This episode features an interview with Melissa Sargeant, CMO at AlphaSense. AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform used by the world’s leading companies and financial institutions. Melissa runs worldwide marketing initiatives including corporate and product branding, demand generation, product marketing, public relations, inbound sales development, and more. On this episode Melissa shares her insights into customer pain points and how to solve them, utilizing macro-themed marketing, and why SEO is important for your website.
This episode features an interview with Melissa Sargeant, CMO at AlphaSense. AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform used by the world’s leading companies and financial institutions. Melissa runs worldwide marketing initiatives including corporate and product branding, demand generation, product marketing, public relations, inbound sales development, and more.
On this episode Melissa shares her insights into customer pain points and how to solve them, utilizing macro-themed marketing, and why SEO is important for your website.
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“You can't show value for what you're providing, if you can't make a connection between the pain and what they're trying to achieve in their roles, particularly on a market intelligence platform.” - Melissa Sargeant, CMO, AlphaSense
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:49) - Melissa’s role at AlphaSense
*(05:11) - Segment: Trust Tree
*(10:35) - Utilizing marco-themed marketing
*(15:24) - Segment: The Playbook
*(16:17) - Why SEO is important for your website
*(17:22) - Customer pain points and how to solve them
*(26:33) - Segment: The Dust Up
*(29:46) - Segment: Quick Hits
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Demand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.
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Links
0:00:05.9 Ian Faison: Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today we are joined by a special guest. Melissa, how are you?
0:00:12.8 Melissa Sargeant: I'm doing great. How are you doing today, Ian?
0:00:14.9 Ian Faison: Thrilled to have you on the show. You're at a new company, so let's get into it. Tell us about your new role as CMO of AlphaSense.
0:00:22.9 Melissa Sargeant: Yes, it's exciting. AlphaSense is a market intelligence platform, and it's used by some of the world's largest companies and financial institutions. And we have this really unique AI-based technology that helps knowledge professionals make smarter business decisions, and they do that by delivering them insights from a really broad array of public and private company content. So that's filings, event transcripts, expert call transcripts, news, trade journals, equity research, all in one place. And right now, we have over 3,500 enterprise customers, including a majority of the S&P 500, and we have about 1,200 people globally and growing really quickly.
0:01:07.9 Ian Faison: I love it. So exciting. You've been in the role a little over nine months now. So what was the first 90 days like? Any things you did this time around that were different?
0:01:16.2 Melissa Sargeant: It was interesting in that when I joined AlphaSense acquired a company called Stream, which does expert transcripts. And that acquisition was really hitting its stride, right when I started. I got thrown into that excitement, and then at the same time, we started diligence around another acquisition of a company named Sentieo that we acquired in June. So my first 90 days was not a typical first 90 days because I really got thrown into some things that we had to care for right away. And I still, in parallel, had to do all the things that you need to do in terms of getting to meet your team, doing your 30-day audit so you can start prioritizing where you're going to focus on, and balance all of that with these two acquisitions. So there wasn't a lot of time to get your sea legs.
0:02:12.7 Ian Faison: Not a lot of time, indeed. That's funny. Anything stand out that you did really well in that first 90 days to make sure that you're prepped for the long haul?
0:02:21.8 Melissa Sargeant: Yes. We really focused in on a couple of areas, and one was getting a plan together because we really didn't have a comprehensive integrated marketing plan. So I spent that first 30 days meeting everybody, talking to everybody, asking lots of questions, identifying some key areas that we knew that we needed to get working on right away. And then starting to set up a framework for an integrated marketing plan that we do every quarter as part of our QBR cadence. And I've done that everywhere that I've been in CMO roles. And that framework, it's not really a template, it's a high-level framework because every company is a little different in where you need to start. But that went quite well. And it's interesting, particularly in companies where there's a pause in between the old CMO and the new CMO coming in, people are really craving the structure and the framework and where are we going, and so the adoption of it was really positive. And then at that time in March, the recruiting situation was quite different than it is now, but we were really low in headcount in some critical areas. We had just one person in content marketing.
