What internal messaging efforts have helped you shift your company's mindset from a product company to a solutions or platform company? What worked the best? What mistakes did you make?

I found that making the shift to “solutions” or “platform” requires becoming more business outcome focused in terms of your messaging. Rather than speak to individual user-level features/benefits (e.g. “the app launches 2x as fast”) you want to speak to the business impact that it delivers (e.g. “enable 2x increase in pipeline or revenue”).The key mistake most folks wind up making is not really connecting the dots between what your app does and the business outcome it helps to deliver [or worse, ...Read More

It starts with the PMM team to come up with messaging that positions the benefits of your solutions/platform. PMM’s own the WHY and not the WHAT. Please refer to my other answers on frameworks and best practices to get to good messaging and positioning here. Once we have your messaging in a good place, our PMM team works very closely with our marketing, sales, sales enablement, product, partners and strategy counterparts to amplify our messaging. Part of the PMM’s job is to make sure our messagi ...Read More

Great question. To be frank, even for companies with a reputation of being open and extensible, this one is always a challenge when you're in a Platform role. Because at the end of the day, the Platform is less about what products your company creates and more about what a customer can do. Thus you're always in conversations with stakeholders who have a POV that the products your company creates are the things that enable customer success. So there's the nuance where you need to decouple product ...Read More

When moving your messaging from product-centric to solutions-centric, you're going to bring in experts in the solutions you're trying to organize around. Whether that be industry, departmental or some other orientation, you will need the people who live and breathe these domains to ensure the messaging/content you develop resonates.   There can also be individuals that act as sales overlays or technical field resources to provide a level of domain expertise in customer conversations that will he ...Read More

Embrace storytelling and focus on use cases and personas rather than brand, features, or capabilities. Going from product to platform is hard. I’ve done it multiple times, and every mistake we’ve made boils down to over-indexing on capability differentiators and not telling enough of a story. It’s not enough to say, “You love [Company], and you use [Product}, we’ll you’re going to love [Product] built with the power of [Company]!” Simply touting the ability or the measurable difference between y ...Read More

What a great question, and having seen this shift happen at a few companies, I don't think it was necessarily just a messaging effort that caused the mindset to shift. To be sure, there was a combination of go-to-marketing strategy and storytelling we needed to bring to the table, but it was above all the output from our ecosystem that really kicked off the flywheel: from the insane business potential coming out of our ISV partner ecosystem at Salesforce, to the innovation fueled by our develope ...Read More

Embrace repetition, and get influential stakeholders on board. I've been lucky to have worked in very collaborative, supportive cultures where any repositioning and messaging was broadcasted at major internal events, then re-broadcasted at subsequent opportunities. For example: Unveiling: Annual sales kickoff (delivered by PMM) Follow-up 1: Company all hands 2 weeks later (delivered by CEO) Follow-up 2: Roadshow at team meetings (delivererd by leaders) Follow-up 3: Inclusion in bi-monthly enable ...Read More

This is a great question. The conclusion I've come to is that while internal messaging is critical, it's not sufficient on its own to drive a significant shift. Incentives play a crucial role, and aligning them requires a full-company effort. Simply put, messaging alone won't be enough to make the change. That said, messaging is still very important. Here are some key lessons I've learned: Leadership Buy-In: The shift must be driven by your CEO, with full support from your Executive Leadership T ...Read More