Jeff Hardison

First, I try real hard to let go of my ego and temporarily forget about the past (e.g., how I worked with demand gen in another company). Every company’s marketing department is structured differently, and it’s important to quickly adapt. Then, I try to be human and have a conversation with each demand gen person, asking how can we help them achieve their goals. Sign up for some activities to help them with some shared KPIs. Once you get some shared wins, other departments tend to start trusting ...Read More

Growth can mean different things in different orgs. In some orgs, a growth person owns acquiring new users (with performance marketing or ads, and so forth). In other orgs, growth helps with proposing and testing different growth levers (e.g., an invite-a-friend option in-app, adding signup-for-free CTAs to collaboration opportunities such as an email a Calendly meeting invitee receives). Sometimes, growth owns the lifecycle marketing from signup to first-time user experience in app to emails an ...Read More

This is one of my favorite topics, and I write more extensively about product-led marketing versus sales-led marketing on the Product-Led Growth Collective site: https://www.productled.org/blog/marketers-prepare-product-led-growth The tl;dr, though: In many product-led growth (PLG) companies non-salespeople (e.g., product managers, designers, engineers, founders, etc.) helping to create the actual product have the initial greatest influence on what product marketing does. In many PLG companies, ...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

Because product marketing is such a collaborative function -- we're like diplomats and glue between product-engineering-design, marketing, customer success, and sales (if you have it) -- I try to open up my "empathy reserves" for the various departments I'm going to work with. If it's B2C, I think about product-engineering-design, customer support (dealing with thousands of tickets), and my friends in marketing. If it's B2B, I think about all of the above plus the sales team (which is likely a n ...Read More

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 for the iPod. There's the logo, and an engaging illustration of someone dancing, sure. Some people's idea of brand advertising might stop there. But Apple doesn't. Then they add: 10,000 songs in your pocket. ...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

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