0:03:36.6 Melissa Sargeant: So I worked with all of our hiring managers to really focus in on recruiting so that we could build out the team and actually do all the things that we wanted to do as part of the integrated marketing plan.
0:03:47.1 Ian Faison: Yeah, that's great. Let's get back into the company here. Let's head to the trust tree where you go and feel honest and trusted and share those deepest, darkest demand gen and marketing secrets. You told us a little bit about AlphaSense and the types of your customers. Who's in that buying committee?
0:04:01.9 Melissa Sargeant: So we have a variety of different customers. So we sell to four key personas. So investor relations professionals, competitive intelligence professionals, corporate strategy professionals, and corporate development professionals. And these span from financial services, even into corporates, which is the fastest growing part of our business today. So think life sciences companies, energy and industrials, technology, media, and telecom. We really lean in on understanding customer pain because each of these personas has very unique use cases. So we lean in heavily into around customer pain, understanding that pain, and really being able to demonstrate to them that our solution, and we have a free trial that we're able to provide them to really show them the value of the platform and how it can help them make better business decisions. So it's very much a solutions oriented sale and very much focused on value and helping solve those pains.
0:05:11.1 Ian Faison: Yeah. And I'm curious, how do you structure your org to go after those different personas? What does the marketing architecture look like?
0:05:17.8 Melissa Sargeant: The way my organization is set up today is the revenue marketing organization is very focused on bringing in net new logos into the organization. But we're a pretty big company now. We've got 3,500 customers and these are really large organizations. So you can sell into investor relations in one part of a company and then the competitive intelligence team can be in a completely different part of the organization and same thing with the corporate strategy. So there's tremendous expansion opportunities within these accounts. So we have a customer marketing team that really focuses on those upsell and cross sell opportunities. And then I have things like everybody else, I have a brand and corporate marketing team that also includes partner marketing because we provide all of this equity research through the platform. We have relationships with all of the top brokers. So we are the exclusive provider of Goldman Sachs research, but all of them. So we partner with them and run a lot of programs and expert series with them that again, draw people into the platform. And then for our existing customers, we want to make sure that they're getting maximum value within the platform. So those engagements with the partners also enable them to access more of the content that's in there when they see the quality of the experts that we're bringing in through those webinars as well.
0:06:45.7 Ian Faison: Did you come in and say, "I'm bringing Melissa's strategy, Melissa's playbook." Do you have a marketing strategy that you're executing against or are you tailoring something super specific to this work?
0:06:55.4 Melissa Sargeant: I come in with a high level framework and I tended to pick companies in my CMO career that want some sort of transformation or change. I'm really not the person that to bring in when you just want optimization. And I would actually say I can do optimization, but it doesn't give me goosebumps. And so coming in, I want to be able to drive some sort of transformation. And AlphaSense is this company that's been growing so fast in so many different areas and was ready to take the marketing to really scale the marketing organization to match up with this tremendous growth the company had. So I come in with a high level framework and I look under all the rocks and ask all sorts of questions. I tend to zone in, not surprisingly on the demand generation engine and function because the reality is like branding and awareness and all those things are very important parts of the program. But if everybody's swimming in opportunities and pipeline, all these other things are much easier to handle. If they're not swimming in opportunities and pipeline, it feels like you're in this constant firefighting mode and there's just a lot more chaos that you have to work through.
0:08:16.1 Melissa Sargeant: So I always zone in on the demand gen engine and try to understand what's going well, what's not going well, where do we need to focus to make sure that that part is running as well as it possibly can.
0:08:29.7 Ian Faison: Any other thoughts on strategy or demand?
