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. For us, solutions serve as new doors into the same house. At Stripe, we’re firm believers in a layered approach; with a broad product footprint, we can’t segment our customers on a single axis—say by size or country or even vertical. For example, you may categorize Lyft as a marketplace or transportation company, but as just one example of how they are innovating, they recently also added subscriptions to foster loyalty. So just targeting them with our marketplace product (Stripe Connect) is not sufficient. We think of solution marketing as a layer on top of product-based marketing, offering a guided tour for certain use cases on the best ways to use the entire Stripe product platform.
Solutions can also serve to showcase best practices. As the complexity of our product increases, offering blueprints for success can help drive adoption and usage. We incubated and piloted solutions marketing this year with a dedicated PMM looking across all the products and working with product-specific PMMs to extract the value prop for different use cases. Here are a couple of examples that bring together the story for different types of business models:
Each of these landing pages is accompanied by sales enablement materials like decks, case studies, etc.
In the next year, we plan to hire specific Solutions marketers for the use cases that are proven out and investment areas for the company. If you're interested, please apply—we're hiring!