AMA: Calendly Head of Product Marketing, Jeff Hardison on Enterprise vs PLG Product Marketing

My favorite product marketing OKRs are the ones that clearly support the company's OKRs. And the second-best OKRs are ones that are shared with other departments because you can always do better, together, with other departments — when you work in PMM. Let's say that your company's OKRs are the following:- Increase self-serve, credit card growth.- Increase sales-led growth with large enterprise customers. Now, let's take one of those: "increase self-serve, credit card growth."Well, then your OKR ...Read More

Stepping back, let's differentiate the enterprise sales motion from the product-led growth motion: Smaller companies have less employees and, therefore, can often easily buy from you with a credit card. Some SDR in a sales dept. can purchase your self-serve plans with their boss' credit card. Some recruiter coordinator can do the same with their own and maybe expense it. In these situations, it's often less about the PMM trying to train or support the sales team in hand-holding a customer to ent ...Read More

In the last couple of companies, what I've done is create a slide that shows the academic definition and jobs to be done in product marketing: research, positioning/messaging, etc. Then, I host meetings with stakeholders, and show them the slide, ask them what they have experience with product marketing handling, what they liked, didn't like, and so on. Then, I ask them what they need help with going forward in our company. That input helps inform how I prioritize the team. It's important to hav ...Read More

What's defined as "enterprise" and "mid-market" differs in many companies. Generally, sales leadership works with the executive team to segment which size customers they go after such as small businesses (say, under 150 employees), medium-sized (say, 150 to 2,500), and enterprise (say, 2,500 and up). As you know if you've worked in differently sized companies, how those companies operate — from 150 employees to 10,000 employees — really evolves. For example, in a medium-sized, 700-person company ...Read More

Ensure you're writing the correct case studies for your business. Align with your executive team — particularly sales and CS — on the types of customer stories they need. Enterprise or mid-market? Certain products or use cases? Which industries or job roles? Then, try to check off each with a "gold-standard" case study. Work with your customer success and sales teams to create a shared OKR around delivering the biggest names associated with these targets. If you can't get big names, work to comp ...Read More

There are different types of competitive product research. Therefore, it's important to ask execs who this research is for.Doing extensive competitive product research to train sales and customer-success is one thing. They're often satisfied with a one- to two-page "battle card" that will help them beat the competition. They rarely need an exhaustive list of every feature (and, if you did create that exhaustive comparison list, it would likely overwhelm them anyway). If the research is for produ ...Read More

I like people who stretch themselves and try, despite all of the challenges others may perceive against them. So, I'd ask myself how has this junior candidate tried to become a product marketer?1. Have they read some books on product marketing and taking some courses (or gotten certifications)? 2. For me, writing is critical. Has this person studied writing in college, worked in journalism/blogging, or even written short stories?3. If no one has given them an opportunity to do product marketing, ...Read More

There are a few things I look for when recruiting enterprise PMMs in a product-led growth company going upmarket (with a sales team):- Have they done enterprise PMM work before? This usually means both have: 1) owned the product marketing work for the enterprise pricing plan (in a PLG company this plan often includes security/privacy features like SCIM, SSO etc.), and 2) gained experience targeting enterprise-sized companies (what's "enterprise" varies at every company but let's say 10,000 emplo ...Read More

I like to measure all marketing in terms of:Outputs: What you did marketing-wise such as sent X emails to whom, created Y social posts, made Z video, etc.Outcomes: How did people engage with your marketing such as clicks on the email CTAs, customers' tweets about your launch, Product Hunt results, etc.?Outtakes: What happened downstream for the business as a result of your launch/campaign? This is often the most difficult to measure quickly, yet the most important for execs. How much pipeline di ...Read More

Account-based marketing started because, for decades, sales did account-based selling. Instead of a salesperson just opening up a list of, say, every financial services company in the world (thousands) with no focus, they work with their sales leadership to identify a target account list to focus on (perhaps it's the top 10 financial services companies, or a certain size financial services company they could be successful with). Then, often times, that salesperson could only reach out to those t ...Read More

There are two main ways tech companies make money:- sales-led: a salesperson works with a customer and closes the deal (which was the norm for decades) - self-serve: a customer can manually enter their credit-card information into the product to purchase something, bypassing a human. Self-serve/credit-card sales is only one aspect of product-led growth (PLG), which also includes using the product to sign up customers (which humans used to own), activate them (which humans used to own), upgrade t ...Read More

Many career climbers recommend being very choosy about where you work. You'll hear advice like "work at a hot/big company first because the reputation will carry you," "choose an amazing product if it's a startup so that the marketing work will be less difficult," "pick a trendy category because it's more interesting," and so forth. While I've repeatedly worked in some categories multiple times — customer data/analytics, meeting software, e-commerce, productivity, deep tech — it's often been on ...Read More

The No. 1 way you can build trust with cross-functional partners is by listening to them. Try meeting with them at least quarterly and asking:- What have you liked that product marketers have done for you in the distant past?- What are some things my team/I have done for you that's been helpful this past quarter?- What are some things my team/I have done that aren't as helpful?- What's changing in your department that you think might affect product marketing?- How are you feeling pressure in new ...Read More

If I had a dollar for every time someone didn't want to help PMM update videos because it's too time-consuming, I'd have enough money to pay a video agency to do it! 😃Personally, I recommend having the PMMs and PMs create quick, rough screenshare videos using something such as Loom. That way it requires no outside video editing help — and it looks more authentic. In addition, for our monthly product-update newsletter, sometimes I just create a Quicktime screenshare — with no voiceover with somet ...Read More