0:08:32.1 Melissa Sargeant: Yes. And I think for us, we take very much an integrated approach. And what I mean by that is, sometimes you come into marketing organizations and lots of activity. And I jokingly refer to that as like random acts of marketing. There's tons of activity, but you're not getting the lift from all of those activities. And you're much better off to come up with a macro theme strategy and align things around that macro theme instead of just doing a bunch of little things and make sure that all of those are highly integrated. And it's the content, it's what's happening on the website, it's what you're doing in paid media, it's your social strategy, it's your PR strategy, that all those things are aligned under this macro strategy, macro theme that you're going to go after. And maybe it's quarterly, maybe it's half a year, maybe you run that for the whole year. But I've just found that you get much better lift by focusing in on a truly integrated plan, and not getting hung up on just a zillion different tactics.
0:09:37.2 Ian Faison: Yeah, I feel the same way. And I feel like we always are sprinting because of all the fun new tactics. But when you can nest a tactic into an existing thing that you're trying to do, it's just going to work a lot better. Chandar, our good buddy, always talks about you can run three plays at a time and that's it. You can't do anything more than that. As much as I fight that tooth and nail every single day to see if I can run more plays, it really does kind of come back to that. And you're like, you really can only do three, great. And the rest, they don't get the attention that they deserve, right? It seems that way.
0:10:10.2 Melissa Sargeant: I'm in the thick of budget season, so I am all Google Sheets and cuts and justification and I'm doing all the things, all the dance right now. And when you have just these multitude of tactics, showing ROI is much more challenging than it is to show something that's truly orchestrated from top to bottom, and really be able to demonstrate in a very meaningful way why you need to invest in the 20 tactics that are underneath that and how they all support each other and why they're all important. Otherwise you get nitpicked. That content syndication thing doesn't seem to be working for you. We need to cut that.
0:10:48.4 Ian Faison: It's a great point. This tactic or this thing that live on an island away from everything else, you can say, "We need to cut that thing because it's just sitting out there by itself." But when it's part of a larger piece, "No, cut this," then we don't have this amount of content for XYZ and that's going to make our SEM way more expensive because we have shown that those, if we do these things in parallel, that those two things work together. And if we don't have that piece of content that speaks to this persona or this part of it, it is all interconnected. And then you say, this is the program that needs to be invested in, not just, okay, we're going to run an experiment. But then I'm curious, how do you run experiments then if you're trying to do something net new that you've never tried before?
0:11:27.8 Melissa Sargeant: I think you have to keep an experiments budget 10% and just be really clear in terms of setting expectations that this is a new thing. We think it's compelling for these reasons. This is how we're going to measure it. And if you're really transparent in what you did, why you did, and what you got from it, whether it was good or not as great as you thought it would be and what you learned from that, I think that's really important in a marketing organization. It has to be a safe place to fail for these things because if you don't try, you will never know.
0:12:00.9 Ian Faison: Yeah. And then it just seems like you invest in something that you've already been doing and you do it a little bit more. I was talking to someone earlier today and they were like... This is a podcast specific thing, but they're like, "How do you know that X persona listens to podcasts?" And I was like, "Well, what did you do instead?" They're like, "Oh, well we did another webinar." I was like, "How do you know that audience listens to webinars?" They don't necessarily, but it's that idea of like, you're always fighting the status quo, right?
0:12:25.4 Melissa Sargeant: Absolutely. And if you have a channel that's working really well for you, everybody will say, "If webinars are going great, we'll just do 10 more webinars." No, that's not how this works. It's called a marketing mix and we do a number of different things and trying to explain that if you rake that grass enough times there's nothing left to rake. We need a balanced mix that has webinars and all of these other things. It's not that simple as to just start quadrupling one channel that's performing particularly well for you.
0:12:58.1 Ian Faison: And it's a great point that you said you have a team that's going after net new logos and then a customer marketing team that is going after those cross-sell upsell opportunities. And that's a great point, right? How much money are we leaving by not investing in customer marketing or whatever it is. Look at how good we're doing. And that's like the non-marketers fallacy is like, "Hey, we're doing something great. Just pour more gasoline on it." And it's, yeah, I totally hear what you're saying. Of course we want to get more net new logos for all the reasons above, but it's like the sales cycle for a cross-sell is half the time and we need to invest a fraction of the dollars. So if we're not doing this, we're just abandoning a bunch of money. We need to make sure that that's in the mix.
