The Platform Paradox: Why Your Best Sellers Could Struggle (And How to Fix It)

Written by Kyle Norton | Jun 10, 2025 1:36:16 AM

Here's a counterintuitive truth that will make most CROs uncomfortable: when you transition from a single product to a multi-product platform, your best salespeople can struggle frequently to make the transition.

I learned this lesson from Hayden Stafford, President and CRO at Seismic, during our latest Revenue Leadership Podcast episode. Hayden has orchestrated two massive platform transformations. First he turned Microsoft Dynamics CRM from a $750 million business unit into a $6 billion CRM powerhouse. Now he’s leading Seismic's evolution from a niche content automation tool to the leading AI-powered enablement platform approaching $500 million in ARR.

His vulnerability about the challenge caught me off guard: "When I first got here, business was booming... we immediately struggled with growth. Perennial successful winners, year over year President's Club winners weren't winning. For my first year, year and a half, I was beating myself up like, what's going on here?" The entire tech market taking a massive turn south in 2022 surely didn’t help. 😅

The answer reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about what platform transformation actually requires and why most companies fail at it.

Listen to Hayden's episode on Apple and Spotify .

The Psychology of Platform Paralysis

The conventional wisdom suggests that adding products should make your sales team more effective. More solutions, bigger deals, higher win rates. But psychology tells us a different story.

Hayden's revelation during a fishing trip in Baja Mexico illustrates what behavioral scientists call choice overload, which is the paradox where more options actually decrease performance. His top performers "were really damn good at selling the world's best sales content management system... They had one buyer and one product to sell. Now all of a sudden, they've got the complexity of four different products, all integrated, that has a value proposition for four different personas."

This isn't just about product complexity. Research from psychologist Barry Schwartz demonstrates that when choices increase beyond a certain threshold, decision quality decreases and anxiety increases. Your sellers aren't just learning new products; they're navigating cognitive overwhelm while trying to maintain quota performance.

In Hayden's experience, the solution wasn't just more training (which is certainly critical and we discussed), it was architectural.

Takeaway #1: Eliminate Overlays, Embrace Business Acumen

Most companies approach platform expansion through specialization, which involve overlay teams for each product and frequently means duplicative compensation structures. Hayden calls this approach expensive and ultimately counterproductive.

Instead of product specialist AEs for each solution, Hayden went to market with business generalists supported by technical experts from Solutions Engineering.

"The model that I take is specialization needs to occur with the technical roles within the company," Stafford explains. "Think solution engineer, sales engineer, architects. You need to be wide enough and deep enough as a seller to be able to get good enough... You don't need to be an expert. You need to have experts that you can lean back on."

This approach mirrors what I've observed at many high-performing SaaS companies. The role tends to evolve from product demonstrator to business consultant. Your core reps need to understand business impact across multiple personas while technical specialists handle product depth. This allows sales reps to focus on their sales craft, industry insight and business acumen, which drive better sales outcomes (IMHO).

Takeaway #2: Shift From Features to Business Impact

The sales motion must fundamentally change when you become a platform. Single-product selling focuses on speeds and feeds—"it does this, it has this capability, it can solve your problem five times faster." Platform selling requires business impact articulation across multiple stakeholders.

Hayden identifies the core challenge: "A platform generally touches multiple stakeholders, benefactors... you're messaging the persona becomes much wider which means you've got to be able to go much wider which means you can't go quite as deep."

This creates what I call the Relevance Paradox. You must be relevant to more people while being less expert in any single area. In Hayden's experience, the key lies in understanding what each persona truly cares about.

"You might have a COO, what is the COO measured on? COO is measured on efficiency, bottom line, right? Maybe it's a CRO, typically measured on the top line. Might be a marketeer measured on top of the funnel."

Moving to selling enterprise value through a platform go to market requires a complete transformation of the plays your sales team run and how a sales rep operates. We spent a good deal of time talking about how to operationalize those changes through training and enablement and new functions that are required like value engineering.

Takeaway #3: Value Engineering Must Be Arm's Length

As deal sizes increase with platform expansion, scrutiny from the customer intensifies exponentially. Single-product companies might escape notice at $50K to 200K annual spend, but "as soon as you become an eight-figure number on a CIO's desk, you better have a damn good value story."

