#78: The Role of Product Marketing (with Jeff Hardison, Head of Product Marketing at Calendly)

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1, 2, 3, 4. Exit. Exit, exit.

All right, I'm here. This is Dave. My guest Jeff is here. Jeff, you want to do a quick intro who you are?

Hey, Dave. Jeff Hardison, head of product marketing for Calendly. Super excited to be here.

I do love Calendly as a product. I did tweet out this morning that I bragged about not having a Calendly, which is a separate conversation. We don't have to talk about that on the podcast, but cool. Jeff and I got connected and traded a note on just, you know, know, hey, he's had an interesting career in product marketing. Has some strong point of views on that, I think, given who you are, the company you work at, and your background. Plus that, no surprise to you as a career product marketer. One of the top questions that I see come up in B2B marketing is like, what the heck does product marketing do? What do they own? And then you have people who say this is the most important role in a B2B marketing team. But most of us can't properly articulate what product marketing is. Long story short, I'm happy to have you on. Thanks for making the time for it.

Yeah, this should be fun.

All right, bring me up to speed before we talk about Calendly. We'll talk about the community stuff at the end of this podcast. Before you got to Calendly, what have you spent your career doing? You told me when we were hanging out before this for a couple minutes, you started your career in pr.

Yeah, you know, I thought I wanted to be a teacher professor, like, of English literature. And one of my professors, he waited until he was like 40 to get his PhD and he had been an advertising copywriter. And he started talking about how much he didn't like teaching after one year of it. And. And I was like, well, maybe I might not like it. And he's like, well, you should do What I did and go into marketing. And so, you know, I moved to the west coast and started applying places and got into a integrated marketing firm for tech companies and got acquired by Fleischman Hillard and became a PR person for Amazon.com and a bunch of different companies and ended up switching over to integrated marketing like advertising agencies and so forth. And then I joined the startup side with this company called Meridian and I was the first non engineering hire. So I had to do everything. I had to do sales, cs, a little bit of product management, all the marketing and the PR capabilities came in really handy because you could write, you could do positioning, messaging, you could not spend money and get things done, which I thought was important in a tiny startup versus, you know, some of my friends who came from ad backgrounds needed a budget and then we got acquired by HP and they needed someplace to put me at HP Aruba and they made me director of product marketing. I had a team there, learned a lot about product marketing and then since then been in some small startups where I don't have a budget and then I've also been managing product marketing teams like at InVision and Calendly and that's where I'm here today.

Awesome. I think that's such a important role or phase if you want to grow your career into any type of marketing leadership that like time period where you had, where you had to do everything. So I have a similar story where like I worked in pr. While I was working in PR though I kind of had a sense of like, oh, I, I saw other teams in marketing. I'm like, I'm interested in that. I think I can do that. Where if you've ever worked in pr, there's kind of like, at least in my experience there's one end of the spectrum or the other. There's the people who are like working in PR because they see it as a bridge to like also do X or I want to be a comp, you know, I want to found my start my own company or I want to go into product marketing or be in marketing. Or you have the other people who are like, nope, I am a lifer and I've hired people like this person is a PR person for life. This is my role, this is what I want to do. And it sounds like you and I are similar in that we were on the, on the other side of the spectrum is like, oh yeah, happen to be good at the communication and storytelling part. And that's what played into that role and just made me think of My time at Drift specifically, I think, was like, the most important time in my career because I got to do all that stuff. I went from being just kind of PR and comms Dave to, like, figure out the website, man, learn how to use Salesforce, figure out Google Analytics, hire, you know, sell ads, do sales demos. Right. Like, did you feel that way in your career?

Yeah. You know what's funny, too, is it took a couple years for my past PR friends to stop calling me a PR person.

Yes.

There's something about that industry where there's like, no, you're in it for life. You're tethered to this. And I would have to remind them, like, no, I'm now just a marketer. I've always kind of found it funny that PR out of all the industries does that. I don't know why that is. Why do you think that is versus other disciplines?

I don't know. I think it's very. I think just the nature of the personality of people that it attracts. It must be that we're tied to our identities at work. I think in many different ways.

I do find the experience invaluable. And I love the PR people in my life because you have to learn how to hustle. You have to learn how to storytell. And it's worse than cold calling sometimes because these people, they are. Oftentimes some of these journalists are underpaid and they're cynical, and they're like, who is this overpaid person right out of college calling me, trying to pitch me on a story? So you have to learn how to take rejection very early on and storytell and get that hook, like, under the gun. And it's invaluable.

Yeah, I love the figure it out now that I can see the threads. I love, like, the figure it out part of it. And it was, like, very. It was. For me, it was much earlier in my career, and it was like, all right, you don't really know this company that well. You don't really know this industry that well, and you don't really know this CEO that well, but figure out how to get someone else to write about them. And you're like, okay. So then you got to research the company and find interesting storylines there, and all of a sudden you kind of. You create this story. And that was exactly what was so fun for me about, like, going to Drift in that example was I got to just figure it out at a bigger scale. And I was like, I understood what the company was doing. I was good at the communication part. And, yeah, I don't know, let's go send a cold email and see what happens. And I think that was a fun part of that job. And obviously the landscape has shifted then, but there was, like, no better feeling than, like, writing a killer pitch, sending it out, and then be like, all right, I'm going to lunch. I'm walking away for two hours, and, like, I come back, check my email, and, like, you get a response from the reporter. Even the reporters are always. They're always. No disrespect to any reporters out there now, but most of them are always so jerk. They're like jerks in their communication with you. And I'm just this lowly PR person. And this reporter writes back, like a one word, like, tell me more, or something like that. And they're all right, I got. I got bait. And then you just got to keep going down that. And I. Looking back now, that was so fun. And that was, like, the competitive nature in me and marketing. I guess that's now made me who I am.

