Not every product deserves its own standalone GTM motion. That's a lesson I learned the hard way at a fast-growing fintech compliance company. Here's the story of what happens when you move faster than the market is ready for, and how a single annual report became the most effective GTM asset in the whole suite.
When I joined, the product suite looked clear on paper.
Transaction Monitoring: detects suspicious patterns in payments over time. Payment Screening: screens individual payment instructions in real time against sanctions lists. Fraud Detection: identifies fraudulent transactions using behavioural rules.
Three products. Three use cases. Three separate GTM motions.
Except it wasn't that simple.
The overlap nobody wanted to talk about.
Fraud Detection was the problem.
On paper it was a distinct product. In practice, it operated on a similar set of rules to Transaction Monitoring. The underlying logic was close enough that differentiating the two to a buyer required a level of technical depth that most sales conversations never reached.
The buyers for Transaction Monitoring were AML and financial crime compliance teams. The buyers for Fraud Detection were risk and fraud operations teams. In theory, different people. In practice, in many of the financial institutions we were targeting, those teams sat in the same department, reported to the same executive, and were asking the same question: what does this do that we can't already do with what we have?
The answer, in the case of Fraud Detection, wasn't clear enough. Not in the product. And not in the market.
Eventually, Fraud Detection was removed from standalone positioning on the website. It wasn't a product failure in the traditional sense. It was a GTM failure. The product existed. The buyer didn't map to it cleanly enough to build a distinct sales motion around it.
What I'd do differently.
I'd carve out the ICP before productising.
Not after the product is built. Not alongside the product launch. Before anyone writes the first line of positioning, before the sales deck gets a new slide, before the pricing model gets a tier.
The question that needed answering first: who is the specific buyer for this product, and is that buyer different enough from the buyer of our existing products to justify a completely separate conversation?
For Payment Screening, the answer was yes. The buyer was a sanctions compliance professional screening SWIFT messages and payment instructions. Their language was distinct. Their regulatory mandate was distinct. Their buying criteria were distinct.
For Fraud Detection, the answer was more complicated. The rules-based approach meant the product overlapped too closely with Transaction Monitoring in both functionality and buyer profile. The GTM motion tried to do too much differentiation with too little underlying distinction.
In regulated markets, understanding the regulatory landscape before you position the product isn't optional. AML compliance isn't one buyer type. It's a set of overlapping mandates, each with its own team, vocabulary, and procurement process. If you don't map that landscape before you build the GTM, you'll spend months marketing to an audience that doesn't quite exist.
The asset that made everything else work.
Across all three products, one piece of content did more GTM work than anything else.
An annual State of Financial Crime report.
Every year, the company surveyed senior financial crime decision-makers globally, tracked the regulatory changes happening across jurisdictions, mapped what compliance teams were prioritising, and published a comprehensive picture of where the financial crime risk landscape was heading.
It wasn't a product brochure. It wasn't a sales tool. It was the reason compliance professionals engaged with the company even when they weren't actively buying.
The logic was straightforward: if you stay on top of what the regulatory landscape means for your buyers, you become a trusted voice in their world before you become a vendor in their procurement process. The report let us say, in a credible and documented way: we understand what you're dealing with. We understand what FATF guidance means for your Tier 1 bank. We understand what the FCA expects from your payments firm. Here's what we found.
That's what content strategy in a regulated market looks like. Not blog posts about features. An annual publication that your buyer's senior leadership reads before a board presentation.
The analyst relations programme.
I led analyst relations across the leading research firms covering the financial crime compliance space.
Analyst conversations didn't change our decisions. But they made the right ones stronger and the wrong ones harder to defend.
Before the Payment Screening rename, independent analyst firms confirmed the category language. Before Fraud Detection positioning work began, analyst conversations surfaced how the market was already drawing the line between fraud and AML. The distinction was blurrier than the product team had assumed. That should have been the signal to go back and ask harder questions about buyer definition before the GTM motion started.
The lesson: use analysts as a pressure test, not a rubber stamp. If the analyst can't immediately map your product to a recognisable buyer need in the market, that's the briefing telling you something your internal roadmap isn't.
The framework: the standalone product test
Before building a separate GTM motion for any product in a multi-product suite, answer these four questions:
Question 1: Is the buyer actually different? Not just theoretically. In practice. Does this product reach a different team, a different title, a different regulatory mandate? If the answer is "sort of," go back before you go to market.
Question 2: Is the language different? How does the buyer describe their own job? Do they use the same vocabulary they'd use when buying your other products, or a distinct set of terms? Buyer language is the clearest signal of whether a standalone product has a standalone market.
Question 3: Can you draw a clean line for sales? If a sales rep asks "when do I pitch this instead of the other one," can you answer in one sentence? If not, the product isn't ready to be sold standalone.
Question 4: Does the regulatory landscape support it? In fintech, every product needs a regulatory anchor. What mandate is this product helping the buyer comply with? Is that mandate distinct enough from the mandate your other products address? If the mandates overlap, the buyer conversations will too.
Next issue: I joined a B2B payments company as their first PMM. No function, no playbook, no process. Here's what I built in the first 90 days, and the one thing I'd do differently.
Hit reply if this resonates. I read every one.
Sneha
PMM Ungated is a newsletter about real product marketing. One story per issue. No theory. No gate.
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