Enter the value engineering team who are specialists that build business cases, create ROI models, and quantify the financial impact of your platform across the customer lifecycle. Unlike traditional sales engineering that focuses on technical fit, value engineers focus on economic justification, they work with prospects to model cost savings, productivity gains, and revenue impact, then track those promises through implementation and renewal.

Hayden’s Value Continuum:

Value Promised (sales process)
Value Delivered (implementation)
Value Realized (ongoing measurement)

This team should own the entire continuum, staying with customers through renewal cycles and building long-term consulting relationships.

Hayden had a strong preference that value engineering should not report directly to sales leadership, which makes a lot of sense.

"A seller has a bias," Hayden explains. "Sell my stuff, retire my quota, make money, make my commission check." Instead, value consultants should be "levered towards success that is aligned with your customer success... having a team that is not directly tied with a hard and fast 50-50 quota gives them a little bit of third party perspective."

Takeaway #4: Platform Requires an Ecosystem

Platform companies without robust ecosystems face an existential threat. As Hayden notes from his experience working with major banks: "They don't want to necessarily have the best of breed for one little thing. They want the best of platform, which may mean good enough for some capabilities." In order to deliver a full solution, the platform provider must be able to fill in some of the gaps with tightly coupled partner products and technical integrations.

But here's where many companies stumble. They mistake partner listings on a website for actual ecosystems. "A lot of smaller companies think that they have a strong partnership with an Adobe Salesforce or Microsoft... when in fact there is none. It's a listing on a partner exchange."

The Partnership Selection Framework:

Hayden uses three critical criteria:

Mutual Creative Value: Both companies must benefit meaningfully
Improved Business Metrics: Win rates, velocity, and renewal rates should improve when partners are involved
Revenue Integration: The strongest partnerships include rev-share or OEM agreements

"Are you doing the same thing with your partners?" Stafford challenges. "Are you inspecting pipeline with your partners, both sides? Are you looking at win rates? Are you looking at quota attainment? If you're not... it's not a real partnership."

Takeaway #5: Respect Your Organizational Metabolic Rate

Perhaps the most profound insight came when Hayden discussed change management: "Companies have a metabolic rate just like a human does. You can't go from being a couch potato and overweight and not able to do one single push up to being a muscle man or muscle woman."

This concept of organizational metabolism may explain why so many platform transformations fail. Leaders, especially impatient CROs like myself, push change faster than the organization can absorb it. There’s a difficult tension here because our job as leaders is to drive change at a rate that is often uncomfortable for people but going too fast can sometimes cause things to grind to a halt. That’s why you hear me say “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”

How to Gauge Your Metabolic Rate:

Structured employee surveys (voice of field)
Skip-level conversations throughout the organization
Voice of customer feedback integration
Monitor "change fatigue" indicators

The goal isn't zero resistance. Some discomfort indicates appropriate challenge. But too much resistance creates what Hayden calls "organ rejection" where the organization actively fights the transformation.

The Platform Imperative

Platform transformation may be inevitable for many companies approaching hundreds of millions in ARR. As Hayden notes: "Those who don't extend and reach further into other capabilities will likely get usurped or passed."

But based on Seismic's experience, success requires more than product expansion. It demands architectural changes to go-to-market strategy, sales methodology, partnership approach, value articulation, and change management philosophy.

Companies that master this transition (like Seismic's journey from niche financial services tool to comprehensive revenue enablement platform) may create sustainable competitive advantages that are difficult to replicate.

The platform opportunity appears massive, but the execution challenge is real. As Hayden learned through vulnerable trial and error, one key seems to be respecting both the complexity of the transformation and the capacity of your organization to absorb change.

While this approach worked for Seismic, every organization's context is different. The frameworks here provide a starting point, but you'll need to adapt them to your specific market, culture, and competitive dynamics.

Listen to new episodes of The Leadership Podcast every Wednesday on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

Want more content from Topline? Check out Topline podcast with Sam Jacobs, AJ Bruno, and Asad Zaman.

View full post