Exactly. It definitely makes you competitive. And I think going back to your point about, in terms of PR preparing for product marketing, that having to learn all those clients after, like, five minutes of knowing them on the agency side makes me kind of raise the bar for people in the product marketing side and all marketing colleagues if they don't understand our products. I'm like, you've been here two, three years, right? How do you not understand, like, all the features and what they do and all the customer use cases? Because when you were on the agency side, you had, like, maybe a week to figure it all out, and then you have to be talking to journalists or analysts about it and sound convincing.

Yeah, that's so true. And I wonder, like, in that client relationship, you do it because there's, like, more pressure. You're like, I'm. They're my client. I gotta learn the product. Where if you're employed by the company, you're like, I'll figure it out.

Yeah, right. The thing with Agency life, you know, they could cut you all within two weeks, three months, a year. Right. So you always felt like this, I could be cut as their agency at any time.

Oh, yeah. One of my first jobs at this agency that I worked at was, like, writing tweets, ghost writing tweets. And this was in, like, 2009, 2010. So Twitter was, like, very, very new. And this company wanted to be on social media and specifically Twitter, and they believed that that would be meaningful in some way, and I would literally have to write up tweets, put them in a spreadsheet, send them to my manager to review, to then send off to the client, who was probably a marketing manager to review. And I remember I'd write something and they'd be like, no, this is not the right hashtag. And I was like, looking back now, I was like, man, that's crazy that that's what my job was.

My first job at this PR firm was. It was the recording industry, like, the people who issue the gold records and so forth and sued Napster. We were going into message boards and hearing people talk about, like, stealing music. And we were trying to, like, engage with them. And it was like, engaging with, like, that's amazing. The darkest people had the darkest.

Was it to, like, learn something or to try to tell them not to do it?

It was a combination of research and learning and trying to tell them not to do it.

Wow. So they hired the company you were at PR firm to, like, that was the mission, like, get this message out.

Yeah. And they. And I got hired right out of college without any marketing experience, and I just got thrown right in.

There's three right into the forums. Yeah. Would they even have had a way to, like, measure if that was successful or not? Or was it just like a gut feeling, like, we should do this?

I think we understood Internet communities better because they were, like, it was pretty early on and like, we were all kind of into them. Like, I was already kind of into them and my boss was. And we understood them and we saw that's where a lot of the activity was happening. People would talk about, oh, use this file sharing service or use this one or use that one. And so that's where a lot of the conversation was happening. And you could track it versus, like, word of mouth. Sometimes you couldn't. And so we just knew we needed to be there. And the recording street, you know, I'll give them some credit. They took some chance. They took a chance on it and they listened to us.

We could spend three hours. I would. Now I feel like I want to just hang out with you and tell, like, PR stories. But we got to talk about product marketing. So this is what you do.

That's what I do.

I think this is best in specific. So let's talk about calendly. So talk about Calendly and why they have product marketing and, like, what is the goal and role of product marketing? Then we can get into, like, what you and your team do. I think that would be better.

Yeah. So there's like, the academic definition of product marketing, where people pretend like it's like this platonic ideal or something that was sent down from the heavens to us. And I'm not one of those people, I believe, and I think someone else said this better than I did, is that product marketing helps bring products to market right? Through things like partnering with product management on research and looking at the competitors and market analysis and helping do private beta testing and then messaging and positioning based off that. And then, then we also, once we bring it to the market, we help market those products together with like the sales team and CS and product management and the greater market team and all that. And there's things we do that we don't always do the same at every company or every project or even quarter to quarter at the same company. And that as we tend to do research, we tend to do positioning, messaging, sometimes pricing in sales led companies or PLG companies going up market, we work with sales and CS to train them, we launch products, you know, we shepherd the whole process and maybe we roll up our sleeves and do some copyright in the process and then we go look and see if the product's being adopted and we figure out why not do some research around that and try to do some ongoing adoption marketing and then the cycle continues. And that's kind of like the academic definition. And I think where product marketers get in trouble is where they like want to do all those things equally at every company because they were taught that in school or some certification. And the art to it is knowing when to like wane and wax and to lean in and lean back into each of those.

Oh, this is great, man. I've never heard anybody really talk about it like this. And you just hit on as I kind of taken notes while I, while I do this, you hit on something that I guess I haven't been able to articulate, which is there isn't one clear definition like product marketing is so dependent because of that kind of broad sphere that you outlined. Of all the, of the things that product marketing is responsible for, think about how many teams that they're going to have to be involved when they're. Well, if you want to be responsible for the positioning and adoption of this product, but you don't write any code, well, shoot, you got to have relationship, you got to have some type of extension to the product and engineering org, but you also don't sell the product so you have to work with the team who sells the product. Okay. But you also don't really market the product. That's going to come from like the digital team or demand gen. Okay, so now you're like, shit, I have basically to work with everyone in the company. And then I like the way that you laid it out, which is at each company. Because one of the questions that I see often is like, well, doesn't product marketing own pricing? And you nailed it perfectly when you said it's kind of like it depends. I've been at companies where product marketing has not owned pricing because we had a very unique, amazing unicorn MBA ops hire early on in the company and he had done pricing in like a previous role and so it made sense for him to own pricing. And so we worked with product marketing, worked with finance, but actually finance and product own the pricing versus I've been in another company where the person who ran product marketing was like a classically trained in like pricing and packaging and so it made sense for her to own it. And I think there's just so much nuance that this is actually what's fun about it is you kind of look at the ingredients of what you have from a team budget, company position standpoint and then you develop your approach to product marketing inside that company. There really isn't one perfect cookie cutter, you know, recipe for it.

