Why too many products kill your GTM motion

Go-to-market strategy sits at the core of everything we do in product marketing.

I've been in this field for many years now, starting out as a software developer, moving into product management, and eventually landing in product marketing at companies like HP, Oracle, AppDynamics, CA Technologies, and now Nutanix.

Along the way, I've failed plenty of times, learned a lot, and picked up tidbits from peers and colleagues that have shaped how I approach go-to-market today.

There's no magic wand here. No secret formula that fixes everything overnight. What I can share with you are the best practices that have worked for me, the ones I've borrowed from others, and the frameworks I keep coming back to when I'm building out a strategy. So let's get into it.

What product marketing actually does

When someone asks me what product marketing does, I usually pull out a cheat sheet I've been refining for years. At the center of it all sits the go-to-market strategy. Everything else radiates out from there.

The work breaks down into a few key areas:

Product messaging and launches: Building the content, working with integrated marketing teams to make sure the message is ready when the product goes out, coordinating with PR, briefing analysts, executing the launch, and following up afterward.
Sales enablement: Making sure sales can articulate the messaging, target the right personas, and use the appropriate proof points to support conversations.
Demand gen support: Working with the corporate marketing team, the campaigns team, channel partners, and GSIs to make sure they have what they need.
Thought leadership: Establishing your product or solution as a leader in the marketplace through analysts, influencers, user groups, industry events, and content.

Depending on the organization, the split between product management and product marketing can look quite different. Sometimes it's 60/40, sometimes 70/30, sometimes right down the middle. The exact division matters less than making sure every area gets covered, either by you, your team, or product management.

Starting with a solution-led approach

When I joined Nutanix, we had tons of products and I've seen this same situation play out at other companies too. When you're a single-product company, articulating value is straightforward. Sales reps can do it in their sleep. But when you've got 15 or 16 different products, things get messy fast.

What happens is the product teams and engineering teams start going directly (or sometimes indirectly) to customers saying "buy my product, buy my product, buy my product." It gets confusing for everyone, especially the customer.

Instead of going to market with 16 different products and 16 different messages, we'd build solutions that attached to customer problems. We looked at how customers were actually using our platform: end-user computing, virtual desktops, private hybrid cloud, and running databases.

We grouped our products into solutions around those workloads, then attached those solutions to the actual challenges customers were facing.

This is the heart of solution-led go-to-market. You start with the customer's challenge, attach your solution to it, and only then talk about the product underneath.

I generally don't like to go beyond three solutions. Once you get past three, focus starts slipping. If you have 10 things that are important, none of them are important. Three is my sweet spot, but there's no hard rule. You can do two, you can do four. The principle that matters: build your approach around the customer's pain point, not around your feature list.

We also added an industry flavor on top. Healthcare looks different from financial services. In healthcare you're talking about digital health, doctors seeing patients remotely, prescriptions, and all of that.

So we took the core solution and tailored it to the industry trends and the specific pain points in those verticals. Building strong core go-to-market messaging is essential, and layering industry context on top makes it land much harder.

A framework for each play

For each solution or play, you need a framework. We borrowed one that some of my colleagues had used in the past and adapted it.

Here's what we look at for each play:

Size of the opportunity: Do we have a way to segment and target? Do we have the data to support it? Can we hand something concrete over to the campaigns team and the sales team?
Use cases and trigger points: What gets a customer to start looking at this solution? What challenges are they running into?
Messaging platform and content: From the initial call script an SDR uses, to the solution brief, to the customer presentation. The full bill of materials.
Enablement plans: Sales enablement, channel enablement, demand gen plans, program plans.
Success metrics: pipeline size, conversion rate (total opportunities divided by closed-won), MQLs to SQLs. Whatever matters most for your business.

Once you've launched, you have to measure. Look at the top areas where you have challenges and optimize for them.

This framework works equally well for a product launch or a solution launch. The principle is the same: look at every part of the go-to-market motion and have a clear operating model behind it.

You are the glue

Here's something I want you to internalize. As a go-to-market leader, you are the glue between sales, marketing, and product. Nobody else sees this the way you do.

You need to make sure your go-to-market plan includes integrated sales and marketing. The assets the marketing team produces need to align with what sales is trained on.

When campaigns generate leads, sales needs to follow up with conversations that match the messaging customers just saw. When marketing gives air cover, sales has to be ready to support it on the ground.

That alignment doesn't happen accidentally. You make it happen.

Messaging: an art and a science

Messaging is part art, part science. There's a formula, but there's also intuition involved.

For me, it comes down to three steps:

Identify the challenges your buyer personas and target customers are facing. Really understand them in detail.
Build messaging that articulates how your solution addresses those challenges.
Support every claim with proof points.

That third one is critical. As a marketer, you can say your product is great all day long. It doesn't land until you have third-party validation: analysts, customers, benchmarks, and case studies.

Take end-user computing as an example. Customers were running into real pain with their existing solutions. Connecting remotely to a desktop, or a doctor connecting to a medical system or a PACS imaging tool, was taking two and a half minutes just to log in.

That's a terrible experience and the problems usually start small. Everything works fine at the beginning, but the moment you add more users, the experience degrades.

You don't need to hit every single challenge. You need to understand and articulate the ones that matter most so that when sales walks into a customer meeting, the first thing they do is lay out the challenges, ask "does this sound familiar?" and get the customer nodding.

Only then do you bring in your value prop. And every key message gets backed by a proof point: 61%, two months down to a day, less than six months payback period. Those numbers come from benchmarks, analyst reports, and customer case studies. Keep building that proof point library over time.

