Help Your Customers Where It Hurts
Melissa Sargeant shares her insights into customer pain points and how to solve them, utilizing marco-themed marketing, and why SEO is important for your website.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to the Manchin Visionaries.
I'm in phase on CEO of Cast Mein Studios, and today we are joined by a special
guest, Melissa.
How are you?
>> I'm doing great.
How are you doing today, Ian?
>> 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 CEO of AlphaSense.
>> 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 like filings, event transcripts, expert call transcripts, news, trade
journals,
equity research, all in one place.
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.
>> I love it.
So exciting.
You've been in the role, what, over nine months now.
So what was the first 90 days like?
Any things you did this time around that were different?
>> 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 Sentio 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 it wasn't a lot of time to get your sea legs.
>> Not a lot of time indeed.
That's funny.
Anything to stand out that you did really well in that first 90 days to make
sure that
you're prepped for the long haul?
>> 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.
And 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 QPR cadence.
And I've done that everywhere that I've had.
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 and some critical areas.
We had just one person in content marketing.
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.
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, gin and marketing secrets.
You told us a little bit about alpha sense and the types of your customers.
Who's in that buying committee?
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 and 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 we 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.
Yeah.
And I'm curious, like, how do you structure your org to go after those
different personas?
What does the marketing architecture look like?
The way my organization is set up today is the revenue marketing organization
is very
focused on bringing in that 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
crosssell
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 this
webinars as well.
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 tail
oring something
super specific to this work?
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 goosebum
ps.
And so coming in, I want to be able to drive some sort of transformation at
AlphaSense is
this company that's been growing so fast and 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 and opportunities and pipeline, all these other
things are much
easier to handle.
If they're not swimming and 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.
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 part is
running as
well as it possibly can.
And either thoughts on strategy or demand?
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 apps 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 of 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
happier, 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.
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, right?
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, right?
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.
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 nit-picked on that contents indication thing doesn't seem to
be working
for you.
We need to cut that.
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 of stuff, 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, like, how do you run
experiments then if you're
trying to do something net new that you've never tried before?
I think you have to keep an experiment's 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 and 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.
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, right?
I was talking to someone earlier today and they were like, this is a podcast,
it was
a big 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 put us to that idea of like, you're always fighting the
status
quo, right?
Absolutely.
And if you have a channel that's working really well for you, everybody will
say, you
know, if webinars are going, great, we'll just do 10 more webinars.
It's 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 time, it was 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.
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
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 marketer's 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.
Yep, 100%.
Okay, let's go to the playbook.
This is where you open up the playbook and talk about the tactics that help you
win.
You play to win the game.
Hello.
You play to win the game.
You don't play to just play it.
And speaking of all those tactics nestled in there, what are three channels or
tactics
that are your uncuttable budget items for 2023?
The website, the content team and paid for us.
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 and 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.
Yeah, talk about how you invest in a website.
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 tests, does pure CR, you
know, 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.
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.
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 like 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.
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 and 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 an opportunity.
And either insights from either content or paid or website that you say is so
integrated
with your process here.
So any other insights of integrating those three is or ways that you're making
things
faster or better.
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
pulled 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.
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.
Yeah.
Do you feel like last touch is perhaps not being very helpful these days in the
new buying?
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 lead with,
hey, how
much software would you like to buy from us?
You saw you went to the webinar.
You really have to be able to feed them and support their decision.
Absolutely love it extremely well articulated of just how complex it is now as
table stakes
to do all that stuff really well, right?
We're talking a couple of episodes ago about how if someone comes to your
website and you
can't have a conversation with them in a couple of minutes.
Go fix that first and then keep working on the other stuff.
Exactly.
The amount of time you have to capture their attention is in milliseconds.
Have any favorite campaigns or stories from the last year or something that you
all did?
I'm just really proud of it is doing.
AlphaSense just published we commissioned some primary market research.
We the first company ever to do this around the state of market intelligence
and 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 industries first
state of market
intelligence report and 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?
Is like everybody else feeling the same pain or this same challenge?
So it's a whole new thing that we've launched and that we're going to do every
year going
forward 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 and this first one and can't wait to get started on the one
for next year.
I absolutely love it.
I love campaigns like this.
I think it's so great.
Back in the day, Kryn and I from IBM, she told us how they did this data sales
force 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 sales force instead of keeping it at our
existence 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.
Yeah, it's phenomenal and you're right.
One of those programs where you have 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.
I think the reason why I love it so much is because it truly is remarkable.
Like it sparks conversation.
The other 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
like just having a number.
I think exploring that stuff is where you get so much more like rich experience
for the
people who are trying to figure all this stuff out on their own.
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.
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 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 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.
Yeah, if you have one takeaway from it, that's a win, one memorable takeaway
and you
want.
All right, let's get to the dust up.
Here we talk about healthy tension.
That's what 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?
Interesting.
This is a very interesting topic because I'm 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.
Any advice that you would give to other women who are feeling that same piece?
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 microag
gressions
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 ch
ippy,
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.
Okay, let's get to our final segment here.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
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greatest
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It's quick and easy just like these questions.
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Quick hits.
What's up?
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
Number one, what is a hidden talent or skill that's not on your resume?
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.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast or TV show that you've been checking out
recently?
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 topically would.
And I love that.
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, no, 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
Braveheart
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.
It's really fun.
Yeah, it's fun.
We love it.
Does 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?
I like to read.
And again, I had 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.
What is your best advice for a first-time CMO?
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 100% ready for this.
You've been ready for it for years.
Don't doubt yourself and your knowledge.
Ask a lot 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.
If you weren't in marketing at all, what do you think you'd be doing?
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.
I don't know why it didn't occur to me to try to do that.
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.
Melissa, that's it.
That's what we got for today.
For our listeners, go to alpha-sense.com to learn more.
If you're an infant, serve, or want some Wall Street insights or consulting or
energy,
industrial life sciences, tech telecom, media, consulting, lots of information
there for
you.
Any final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
Just as you said, alpha-sense.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.
Yeah.
Y'all need to be more intelligent in general, but definitely about our markets.
Melissa, thanks again and we'll talk soon.
Thank you.
one.
Bye. Bye.
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