Yeah. And when a product marketing leader tries to apply the same recipe, they use the past company or something they read about or something they were trained on to the situation, they almost always fail. And that's why product marketers struggle is that they get rigid and too academic about their profession. When we're just making this up, people, right, we're looking at the situation and we're saying, hey, what does product management need right now? What does sales need right now? What does marketing need right now? What is this sales led company need versus this PLG company versus this hybrid PLG sales led company? And it's always different. And so as a product marketing leader, you need to psychoanalyze the situation or maybe look at it like an armchair sociologist and then come up with your plan.

I want to get into your team and the goals and roles inside of the org. But let's first talk about what is the scope of product marketing inside of your company? Like as a job to be done, what is the purpose of what you do?

There's so I think it's still helping bring products to market together with product management, engineering, design. And then once we bring them to market, marketing them, that is at its core still what we do. And we've done that at every company I've worked at I'd say what I've done differently at Cali than I have at other companies is when I've worked in sales led companies like Arubin Networks, hp because it was sales led. You had this CEO and then you had this sales leader oftentimes at the top that were calling a lot of shots and was about helping the sales team win big deals. Right. Or expanding existing deals. And so product marketing as a reflection of that had to be able to not only launch products but really serve the sales and CS team and make them successful. So a lot of maybe getting on the phone and helping pitch clients about, you know, new products the sales team didn't understand, training the sales team, creating collateral for them in addition to the launching. And so there was maybe a little bit less research and so forth. Whereas when I'm at a pure PLG company oftentimes what happens is product management is at the table now like never before and they're maybe calling the shots and maybe sales is like a second class citizen in those situations. I'm thinking those pure PLG companies where they only have credit card sales. Right. And in those situations it's more about helping the product management team be successful. So it's more research, it's more data analysis, it's more experimentation and testing than training the sales team. So what's interesting at companies like Caly is that we both have a PLG motion where we have credit card sales. So we have a product manager at the top running things together with the CEO. And we also have a sales leader and we have marketing leader and CS leaders and all that. And so because we're a hybrid, I had to staff it up and to think about what we do. Yeah, to serve both masters.

That's super interesting. That's because you have the, it's going to the product marketing companion to the self serve, you know, nine 99amonth high volume funnel is going to be much different than the needs of like the enterprise sales rep. That's cool, that's interesting. And I think this is a common model actually now at a lot of companies and a lot of people listening where you kind of have these two funnels. All right, let actually from here it'd be interesting to actually tell us about your team structure and how you have things set up.

I recommend this for everybody that's in a PLG company going up market with a sales team and that is you need to have some product marketers who maybe come from more of a consumer background, like a high velocity PLG background. E Commerce background that can work with the product managers that are serving the millions of freemium signups that they need to activate. And maybe they never buy, but they're part of the masses that are important. And then you need to have some product marketers who can work with product managers that are trying to build the enterprise features like single sign on and admin controls that bigger companies, you know, want to pay for. And so those are oftentimes two different types of product markers, different types of background. The one that helps enterprise oftentimes needs to be really good at working with sales, whereas the one who's working on the features and activation of the millions of users that might never buy, they need to be really good at data analysis and research and partnering with product managers on experimentation and so forth. And so we've structured the team with both kinds of product marketers who are amazing. Then the second thing we do is we have solutions marketers and I recommend this too, is that if you can get buy in from leadership. These solutions marketers specialize in key Personas we're selling to. And so there's one, you know, that's specializing in tech industry companies, but they also work with sales, CS and marketing department buyers. Another one specializes in say financial services. And so they can wear these multiple hats of specialized in different ideal customer profiles. And then that team really works more with our sales team on doing all those little assets sales teams have in sales led companies such as, hey, do you have a PDF version of the pricing page? Can you create a battle card? Explain this competitor to us. Can you help me write some email copy for sales after outreach that we're going to send out and some email cadences as well as helping the demand gen team who often has lots of asks around copywriting and understanding, you know, certain ICPs and so forth.

What was the first bucket of role called? This is solutions. What was the other one?

Yeah, the, the first ones were just kind of product marketers, but a lot of times they are product marketers that partner mainly with the product management team.

Okay, cool. So you have actually two. This is interesting. Like there's sub roles. I've kind of always wondered what the role of like solutions does in marketing, but probably at the scale of this company, this makes sense. As you were saying those things, part of me was thinking like, well that's kind of the job of product marketing. More like a smaller startup, one person might do all those things. But today's episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as An SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift at Privy and now we're using it at exit 5. But over that time, Ahrefs has evolved a lot and they're not actually just an SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions in the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors, understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks, and you can even understand how much or your organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traffic that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research. 24. 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place. With Ahrefs. It's really a marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself, one of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool which allows you to explore what people and AI says about your topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like Chat, GPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than something like Google Analytics. I love it. We use it on our site. I've used it for Exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to Exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you gotta go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a href r e f s.com today. Go check them out. When you're at the scale that you're at now with Calendly you can actually specialize them. Is that why you do it that way?

Yeah. So I learned the lesson the hard way to envision which was also a PLG company that went up market and there we had fewer product marketers that were wearing multiple hats. They were the full stack product marketer. And not only did they have these consumer background Facebook product managers being like hey, let's do a ton of research calls and let's look at the data, you know in mode to see where people are falling off. So they had to put that kind of quantitative consumer grade product marketer hat on. Then the salesperson be like hey can you get on a call and help me pitch this client? Is like it was too much for product marketers. So here we kind of bifurcated it where it's like nice. These product marketers will specialize in helping the sales and demand gen teams and these over here will really specialize in helping the product managers.

