One of the most important and yet the hardest transitions from SaaS product to a #platform ecosystem is the company-wide mindset 👇 👆 shift that it requires.
The two big parts of this transition are on the product side and on the customer engagement side.
Insights from Scott Brinker who is leading HubSpot transformation into one of the most successful #saas platforms:
💬 Changing the mindset of a company from being purely a product or suite, to being a company that really thinks throughout its entire organization
- from product to sales, to marketing, partnerships to change that worldview, to have a platform #ecosystem mindset
- it's a big change.
🎁 On the product side
It comes down to saying “It's not JUST about the things we build, but it's how do we provide the right extensibility points, so that there's this open architecture that allows other people to add value on top of our foundation.”
Purely from a product management or engineering perspective, this doesn't just automatically happen, you really do have to consciously build that into how you're creating a product.
📢 On the customer engagement side
When you make the shift to selling as a platform, now you're starting to take a very different view. Part of the value you're selling to the customer, it's not just the capability or the functionality of your product, but it's the fact that it works really well with some of other products.
⛳️ If you're a salesperson at a company that isn't selling a platform, it's just selling its core product, basically the last thing you want to do is have any conversation with the customer about any other piece of software.
“No, no, let’s not worry about anything else. This is our software. Yeah, don't worry about that other thing”.
Because anytime you're talking about bringing other things into the conversation, it's like:
“Oh, my goodness, is this going to slow down the momentum of this deal? Are we competing for the same budget with this other product?”
And so it's almost kind of standoffish - it's either our product or their product, a zero-sum game.
🚀 When you make the shift to selling as a platform, now you're starting to take a very different view.
Actually part of the value you're selling to the customer, it's not just the capability of the functionality that's in your product.
But it's the fact that it works really well with some of these other products.
And so, when a customer brings up another product that they also want to use, rather than trying to push that off the table, you're like,
"Oh, you're using that - fantastic! They have a wonderful integration to our platform, here's how these two things work together to get more value out of both of them."
Again, it makes sense, but that is when you think about it, that's a pretty significant change in how you approach your go to market.
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Watch/read our episode with Scott Brinker.