What are the steps to tell a compelling platform story while focusing on individual products?

Thank you for your question - it's an excellent one. In my experience, the platform story is distinct yet deeply complementary to product messaging. While product messaging focuses on the unique value and use cases of individual applications, the platform story highlights the horizontal elements that support and connect them—such as workflows, analytics, and integrations.

There is less written about marketing a platform or suite of products vs individual products so I'll start there. There are two things I think work really well when marketing a platform.

1. The Platform should unlock use cases or outcomes you can't achieve with the individual products alone. Like Captain Planet (sorry non-90's kids for the reference you can google it) is an amalgamation of a smaller team of individuals - your platform must feel like a single powerful entity made up of the individual products. But it's not a combination of them the platform is more than the sum of it's parts.
   

2. With a platform, especially one that is built from the ground up, the individual products should work together, and overlap, and benefit from each other. This is the true benefit of a platform and why you'll win against point solutions. You have to tell this story though. At HubSpot we branded these connections as "chevrons" and marketed them heavily. At Pendo we call the "intersections" and do the same.