That's probably more fun from a career standpoint too because like everybody's different. I'm just think of me. I did some time in product marketing. I did sometimes like it was a jail sentence. But I, I always, I gravitated towards like the positioning, messaging, storytelling, copywriting, like deck for launch part of product marketing. I hated the research, analysis, ICP charts, this and that, buyer Personas. And so yeah, me at a startup, I'm going to have to do both of those things and I'm probably not going to do as good of a job on the other stuff because I don't love it. You can kind of then have the bias towards like oh, the person who's going to own that stuff is going to be more biased towards that where versus the other side of the product marketer Coin is going to be more of a writer, creator, storyteller.

Right. And what ends up happening is that you will always have these product marketers who specialize in different areas of that circle. I was talking about earlier research, position, messaging, copyright and all that. And so if you just staff your team at the size calendly is with the full stack product marketer, they're going to fail at something and then it's going to come back on you as the leader and you're going to have to go to product management and some leader who's from Instagram and say sorry, we're not good at research over here. Then they talk to the CEO and then you know, it all starts to fall apart. So it's better to just try to split the team a bit where you find you, you staff people on things that they're good at and they have passion for, which is one of the things I hire for. So I have a certain question that I ask if you want to. If you don't mind me sharing it.

No, I do, I do. But I want to talk about hiring in a different section. So save that thought for hiring. I 100% do. Let's go on this team because as people are listening to us now, they're interested in how you do product marketing. Can you actually share with us what the team looks like? You're Jeff, you're head of product marketing. There's X people on the team. Here are my direct reports people. I know it seems silly but people love hearing that. So if you can tell us that, we'd love to get it.

Yeah. So the way it works is there's me and I have a few direct reports. One of them is a manager and they manage the solutions marketing team. The senior manager, they manage the solutions marketing team and they really have a passion for helping sales, helping demand gen, understanding these buyers. Right. They don't like as much doing like product marketing, launch market where you're launching products and so forth. We have a product marketing manager who is specialized in enterprise and so they have experience in those features that are like security features and so forth and selling to IT buyers. They still support the sales team but not as much as the solutions marketing team. And then there is another manager who's over the what we call core scheduling of calendly and that's a lot of the free features that everyone uses. And so it could be maybe like we are changing the homepage and how event types work that are free and it's going to affect everybody but it's also going to really affect millions of people out there who are just using Cali for free. And so they have a team, a small team of one person and then the other person who's running enterprise has a small team of one person. The solutions marketing person has a few people reporting to them. The last groups are we have somebody. And this was something else I discovered was that a lot of times partner marketing, if you're at this mid sized level gets kicked into product marketing because the company's not big enough to fund it as its own department yet. And so we have one person reporting to me that handles product marketing. So that's a lot of the co marketing we do with our integration partners and so forth. This person's amazing at doing that. Sometimes they even pitch in to help talk to partners who want to partner with us. And then last we have a person that is more of a life cycle growth marketing manager. And this is another thing that I see that gets pushed into product marketing sometimes. And maybe you saw this at some companies where growth product management is more focused on in app changes. And then the growth marketing team oftentimes gets pushed more in an acquisition mode running like Facebook ad experiments and so forth and testing signup pages on the website in some companies. And so the lifecycle marketing sometimes gets kicked over to product marketing because we can write and we understand customers and so forth. But it takes a special kind of person that has a true like consumer grade email to millions of people background to do that work in a credible way and that person does that.

I agree. The other thing is about lifecycle marketing is I think typically the mistake that I have made within one company was from a business standpoint. And I'm assuming when you say life cycle means like how somebody might upgrade and expand and use more of the product and drive adoption. Especially in Calendly's model, I'm sure there's some consumption based pricing in some way. Like you use more of it, you guys make more money. And I think I made a mistake of the company from a business standpoint had budgeted for X dollars in revenue from upsells and expansion. We had dedicated sales reps that were supposed to sell into those accounts but there was no real like marketer who also owned that number.

Right.

That just kind of got all passed to everybody. And so I think the mistake I've made is not having that be maybe the title is life cycle but they gotta be in my opinion like a revenue minded type of person. And it's not just somebody who's gonna send newsletter about new product updates once a month.

Yeah.

It's somebody who knows how to like hit a number.

Right.

And if you have a number tied to it, otherwise like you're, you're never gonna get there. You're gonna have somebody who does lifecycle marketing but they kind of just. I've seen it over and over again. Yeah, let's do a, you know, we'll do a webinar. And they said we do a webinar and we send emails and then we wonder why like upgrades and expansion aren't happening.

Yep. And this is just where we were at for the past year. But like now Calendly has like a life cycle marketing team who are awesome and they own like website conversion experiments and email conversion experiments. And this person like works with them, but also works with the product management team building experiments. So one of the things that I talk to the team about a lot of times is that you got to use an often used phrase, you got to like let go of your Legos and that like, just because product marketing is only life cycle right now doesn't mean we would, you know, in 2023, right? And so you have to be ready to kind of pivot and let go of these things as the company gets bigger and you get more credibility around hiring different roles and so forth.

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Right? There's two types of customer marketing. This is one of those I love us in marketing we always come up with these words and we use them in like a million different ways. So there's like customer reference marketing where your job is to get references. You know, companies that like calendly and like your company and talk about us and case studies and at trade shows and videos and all that. There's that kind of customer marketing and then there's the customer marketing of like almost like life cycle marketing where how are we going to communicate with our customers once they're customers versus their prospects. And that's what we have is we have an amazing person from our CS team moved over to the solutions marketing team and they own customer reference marketing. We call it customer marketing but it's customer reference marketing of let's get some companies that like calendly and let's tell their story.

Yeah, and that's awesome to be able to specialize in that role because it means like you'll get that as opposed to just a part of somebody else. All right, can you go back to your team and kind of give us a high level of each one of those buckets of the departments in product marketing what their business goal might be? You don't have to share the real number, but just as an example.