0:13:35.9 Melissa Sargeant: Yep. 100%.
0:13:37.9 Ian Faison: Okay. Let's go to the playbook. This is where you open up the playbook and talk about the tactics that help you win.
0:13:43.4 S3: You play to win the game.
0:13:48.8 S3: Hello. You play to win the game. You don't play to just play it.
0:13:55.3 Ian Faison: And speaking of all those tactics nestled in there, what are three channels or tactics that are your uncuttable budget items for 2023?
0:14:03.6 Melissa Sargeant: The website, the content team, and paid for us. Because we have such an expansive customer base, we do a lot on the customer marketing side and historically always have, but haven't done as much on the net new side of bringing new people into the funnel. And so those three key areas are really one of the areas that we're developing and focusing in on 2023 is to bring net new people into the brand.
0:14:28.7 Ian Faison: Yeah. Talk about how do you invest in a website?
0:14:30.7 Melissa Sargeant: For us, we went in and did a bunch of SEO cleanup because our SEO traffic is our highest converting traffic. It drives more trial requests. It drives more engagement in general. So we've done a lot of cleanup there. We also are working on some website redesign, not from the perspective of just making it look pretty, but some functionally, some things that we want to improve again to continue to make it a conversion engine for us. We have somebody on the team who does nothing but run tasks, does pure CR conversion rate optimization all of the time. And so we've just really made some big improvements there. The other area for us was content and that the team was much smaller and we got into a cadence of if the website's the engine, the content is the fuel and you have to produce a certain number volume and cadence of regular content that speaks to your audience. That's challenging for us on a volume perspective because we have these four different personas. We have all of these different segments and they have very different pain points. So we actually have a segment marketing team that sits within product marketing and their job is to understand the uniqueness of their segments, the personas within those segments.
0:15:55.3 Melissa Sargeant: And we specifically recruited people out of those industries. They weren't necessarily marketers in those industries. We thought we're going to train them on the product marketing stuff, but what we really need is their insights on the real value and pain that's happening in that specific industry. And then we'll build out the product marketing muscles around that.
0:16:17.4 Melissa Sargeant: I love that. And I think that model is going to be the new normal is that persona based, creating consistent repeatable content by persona that is highly expert, highly targeted. That's not all just features and benefits. You have to be speaking to those folks in all those nuanced ways. And if you're not, you're not putting enough stuff out there.
0:16:38.3 Melissa Sargeant: And you just can't show value for what you're providing. If you can't make a connection to the pain and what they're trying to achieve in their roles, particularly on a market intelligence platform, if we're not helping them do something faster and better, and we can't show the connection that, "Hey, you and life sciences, we have a ton of content on our platform and we can help you sift through it faster and find the most relevant content for you better than anything else you're doing today." That's a missed opportunity.
0:17:09.5 Ian Faison: Any other insights from either content or paid or website that you say, it is so integrated with your thought process here? So any other insights of integrating those three user ways that you're making things faster or better?
0:17:21.0 Melissa Sargeant: Ultimately, the goal is to drive everybody to that website. And so I think you really have to understand and trying to figure out customer journeys and all of the touch points that they're going to, you can make yourself crazy trying to figure it out. I used to spend lots of time looking at all my visible information around touch points and realizing there's no linear path here and there's no trend that I can figure out. So you have to place your bets in a lot of different places and knowing that once you pull them in then and you understand who they are, then you nurture them and start to feed them content via email drip campaigns that's really relevant to them to help support that journey. And so that's why all of this stuff has to be so highly integrated. We're getting to the point now where we use the Muni platform to provide really customized, personalized landing pages so that once we know that you're in life sciences, when you come to us, you're going to find a life sciences landing page and relevant life sciences content for you.
