Communities
Sign Up / Sign In
AMA: Calendly Head of Product Marketing, Jeff Hardison on Messaging
May 17 @ 10:00AM PST
View AMA Answers
Calendly Head of Product Marketing, Jeff Hardison on Messaging
Top Questions
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
One of the biggest category creation mistakes is trying to create your own category — when there's already a category you could join and dominate as the leader. Many of the "category creation" companies people often trumpet didn't really create the categories from scratch. They took emerging c......Read More
474 Views
2 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
The best ways I've found to ensure your messaging lives for more than a few weeks: 1) Collaborating with your company leaders to not just review, but also develop the messaging 2) Testing the messaging with real customers (and sharing their responses with your coworkers) 2) Training — and someti......Read More
438 Views
1 request
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
For me, there are few types of "Why's." There's the lowercase "why." And the uppercase "Why." Lowercase "why" gets at communicating why a prospect should choose your offering over the competition. For that, I recommend the popular value pillars/differentiation method I mention in another questio......Read More
582 Views
2 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
Good product marketing helps build the brand. Good brand marketing helps drive usage of the products. To me, they're like cousins in marketing. Perhaps more so than any other marketing disciplines. Take Apple, a master of marrying their brand marketing and product marketing. Here's an old ad fo......Read More
818 Views
1 request
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
If you frequently find yourself in a "messaging by committee" situation, I'd recommend working directly with your boss (e.g, the CMO) and the CEO to create a DACI document (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed). Let's take company messaging. You might be the Driver. Your boss might be the......Read More
504 Views
2 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
One of the biggest mistakes I see marketers make when talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) is they just throw the terms around. Like their employer can just sprinkle some AI salt on something to give it extra marketing zest. Think like a journalist for a small-town......Read More
516 Views
1 request
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
It's never too early to first write down some words about either the problem you're trying to solve (pre-product market fit) or are solving (post-product market fit) — and then running those words by potential customers, investors, employees, and more. For hundreds of years, humans have explai......Read More
458 Views
1 request
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
Repeat, repeat, repeat. As our CMO Jessica says, once you start getting tired of sharing the messaging, then you're just getting started. Of course you need to email, share on Slack, host on Asana, and so on. But that's just the beginning. Speak publicly about the messaging. Present on the mess......Read More
538 Views
3 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
One thing I've seen work is positioning "positioning" as business strategy or a business plan versus marketing "words" we want people to think about and use. Positioning is the company's strategy — based on research and expertise — for who we're going after (e.g., sales teams) with what category......Read More
429 Views
2 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
If the product's audience includes a handful of large Enterprise customers, I'd ask for approval from Sales and Customer Success to reach out to the customers and run the messaging by them on a video or phone call. "Hey, Big Customer. We value your opinion, and would love just 15 minutes to run ......Read More
508 Views
2 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
One thing I've seen work is positioning "positioning" as business strategy or a business plan versus marketing "words" we want people to think about and use. Positioning is the company's strategy — based on research and expertise — for who we're going after (e.g., sales teams) with what category......Read More
517 Views
4 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
We've all seen this and cringed, right? Over-reliance on benefits: "Our scheduling automation platform help you shorten your sales cycle! Want a demo for something that you don't understand at all but somehow magically shortens your sales cycle?" Over-reliance on features: "Our scheduling autom......Read More
405 Views
2 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
There are so many ways to test messaging, but here are some of my favorites: 1. Work with your Sales and Customer Success teams to reach out to your customers with an offer to give you feedback on your messaging via a phone or video call. This works better than you'd expect, but if they don't en......Read More
456 Views
4 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
First off, I recommend reading my friend Adam DuVander's book Developer Marketing Does Not Exist. He is the master of teaching people about how to work with developers. In the past, when I've done developer marketing, these were some of my most successful initiatives (but please read Adam's book......Read More
712 Views
1 request
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
One of my first jobs in tech marketing was promoting Amazon's software development kits (SDK) to developers. What I learned from everyone at Amazon is the power of using "plain English" when talking about anything. If you look at Amazon's site, you'll notice they use very simple language to talk......Read More
427 Views
2 requests
How do you lead a team to create aligned messaging for multiple areas?
i.e., How to ensure various PMMs, vertical managers, campaign managers nail their specific value props but remain in line with your overall narrative/brand positioning?
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • May 18
I recommend collaborating with your executive team to first create "umbrella" positioning/messaging that covers your entire product line. Then, the product-line product marketers + product managers can create their own positioning/messaging for each new feature/product that aligns with the umbrel......Read More
490 Views
1 request
Upcoming AMA's
Show All