Yeah, I would say that their goals change about every quarter based on the company's okrs and how we do okrs and how we're measured changes every quarter. Right. Because we're fast moving, fast growing company and like we don't just set like one okr for the year and measure it the same way versus maybe like a bigger company doesn't. Maybe we'll get there someday but that's just not where we are right now. And so how they're measured changes. But I'll give you some examples of what's happened in the past. The product marketing team who's partnering with product managers, which is like today it's three people but it will eventually be four. They are responsible for partnering with the product manager also on co owning their okr. So like let's say they're going to launch some new feature like routing which allows you to add like scheduling to your website and qualify the people who sign up so you can help let them schedule right then at 10pm at night that product right there has a certain amount of usage we want to drive with existing customers as well as net new prospects buying it. And so there's an okr around that and we're partnering with product management and CS and sales and so forth on that. Okay, so that's one example over on the core scheduling side, the two product managers that own that, there's all kinds of new features that are coming out that are free as well as UI changes to our existing kind of like Cali as you know it's that'll be interesting to see this year. That product manager also owns product usage numbers. Right. So like let's say we launch meeting polls which was free. This person would have owned that if they were here. And there was a certain amount of usage we wanted to see of existing customers. And so they work with product management and they co own that. On the solutions marketing side there are efforts to partner with the demand gen team on hey, let's see if we can get a certain amount of net new marketing departments buying cali like talking to sales and getting a sales accepted opportunity and actually upgrading to the enterprise plan. They also are they measure themselves like from a KPI perspective maybe not like an official company OKR on how much they survey the sales team on how happy the sales team is with how they're supporting them. Some marketing leaders might scoff at that, but I think it's important because ultimately every CMO cares if a sales leader comes to them is like hey, not getting much help out of your team. They're hard to work with. They take three weeks to do a PDF A1 pager. So we do survey the sales department on how we're doing over and supporting them.

I love that. I heard I did a podcast a while back with a VP of product marketing and he talked about they have a big field sales and he said the number one KPI that he has for my team is how much their name is used by the sales team. And I thought he was joking and he's like no, no, I'm serious. Like I basically just pull the sales team and talk about like how much has X person helped you? And that's how we know if they're doing a good job. Now it's different in that model when it's very field sales like you're literally like helping them close deals. But I still think in your org it makes a ton of sense too. So unless there's any more context on the goals, there's two more. Okay, go ahead.

Then we have our partner marketing person. Like we have certain integrations that help us go up market. For example they might be goal around like let's partner with HubSpot and there's a certain amount of not only engagement with those co marketing things like the webinar and so forth but also what kind of net new leads around lead sharing are coming out. That's an example of how they are gold. And then last we have that person I mentioned earlier who specializes kind of like life cycle growth product marketing and so they are driving a number of experiments. So they might be gold around 1/4 on. Let's see if we can improve how net new signups to free calendly activate in the first two weeks by experimenting with certain types of emails we send them that are different than our initial drip sequence or partnering with you know product to do in app messaging to be like hey, you haven't tried this feature yet. They're gold around that beautiful.

People are taking notes right now on their runs. All right, is that Would that cover the goals before I take it somewhere else?

Yeah, I think that would cover it. And I know it sounds kind of confusing, just kind of going over it orally, but if anybody has any questions.

No, it's great. There's not a recipe, but I think if people, at least for me, like when I would listen to something like this, it's like, oh, just getting one idea for like how you might restructure or structure your team can be such a big unlock as opposed to like a little channel optimization. I'm, I've always kind of been obsessed with changing and rearranging the team, which not a lot of people like, but I kind of would, you know, it's. I think that's something that you're always thinking about.

Right?

All right. I have a bunch of product marketing topics that I just wrote down. I would love to just hear your perspective or your reaction or how you approach it. You can take it any direction that you want. Number one is measuring product marketing.

So I think that there are certain types of output measurement. I think in marketing in general there's outputs, like I'm doing this thing, I'm making this email, there is outcomes. It got a certain amount of like engagement, like clicks, you know, so on and so forth. And then there's outtakes like what can we take out of this marketing activity for the business? Right. Increased revenue, increased upgrades to the paid plans, increased, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so I like to try to measure all three of those. And where I get kind of irritated sometimes with the market industry is when we try to like favor one over the other. We say it's all about just measuring the outtakes, how we're moving the needle for the revenue. And it's like yes, that totally does matter. But sometimes the company doesn't have their data game together where you can figure out how much an email impacts sales accepted opportunities or upgrades or whatever. Or maybe the CEO wants a certain amount of things made that they've always wanted and they're going to measure you on that regardless if you hit the number or not. Right. And so you need to. Product marketing needs to partner with leadership, the sales leaders, the product leaders, CEO, the head of marketing, and figure out what makes sense for each product market to be measured around. So demand gen. I think what makes that job both easy and hard, it's a double edged sword, is that they often have like one number. I'm delivering either MQLs or sales, qualified opportunities or pipeline and that's what they're marching to. And every demand gen team probably is measured by one of those and that's what makes the job kind of predictable. The hard part is they have to hit that number, right? Whereas in product marketing a lot of times it just changes because we don't have that same responsibility of delivering the number. That way we partner with demand gen on it and we should co own the number maybe, which sometimes we do at Caly. But maybe we want to drive activation of free users, maybe we want to drive certain amount of usage of a product, a new feature, maybe we want to drive upgrades to paid plans. And so really it should be an ongoing conversation with leadership every quarter on what product marketing is measured by.

Nice. I like that there's often it depends on the health of the organization, but I've seen some beef between demand gen and product marketing for almost that exact reason. It's like, hey, come on, we're measured by this. We don't believe in your goals. And so there's nothing more toxic than when you have two teams who don't believe that the other team is being measured correctly.