0:18:21.7 Melissa Sargeant: But again, everybody having this really personalized experience that drives everybody back to the website with the idea that we want them to engage with more and more content. We see that activity happening. We're helping guide them as they're making this decision because we know that it's a very stealthy mode that they're in, in terms of how they're making their buying decisions. They want to do their research on their own before they're ready to talk to you. And our job is to keep them coming back for more and feeding them more when they come back, so that when they're ready to talk to us that, we've done everything we can in the background to help inform that decision.
0:19:03.3 Ian Faison: Yeah. Do you feel like last touch is perhaps not being very helpful these days in the new buying?
0:19:10.3 Melissa Sargeant: Yeah. We definitely look at things from a multi-touch perspective. I saw a report from Forrester, and before the pandemic, they were saying it was like 15 to 20 touch points. And just like a lot of things, the pandemic took these trends and really accelerated them. Now they're saying it's between 17 and 27 touch points. And so that means you have to be in as many of those places as you possibly can. You've got to be on the review sites. You have to be pushing out blog content in a regular basis. You have to be producing Greenfield content. You have to show up on paid. You have to have a high-performance website that's intuitive and really helps guide them on that journey. You can't really go to somebody who attended your webinar and say, I'll leave with, hey, how much software would you like to buy from us? If so, you went to the webinar, you really have to be able to feed them and support their decision.
0:20:04.9 Ian Faison: Absolutely love it. Extremely well articulated of just how complex it is now. It's table stakes to do all that stuff really well, right? We were talking a couple episodes ago about how if someone comes to your website and you can't have a conversation with them in a couple minutes, go fix that first and then keep working on the other stuff.
0:20:20.2 Melissa Sargeant: Exactly. The amount of time you have to capture their attention is in milliseconds.
0:20:25.2 Ian Faison: Have any favorite campaigns or stories from the last year or something that you all did?
0:20:29.4 Melissa Sargeant: I'm just really proud of it is doing AlphaSense just published, we commissioned some primary market research. We're the first company ever to do this around the state of market intelligence. We surveyed over 600 market intelligence professionals in the US across all those personas I mentioned, across all of those different industries and published the industry's first state of market intelligence report. Our vision for this is not just this one time. We have a lot of activities and programs and surround sound with it. In addition to the report, we also did slices of it specifically for each of those industries. Next year, we will expand more into Europe and it's something that we're going to do every year so that you can count on AlphaSense to publish the annual state of market intelligence report. And it's been really well received because it's not pushing anything about AlphaSense. It's really connecting to those market intelligence professionals and knowledge professionals and the challenges they're having and enabling them to benchmark. We all want to know, am I doing this right? It's like everybody else feeling the same pain or this same challenge. So it's a whole new thing that we launched and that we're going to do every year going forward.
0:21:46.7 Melissa Sargeant: And just really proud of the work that the team did there and excited about what we're going to do for it. We learned a ton in this first one and can't wait to get started on the one for next year.
0:21:57.5 Ian Faison: I absolutely love it. I love campaigns like this. I think it's so great. Back in the day, Corinne and I from IBM, she told us how they did the state of Salesforce with Blue Wolf back in the day and it was like this big controversial thing back then, and then ended up becoming this thing that Salesforce, instead of keeping it at arm's distance now was like, "Oh, this is great. Someone's objectively looking at this and now we don't need to do the sort of research on this and it was super helpful for the community to make it better." I love campaigns like this. You can reuse it in a million different ways. You can re-put it in your content in a million different ways and it just shows that you care about exactly what you said, benchmarking your community with each other and that's what they want to see.
0:22:40.6 Melissa Sargeant: Yeah, it's phenomenal. And you're right, One of those programs where you have sort of this core thing and then underneath that core thing, there's a hundred different things that you can do with that it really does have a long shelf life.