Launch planning without reinventing the wheel

For launches, I use a tiered model. Tier one launches (a major new offering) get the full treatment. Tier two launches get less. Tier three launches might just be a press release and a webinar.

The point is to define ahead of time what deliverables go with each tier.
Pre-launch, at-launch, post-launch. Use it as a checklist so you're not reinventing the wheel every single time. When the team knows what to expect for each tier, planning gets faster and execution gets cleaner.

Sales enablement starts with motivation

Before you enable sales, you have to motivate them. Sales reps have many people coming at them asking for attention. In our case, 16 product managers were all knocking on their door saying "sell my thing."

If you want sales to invest time in your solution, they need to understand why it's worth their time and the answer almost always comes down to two things: close deals faster, make more money.

At sales kickoffs, in training, and in workshops, you have to get them locked and loaded. Show them, don't just tell them. Walk through the math. "If your quota is this, and the average deal size for this solution is that, you only need to close 10 deals to hit your number." When they see it concretely, they buy in.

Then comes the actual enablement: segmentation, target accounts, content, and the tools to move the pipe.

This is where I think product marketing has more responsibility than people sometimes realize. All the work you do, all the messaging you craft, none of it counts until the deal is closed-won. So you've got to help sales move opportunities through every stage.

Helping sales move the pipe

Here's a concrete example. We were analyzing the pipeline and noticed many deals were stuck at the "technical win" stage. The customer had agreed the technology solved their problem. But they couldn't get their internal stakeholders to sign off.

That told us our champions inside the customer organization didn't have what they needed to build the business case. They had the technical story, but not the business justification.

So we built tools to fix that. A total economic impact study based on five customer interviews. ROI calculators. Business justification templates. Things our champions could take to their CFO and their executive sponsors.

This is the kind of work product marketing should be doing. Pipeline analysis traditionally lives with sales ops, but if you partner with them and approach it as helping (not meddling), they'll welcome you in. The data still comes from sales ops, but you bring the marketing lens, you spot the patterns, and you build the assets that unblock the stuck deals.

You'll want a build of materials across the full sales journey: assets for preparing, attracting, engaging, and proving value. Some of those assets are mandatory before launch. Others are nice to have. You decide which is which based on the product and the situation.

Supporting demand gen

The demand waterfall (the Sirius Decisions one, if you've seen it) is a helpful way to think about how product marketing supports demand gen. You're helping with segmentation, messaging, watering holes, the content and webinars and tactics that work at each stage of the funnel.

You probably won't be running every campaign yourself. But you're building the core messaging, the rally cries, and the proof points that the demand gen team carries into the market. You're there to support them through the whole process and to make sure the content is ready for the web team, direct channels, partners, and GSIs.

Build the checklists. Build the bill-of-materials documents. Take ambiguity out of the system so people have something to look at, tweak, and use.

Thought leadership is a long game

Thought leadership matters for a couple of reasons. One, it establishes your product in a category, which is especially important for newer products that don't have an obvious home yet. Two, it builds share of voice over time.

For example, we have a database management product at Nutanix. We're known for infrastructure and cloud (private cloud, hybrid cloud, public cloud), but this product helps manage database lifecycle on top of our cloud platform. One of our goals is to get this product listed alongside other database management players. PR work, analyst briefings, and influencer engagement are all critical for that.

Thought leadership also involves your subject matter experts. Your technologists are submitting papers, speaking at user groups, and attending special interest groups.

At one of my previous companies, we built a continuous delivery microsite for DevOps content. The idea was to make it the destination for anyone looking at continuous delivery, testing, or DevOps. The content wasn't about speeds and feeds. It was leadership-oriented. Product content lived elsewhere, and the microsite pointed people there when they were ready.

That separation matters. Thought leadership content earns trust. Product content closes deals. Both have a place, but mixing them dilutes both.

Frameworks beat heroics

If there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that frameworks beat heroics every time. Cross-functional collaboration has always been hard, and it's gotten harder with distributed teams. But a shared framework, a shared operating model, and a shared vocabulary, those things let you scale beyond what any individual can do.

The demand waterfall is one framework. The solution-led go-to-market structure is another. The tiered launch model is another. Pipeline analysis templates, build-of-materials checklists, and sales enablement assets organized by sales stage. All of these reduce ambiguity and let teams move faster together.

One challenge worth flagging: in some tech companies, particularly ones that are very sales-led or CEO-led, the relationship-driven sales motion can sideline a lot of the messaging work product marketing does. I've been in situations where the CEO was making most of the calls and the sales reps were focused purely on relationships.

All the business outcome messaging we built didn't get used because the conversations were happening at a different level, with the wrong personas. That's a hard situation to be in, and it's worth recognizing early so you can adjust.

Sales is your primary customer

In my current role, I genuinely believe sales is my primary customer. I support marketing, I work with product, but my job is to position sales for success. Make sure they have the tools, the knowledge, and the assets in their backpack so they can win deals.

And when I say sales, I mean the full route to market: direct sales, channel, and GSIs. Whoever is carrying the message to customers needs to be enabled.

Until the deal is closed-won, the work isn't done. And once it is done, you cycle back: build the customer reference, capture the proof point, write the case study, and feed it back into your messaging library for the next set of opportunities.

Go-to-market strategy isn't a one-time exercise. It's a continuous discipline. Build the framework, work the framework, and refine the framework. Stay close to sales. Stay close to the customer. And trust that the structure you put in place today is what lets you move faster tomorrow.