Right. Or that the other team isn't working hard enough or they're not being service oriented enough or it's classic like basically one of the challenges of being a marketer and a SaaS company is that CEOs that are oftentimes less experienced will think in the very early days that they can get one marketer that knows how to do demand gen. And it's good with spreadsheets and good with numbers and their growth hacking. And in that same marketer they also have a product marketer that's good with talking to people and isn't grumpy and can write and can explain things to sales and talk to that's really difficult to find in one person. And that's why many CEOs have a hard time hiring and keeping the marketers in small startups. And so when you get bigger and you have the budget for it as soon as you can, you should hire two different types of marketers and let them kind of have some healthy conflict between the two of them because their personalities are very different and how they're measured is very different. So I think it's healthy to have that conflict.

But when the both teams, when the team leaders like each other and agree on each other's goals and feel like they are each other's superpowers, like demand gen is raving about how great product marketing is helping them and product marketing is raving about like how much demand Gen is helping them prove that they're driving revenue. Like, I think that's when the magic that. That's when you have a really strong unit. Like, I've been in a situation where demand gen is like, hey, no, product marketing. Like, let's measure this. Let's figure out how that new positioning is driving revenue. When they believe it together, like any other team, when everybody's rowing together, it's like the one plus one equals three effects. But I think it's a coin flip. I feel like every other company, it's like, you have the amazing one, you have the shitty one. You have the one, you have the shitty one.

Sometimes they're both amazing and they still have conflict. Right. It's just, I think it's because their personalities are oftentimes different. People that are demand gen often have a certain type of personality and people that are product marketing have a certain personality, like pr.

Like a PR we talked about earlier.

Totally. Right. And I think that's why you see conflict in marketing departments is that unlike product management, where it's like similar personality but just owning different parts of the product, in marketing, it's like all these different personalities trying to do the same job.

All right, so I think that will suffice for your answer on that one or your statement. Next topic. Positioning and messaging.

My thoughts on it?

No, I have nothing else to say. Letting it breathe. I'll restate the statement. Positioning and messaging.

Okay, so I think that there are way too many product marketers talking about position messaging on LinkedIn right now. Product marketing position messaging is like one of like 10 things we do and it's important to get right. But one shouldn't fuss over the style of position messaging, the framework and so forth. And there's just too much talk about it. And I think part of the reason is there's a lot of consultants whose entire job is just doing position messaging for companies and talking about it. And so they want to push their framework. Just like on the sales side you have people pushing BAMF or Medic or different sales frameworks. Right. And I think the best thing you can do when you do positioning messaging is just step back and just think like a normal human and say, like, why do we need position messaging? Well, we need to figure out for what customers as a company, we do what for, for what benefit. And unlike the competition, we do this other thing different and better and for what kind of business outcome. There's the classic formula that's really easy to remember, that's in crossing the chasm that people scoff at now, today. But the reason it's been used for decades is that it's super easy to remember for everybody else in the company who's not a position messaging expert. And so oftentimes still companies, like when I'm like advising small startups, like just start with that, that crossing the chasm framework of we do this for these people to this benefit and I like the competition, we do this now. What ends up happening is you then have demand gen that wants words. They want actual example copy that they can like copy and paste into emails, ads and so forth. And that's where messaging comes in. So messaging is really like talking points or example words that other departments can use, whether it's sales sending an email about a new feature that's gated, or it's demand gen doing it. And there I think as a product marketer you need to be very flexible and partner with your team and say like, hey, at a past job, what did you use? Like what kind of framework did you like in terms of a spreadsheet of all this stuff did you like? And I'll adapt to you because I want you to actually use it. And too often product marketers try to force some latest framework that they learned about somewhere on the rest of the team, demand gen, sales, et cetera. And no one wants to use it because it's not familiar.

I love that opinion only because not many people say that it's. I don't want to say overrated. Not that you're saying overrated, but it's overly talked about where you need to. I like that advice also because I do see a lot of companies get they spend so much damn time on because there's so much about company story. And I've pushed these narratives also company story and the importance of creating a category and strategic narrative that men I see companies today, they take three months to launch a new position, like a new website with the new positioning versus like if you just go with your model, rip the page out of crossing the chasm, explain who you are and what you do and go and test and learn. And you can like build it as you go as opposed to every time you want to change a story. Like product market has got to go shut everything down for three months and do this big freaking project.

Totally. And part of position messaging is just being a writer and being a psychologist.

Yes.

And there's just a lot of marketers who aren't writers and psychologists. Like they got in it for it was fun or it looked cool or Whatever. And so you've got to have somebody on your team who's a writer and a storyteller and a psychologist doing your position messaging. I don't care if it's a product marketer, stem engine, or PR or whatever. Like, I did position messaging as PR person. You probably did, too, right? Yeah. And so you got to have that person doing it, and then once they write it down, you need another person or that same person that's good at collaborating with people, not forcing people to use stuff, collaborating with them to test it out, use it, give feedback, all of that. So, like, I'd say like 20% is the writing and the storytelling. The other 80% is getting people to actually use the thing and being flexible on how you deliver it to them so they'll actually use it.

Well, to your point about who's doing it, for all of the positioning and messaging books and frameworks and everything out there, like, the best positioning and messaging that I've ever come up with, has come up with has been in back and forth WhatsApp messages with the CEO.

Yep. Right.

And there was no framework, but we just. We both were, like, pretty good at it. And us riffing together was, like, a really good combination. And, like, we just would be like, boom, there's our new tagline. There was no. We didn't test it with anybody. There was no process. It's like some of this is still gut and intuition and, like, the ability to be creative and tell stories.