0:22:52.8 Ian Faison: I think the reason why I love it so much is because it truly is remarkable. Like it sparks conversation. Another thing is, you can bring in people to dive into that from their own anecdotal stories and that's what I think is so fascinating. This is how it is for us. Yes, our budget is remaining the same, but our numbers twice as big. That's where you sort of get to be able to dig into the information and the data and then you get to create content around that stuff and you can ask five different people, what do they think of the statistics? They give you five different answers and it's like much more nuanced and interesting than just having a number. And I think that exploring that stuff is where you get so much more rich experience for the people who are trying to figure all this stuff out on their own.
0:23:35.6 Melissa Sargeant: And for the sales team... Gosh, what a great piece of content to go to knock on doors, because it's not a vendor push, these are real insights that can be helpful for them and what a great door opener to start a conversation around their pains and their needs to provide them something that's truly a unique piece of research that they can't get anywhere else.
0:23:56.2 Ian Faison: And I think that the reason why people struggle with this, in my opinion, is because first they lack the conviction to do something big of like, "Hey, I'm going to commission a 160 page report," or whatever it is. "Hey, that's going to be a lot of money. It's expensive," whatever. And then they go, is anyone going to read that? And the thing is, like, A, it doesn't matter if anyone reads the entire thing. What matters is that if there's one quote or evidence or whatever, if there's a 60 second snippet that is interesting and that's what everyone reads, that's a win. And I feel like people get so conflated with that stuff like, "Hey, they have to read 160 pages." I don't care if they read one page or 160. They know that we created this thing that is the industry standard and that they trust it to be great. That's the important thing.
0:24:41.8 Melissa Sargeant: Yeah, if you have one takeaway from it, that's a win. One memorable takeaway and you won.
0:24:46.3 Ian Faison: All right, let's get to the dust up where we talk about healthy tension. That's with your board, your sales teams, your competitor, anyone else. I know you're new in the role, so I'm sure things are just smooth sailing. Any thoughts on dust ups when you're coming into a new role?
0:25:00.3 Melissa Sargeant: Interesting. This is a very interesting topic because I am a female and I've been in tech marketing for 30 years. So I often find myself as the only female in the room. And what that makes this question different maybe than for some other folks is, if there's a dust up, it's very different for me than it is for my male counterparts in that if I raise my voice, it can come across as Melissa's upset or Melissa's emotional. So for me, I actually can't really have a real dust up the way maybe other people can because I have to intentionally stay medium if I'm having a more spirited discussion or just crossing wires. I have to be really intentional about that. And particularly as a leader that is amplified even more.
0:26:00.4 Ian Faison: Any advice that you would give to other women who are feeling that same piece?
0:26:04.1 Melissa Sargeant: Yes, a strategy that I use... And a lot of times when there's going to be a dust up, you know there's going to be a dust up going into it, because there's usually a series of microaggressions or whatever leading up to the courageous conversation. And I remind myself going into it that I cannot change how somebody else responds or behaves any more than I can change the weather, but I can choose to change how I respond to it and I don't have to match somebody else's intensity or the tone of their voice. And typically when things get a little chippy, I go into curiosity mode. Because often in work situations when people are at cross purposes, there's a lack of trust in that relationship and so they're not getting positive intent. And so to build that trust, the best way is to get really curious about that person, and to start asking a lot more questions and seek to understand first. And that tends to help diffuse the situation for me.
0:27:17.3 Ian Faison: Okay, let's get to our final segment here. Quick Hits. These are quick questions and quick answers. Just like how Qualified helps companies generate pipeline faster, tap into your greatest asset, your website, to identify your most valuable visitors and instantly start sales conversations. It's quick and easy just like these questions. Go to qualified.com to learn more. Quick and easy. We love Qualified. They're the absolute best. We love them dearly. Go to qualified.com to learn more. Quick Hits. Melissa, are you ready?
0:27:48.4 Melissa Sargeant: I'm ready.
0:27:48.5 Ian Faison: Number one, what is a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
0:27:53.0 Melissa Sargeant: I am a very good cook. I like to cook. I find it relaxing at the end of the day to prepare meals. And I've always cooked, but prior to the pandemic, I used to do 250,000 air miles a year. So I wasn't home very much. And then one of the things that was a blessing for me, being home, was preparing a meal every night. That's fun for me, relaxes me and gives me joy.
