A wise, experienced salesperson told me that selling products, especially in the AE market, is an immediate death knell to your pitch. They said it's better to sell solutions and to distance yourself from products as much as you can.
This kind of resonated with me. As PMs, we've always sought to solve problems that are niche and prevalent. These problems are typically solved by building a product that fits the need. However, once we solve that problem, we're forced to either cater to the vast majority or a niche, high-paying few. This introduces drift: our product becomes a solution for either the majority, excluding the few, or a solution for the few, excluding the majority. (Aside: product-market fit is essentially driven by paying customers; as long as the economics of it make sense, you can have a successful product with only a handful of paying customers).
With drift, your sales team cannot talk about a specific problem; they're selling features. That is less convincing because very quickly, your product is suspect. You're relegated to a long line of products that promise the moon and deliver crap.
Instead, if you focus on understanding the problems (or future problems due to an ecosystem change) and then promising a better future, the product becomes a tool in service of solving the problem.
In a very contrived manner, you're not really selling a product; you're selling a bespoke set of tools designed to fit the exact business problem you're solving.
I've yet to try this out, but this makes sense logically. With code being cheap and software timelines reducing to hours or days, it's easy to whip up a custom solution that can or will work for every customer. What you hold as a 'product' is simply a set of interconnected modules that can be plugged into an ecosystem. You can literally give the ownership of these modules to the organizations in question since they're not really going to bother to figure out what's under the hood.
Pricing can get tricky though. Which modules are 'IP' and need servicing or SaaS agreements, and which can be handed over? This is pretty difficult to generalize, but the era of personalized products is here, I think.
Enterprise customers will no longer accept generic, one-size-fits-all solutions that make up the majority of the market. Instead, the ask is going to be process-fit solutions that meet specific demands. Money will be directed to make those solutions evolve with the process.
This changes how tech will be seen in enterprises. While today the process revolves around the technology, in a few years' time, technology will need to revolve around the process and adapt to changes.
Whatever future there is, there is always going to be space for sharp, adaptable product managers who have a genuine liking for solving problems.