Yeah. And I think that's why sometimes companies hire outside people to do their position messaging, because they want to hire somebody seasoned that the CEO trusts. And sometimes you just trust people who are outside consultants. You know, there's like, familiarity breeds contempt sometimes to your own team. And so a lot of times you'll see companies hire outside people because that person knows they need to partner with the CEO and their objective consultant, and they come in and they riff together with the CEO, like you said. But if you're internal doing it, I'd say exactly to your point, if you don't have your CEO and the C Suite be part of the position messaging creation process, it's never going to stick. It's never going to get used. And that's why you'll oftentimes see three months later, you have to revisit the position messaging.

All right, thank you for your answer on that. Next topic is product launches.

Launches. I love launches because they're this, like, moment in time for the company where you can rally everybody around. This moment in time that has Kind of almost like artificial importance this date. And you can get product and engineering design to build something for that date instead of waiting another three months and iterating, iterating, iterate. You can get sales excited about finally learning how to talk about it and CS learning how to talk about. Instead of waiting, waiting, waiting, you can get marketing excited about learning about the product finally because they don't want to do a bad job of talking about it. So by creating this date and then marching toward it, it gets the company to rally together sometimes never than before. And so you should be looking to do product launches a couple times a year that are like tier one big launches for your company, even when you have very small things to launch from your perspective.

I love that. Launches for me at companies I've been at have been. Anytime you looked at like a step function growth in the company, it's usually always been because some type of launch. And I also always like doing some type of launch monthly just to keep like a cadence going. But then maybe quarterly you have a bigger launch. And one of the things I love doing with product marketing is like finding ways to do launches. And so it's like, oh, the company is announcing their fundraising. I think the average marketing playbook is like, announce the fundraising. I think the above average playbook is like, ooh, how do we use this as a hook to like do something else to the world? And so like on the same day we announce our fundraising or some big announcement, we're also going to. Let's also use that as the date to drop this new feature about X. I love it as like a forcing function and packaging it all together. And I see you nodding along because I think you agree totally.

You see, the funny thing is, is that it's gotten harder to do launches than it used to be for a couple reasons. One is back to the PR thing. I used to be able to say, hey, engineering team do in this small startup. Do you want to get in TechCrunch? I know you love reading TechCrunch. You wanna get in there? And I would say like, we can get in TechCrunch if we launch on this date, you know, a month from now. And people would scramble and rally and make things happen that were amazing. But now what's happened is like, there's less publications really, and they have less impact on the customer than would have been like say Twitter does now on LinkedIn. And so I have a harder time using that lever to rally the team to finally launch the thing. So you have to kind of come up with other creative ways to motivate people to build the product. And I think in smaller companies in particular, there's a lot of smaller shops where I see them fail is they just don't launch enough. They sit there and they iterate and they iterate and iterate and they, they do it under the banner of like, testing and so forth. But sometimes you just have to stop and say, look, let's just get this thing on the market and get some customer feedback. Let's. And let's get some feedback From Twitter and LinkedIn and so forth and not just beta testers.

I couldn't agree more. I was working with a startup one time and they were really set on press and they're just like a B2B SaaS company. It's not a. I talk about this often and people are, well, you know, there are some industries where press does mean something. And I'm like, yes, but also kind of Twitter and social media are the news now anyway. But they were so obsessed with having a TechCrunch article on the launch day. And I was like, but like, who really cares? And like, we all know that a lot of the times that what they write is kind of trash anyway. Like, it's, it's not. Doesn't live up to the standards of like, what you could do and publish on your own. And so not everybody agrees with that take. But to hear you say it is, I'm like, I'm like, who are you even going to pitch? Like, there's, there's maybe. Is there even one or two meaningful outlets that you're going to, you're going to get in? Like, let's just spend that time elsewhere. Okay. You like launches? I have another one, but we're going to skip it because we need to wrap up and want to talk about. Make sure we talk about hiring with you. So this is a great one common question. Let's talk about hiring product marketers. What do you do? How do you do it? What do you look for?

So one of my favorite tactics in the hiring process is there's two questions I ask. One is, I'm gonna list out. I'll show you on a screen what the academic definition of what a product marketer does. And I show like research. I show position messaging, I show sales enablements and CS enablement. I show running launches and then ongoing adoption marketing. Everything's launched. And I say, I want you to stack rank in order what you like doing most to least. And based on what they say, I can see whether they will be a good fit for the particular product marketing role we're hiring. So for example, the person who got hired to do all that work around the early solutions marketing was one person and they needed to work a lot with sales and train sales and create materials for sales and all that. They told me their favorite thing to do out of that was working with sales. So I was like, okay, you're hired. If someone had said like fourth on the list, they wouldn't have been hired for that role. Now on the the side of working with our millions of customers who maybe don't even use calendly paid, they might just use this for free. I needed somebody who loved research and working with product management and so forth and maybe less about working with sales. And so that was a good fit for that. So a lot of times I'll ask that question just to see if the person is a good fit for the particular role. And all the roles are different on our team. I recommend that to everyone to use that figure out like what product market needs to focus on out of those out of that stack I mentioned earlier and then have someone stack rank what they like to do most at least second question I asked them is in six months if you were to join Cali, what would be like a nightmare situation where you'd be like oh my gosh, I can't believe I left my job at XYZ to join this team. And based on what they say, if I know we're dealing with that situation, I know that they probably would hate it here. And so really oftentimes hire for will the person be happy or not? There's tons of smart product marketers out there. There's tons of hard, hardworking ones. It's will they be happy in our current situation doing the things we need them to do?

That's a great one. All right, give me some more hiring wisdom. Come on.