0:28:18.6 Ian Faison: Do you have a favorite book or podcast or TV show that you've been checking out recently?
0:28:21.8 Melissa Sargeant: I love Kara Swisher's new podcast on... I love Kara and Scott Galloway on Pivot. In fact, every Saturday, my husband and I, run our errands and he's in the business world too. We always listen to Scott and Kara and it's really fun just kind of driving around and saying, "I can't believe he said that," or, "No, they should think about this." But it's really a fun way to talk about business without having to download like an, Oh, this happened at work or that happened. We get to have a completely different conversation than we typically would. So I love that.
0:28:58.3 Ian Faison: It's so funny how those shared experiences, like when you're listening to a podcast or watching the TV show, I had a bunch of family in town, we're talking about how they make their, all their little girls watch certain shows together, like everybody can't be on their own iPad. Because it's like, we have these things that as a kid, like, "I remember watching this movie," like, "I remember watching Brave Heart for the first time with my sister and my mom covered our eyes," or whatever, building shared experience so important. So I love that you're doing that with your business podcast. That's really fun.
0:29:27.8 Melissa Sargeant: Yeah, it's fun. We love it.
0:29:29.1 Ian Faison: That was not very quick of me. I'm supposed to go to the next question. What is your favorite non-marketing, Avi, that sort of maybe indirectly makes you a better marketer?
0:29:37.5 Melissa Sargeant: I like to read. And again, I'm a classic introvert where I can be on the big stage all day long, talking all day long, but at the end of the day, I need to recharge and compress. And for me, that requires a quiet space. And my mom instilled in me a love of reading. So I like to read in a variety of things. I'm really passionate about leadership development and becoming a better leader. So when I see new books that come out on that, I like to read that. I love biographies, because I love to hear people talking about their stories and what they've experienced and gone through. So I would say probably reading.
0:30:16.2 Ian Faison: What is your best advice for a first time CMO?
0:30:19.1 Melissa Sargeant: I remember walking in on my first day, my first CMO role, and they took me to this very large office, which I learned was mine. And I remember thinking they have made a terrible mistake. I'm not ready for this. I had the massive imposter syndrome. It's very natural for people to feel overwhelmed by that. And so my advice would be you are a hundred percent ready for this. You've been ready for it for years. Don't doubt yourself and your knowledge, ask a lots of questions, lean on your team and really just focus those first 90 days and getting to learn the business, getting to learn the teams and understanding the challenges. No one's expecting you to show up on day two and some executive meeting and come up with some major epiphany that nobody has thought of in the 10 years that they've been working at the company. Just try to relax and focus in on the basics.
0:31:28.2 Ian Faison: If you weren't in marketing at all, what do you think you'd be doing?
0:31:32.2 Melissa Sargeant: I think I would be somewhere in the healthcare field. And I was very good at math and science and chemistry and all this stuff. And I don't know why it didn't occur to me to try to do that, [chuckle] but instead I made this brilliant decision of getting a degree in political science, which is a really interesting journey. But I think I would do something in the medical field. I'm really interested in things like physical therapy, something there.
0:31:57.8 Ian Faison: Melissa, that's it. That's all we got for today. For our listeners, go to alpha-sense.com to learn more. If you're in FinServe or want some Wall Street insights or consulting or energy, Dash shows Life Sciences, Tech Telecom Media Consulting, lots of information there for you. Any final thoughts, anything to plug?
0:32:16.6 Melissa Sargeant: Just as you said, alphasense.com, alpha-sense.com, we would be happy to give you a free trial of the platform and show you how it can really help you make better business decisions for your organization and set yourself up for success.
0:32:32.2 Ian Faison: Yeah. You all need to be more intelligent in general, but definitely about our markets. Melissa, thanks again and we'll talk soon.
0:32:38.5 Melissa Sargeant: Thank you.