Initially you build out your PMM team around your main products; ideally making them 'full stack' - ie they own their product soup to nuts. This becomes tough when that product needs to be positioned different ...Read More

I view the role of a PMM as being someone who owns the full story/customer perception of a product, is the product-line CMO so to speak. Sometimes you will need to market a solution, sometimes you will need to launch a product, sometimes you will need to convince sales people to do something and sometimes you will need to create a new narrative. So as I think about product marketing for my team and what a PMM would do, it's less around a product or a solution and more around being nimble to buil ...Read More

The product marketing team at Sendbird officially transitioned from product to solutions marketing last quarter. I don't see PMMs take on both product and solutions marketing responsibilities in the sense that they're now taking on double the workload. The focus has just shifted from selling product features & functions, towards measurable outcomes and the customer value that our solutions deliver. The desire (and need) to speak with customers is always there. We ran the company's first cust ...Read More

The transition from products to solutions requires a company wide buy-in from the top otherwise PMM's cannot make any impact. The reason we move to solutions in the first place is because the customers prefer a more holistic solution to their problem/pain point versus a point-product. To build a solution -- it can be a combination of products in your company's portfolio or with technology partners. Solutions can be vertical or horizontal specific. I have come across 3 different ways of how solut ...Read More