Buyers couldn’t care less about your product.  That is, unless you can quickly and clearly explain how it helps them achieve something meaningful.

That’s the philosophy of Sophie Cheng, SVP of Product Marketing at Sinch. When Sophie joined the company, she was tasked with shifting the company’s marketing and sales teams from a very product-centric approach to one focused on business outcomes.

Sinch is a digital customer communications provider that offers its customers, including Google, Uber, PayPal, Visa, and Tinder, a way to improve their customer experience through mobile messaging, email, and voice solutions. 

With such a broad offering and hundreds of possible applications for their product suite, it was easy for the Sinch team to get stuck on the rich set of communication features and modalities.

However, as Sophie points out, “When sales or marketing teams are feature-dumping, it’s usually a product marketing failure.”

To get a multi-product company shifting from selling individual products to a solution-selling model product marketing at Sinch needed to identify use cases across our entire product portfolio, not just each individual product.

Sophie’s framework for shifting from product to business outcomes includes four key steps:

▶️ 1) Bottoms-Up Alignment: Crowdsourcing Use Cases

Rather than imposing a top-down framework, Sophie’s team engaged marketing, sales, account management, and product marketing members in a collaborative process. Teams grouped product features and activities into business outcomes through a crowdsourced exercise.

 Customer-facing teams intuitively know what customers care about and what problems they are looking to solve, so the best way to get tangible inputs is to go straight to the source.

“Most teams grouped things in a similar way, but used very different language,” says Sophie.   For example, customer updates was a commonly named use case in the bottoms-up process.  

Customer updates are used to increase operational efficiencies, such as confirming restaurant reservations or appointments to increase the percentage of reserved tables filled at a restaurant or the number of patients who show up for dentist or doctor’s appointments.

However, some team members called these communications utility messages, while others called them notifications, operational updates, or transactional messaging.   

▶️ 2) Market Trends and Positioning: Using Analysts to Refine Messaging

To reinforce internal findings, Sophie’s team analyzed external market data. Reports from Gartner and Forrester provided insights into market sizing, competitive positioning, and emerging trends. 

However, the industry lacked a standardized language for use cases, which made defining Sinch’s unique value proposition even more critical.  The initial bottoms-up process in combination with the analyst reviews led the Sinch team to focus on four specific use cases: keeping customers engaged, safe, informed, and happy.  

▶️ 3) Capturing the Customer Voice: Testing Messaging in the Field

As a next step and to ensure messaging resonated with customers, Sophie’s team used two approaches to customer testing on different value statements.

They used Wynter, a message-testing platform, to see what types of customer profiles were responding to which types of messages.

They also relied on top-performing sales reps as a proxy for customer perspectives. They asked top reps how they message common use cases to customers, things like sharing payment receipts or appointment confirmations, and customer updates.

The customer testing helped shape the use case language in a way that felt natural and compelling.  It also helped connect the four to specific and measurable business outcomes, including reducing risk, increasing operational efficiencies, building customer loyalty, and generating revenue.

▶️ 4) Enabling the Team: Implementing a Clear Positioning Statement

A final step was rolling out this new positioning strategy built around four use cases and associated business outcomes to the company and specifically market-facing teams.

The impact of this initiative was immediate. As Sophie recalls, “Team members that had been a Sinch for a while commented they had never heard the company’s value articulated this clearly.”

This new positioning was introduced to the sales team through regional Sales Kickoffs (SKOs) in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC to begin a process of global alignment. The SKOs focused on equipping sales teams with the tools and language to shift from product-based selling to value-based conversations.

The shift from product features to business outcomes is an ongoing journey, but by aligning teams internally, leveraging customer insights, and simplifying messaging, Sinch is well on its way to delivering value-driven sales and marketing interactions.