What are the best approaches to crafting a Go-to-market strategy when you are trying to unbundle a product feature and position individually?
What a cool question! And project for you to undertake!
I think the good news is that if your market research, audience focus, and messaging framework were as robust as you’d hope, you don’t need to think too hard about refactoring core positioning.
So I would refocus your effort into three (sizeable) categories, ordered by time needed to execute:
1) Pricing/packaging: If you’re moving one of your products to self-service there’s significant infrastructure that will likely need to be considered to enable someone to swipe a credit-card. Payment infra, data capture and monitoring, and compliance come to mind. Don’t underestimate the complexity of this work—most of which will be owned by product and engineering. Your role will be in nailing pricing, packaging, discounting, and upsell or expansion playbooks.
2) Promotion: Your content needs to span several mediums, and allow users to self-serve everything from thought leadership about the problem your product serves to how-to guides, videos, forums, etc. Your social, digital, paid, and ad strategy should also change. If you don’t have teams owning those things already that should be a major consideration in timelines for launch.
3) Support: A self-service product centers on self-service support. Are your docs crystal clear and easy to find? Do they cover the “why” as well as the “how?” Do you have an onboarding guide that can be used for different use cases? Does your support team have proper routing and escalation set up for significantly higher volumes? How will you update users on changes if there’s no Account Manager or Account Executive in the mix?