You know, I like the book who I recommend everyone at least read it. There's a question there where you say and some people don't like this question, but I'm going to share it with you anyways. It is hard to ask. And that is. Okay, tell me the last three managers you had and what their names were and if I were to go to them and ask them how they would rank you on scale 1 to 10 and the book who says this really gets out like frank answers from people around what their past boss would say about them. And they tend to open up about the challenges and what was great and what was challenging about the role and so forth. Some people swear by that question. I have found it's hard to deliver. Some people find it kind of like intrusive. So what I usually say is like I'm not going to actually go ask them this. I'm not going to call all your bosses and ask them without your permission. But just hypothetically, what do you think they would say? And it's, it does create some great conversations. Another thing who recommends doing is you spend like an hour with the person where you walk through their last three jobs and you talk about like let's walk through the whole job and like what were you really proud of and what do you think you could have done better? And then why did you leave? And it create and you have to write down all the answers and then share it with the rest of the hiring team so that the rest of the hiring team doesn't ask those same questions again. And they can ask different questions like cultural fit and so forth. So I've used both those, I don't always use those tactics. Sometimes I'm hiring too fast to do that. But when a hire is really key and I don't want to get it wrong at all and I'm a little worried I might, I use that system.

Have you ever had anybody like that said something bad and you, you hired them anyway?

Yeah, I was happy that they were frank with me and they didn't try to like BS me around, you know, relationship they have with their boss. I even hired somebody who didn't stack rank things like I mentioned earlier. Just like I'd hoped. But they had a good reason for it.

Any final words of wisdom on hiring?

I think that where companies get hiring wrong is they try to look at like surface level stuff like where someone went to school, where did they work. And a lot of times some of your best people are people who didn't go to the coolest school or didn't go work at the coolest companies. Maybe they worked some tiny startup where they had to really grind and they had to be creative and wear multiple hats and they worked all kinds of crazy hours and stuff. And so like just keep an open mind to people that have, you know, non traditional backgrounds. Like our social leader that I hired before social wasn't under me, came from npr, never worked in tech, but I just knew something about her, that she would be amazing and she is right. And so just keep an open mind to people. Don't just hire on service level stuff. Try to find your inner psychologist and get to know people and Whether they'd be a fit or not.

Well, and to your point, from all the way at the beginning of this, it's going to be so different at every company. And so it's hard. Like you're like, ah, this person has, you know, five years of product marketing experience at Salesforce. That's very valuable experience. But that might not be the right fit of experience for what you need and what the right mix of product marketer you need right now. So there's going to be a lot.

Of variance there and sometimes it does help. Like we have a person from Salesforce who's awesome.

Exactly.

That's the thing. It's like sometimes the big company like just completely keeping an open mind and hiring someone who's stage appropriate I think is key.

You mentioned the who method. So there's a book called the who method. You can look it up w h o method. And I like this also because I think one thing that I helped me get better at hiring was I didn't have a process before. It was too just kind of like based on gut and feeling and what's great about who is like, it forces you into a process. Use this exact process checklist method for hiring. And I think that helps it become a little bit more of a science than just kind of gut feeling.

Totally. It also prevents. I see some hiring managers who are very experienced. They kind of just do some like soft banter. Hey, what have you been up to? You know, it's like 15 minutes of the interview.

Yes.

Just getting to know people.

Totally.

And it, it forces you not to do that and to just get to the point.

The who method can be very off putting at first because it turns the interview into like a. You're like, hey. And I remember being like, look. So if I was going to interview Jeff like you are, you seem great. Look. So the next 30 minutes is going to kind of be weird because I'm going to basically like interrogate you and I'm going to just not make a lot of small talk. And I try to like I got better at it when I would kind of get it out of the way as opposed to like someone feeling like that. And so especially like in the who method when your job is to basically be like the I forget what the role is. But you're supposed to be the fact finder. So I'm supposed to find out like what you did at all these companies and get very specifics about their roles. It's going to take 30 minutes to get there. If you spend 15 minutes talking about, you know. Oh, yeah, yeah. I've also have a, you know, my in law have a summer house in here. Like, I'm not saying that stuff isn't important. Like you have to build a relationship and rapport with somebody. But that can come in the later stages, I think of the hiring process early on. You got to be in there trying to get the facts. And I think that's why the who method is really great.

Totally. And it is kind of off putting at first. And I have like, you, I've really worked hard on, like, how do I soften this a bit and make it not so obnoxious. Right. And just be like a bunch of weird questions.

I'm just going to.

And these are the questions.

Like I would be like, oh, so you worked at Clearbit. Okay, interesting. What did clearbay? What. What marketing automation system did Clear Bit use? Oh, use HubSpot. Interesting. How come you guys, you know, why'd you use HubSpot over Marketo? Now this would be like if I was interviewing you for marketing ops or something like that. But it's like that level of grilling someone and I think most it's. It's not common to hear that.

Totally. Okay.

We could talk forever. We gotta go. I just noticed my daughter is getting off the bus and it's been over an hour with you. So Jeff, thank you. This was a great conversation. Do my CTA for all these episodes and this is my favorite part because I hope you send me a message in a couple weeks is go to Jeff's LinkedIn. Go to LinkedIn, type in Jeff Hardison calendly. You'll find him, connect with him, send him a note, tell him that you learned a thing or two on this podcast and that would make me really happy. I don't want a rating. I don't want a review. I want you to go and send Jeff a note. Jeff, thanks for doing this. I appreciate you having you on. I'm sure we'll be in touch for the future.

Thanks, Dave. Super happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

All right, thank you. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people people are talking about. Get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there you can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out, exit 5 and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast setting and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch. Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's going to be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not, what's just noise, what's actually contributing to Pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing and that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dollar. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers. And right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year, planning, forecast and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026. It's not a sales pitch from them, but this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap, and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you got to grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to paramark.com office hours that's paramark.com office hours.