“Differentiate yourself by making sure that you have people in-house that have worked with the brand, understand the brand, and connect with everyone [in the team]—so you don’t just have a random team working on your account and 50 other accounts…”

Melissa Rosenthal is an award winning marketing exec and the Chief Creative Officer at ClickUp, focused on making the world more productive through best in class SaaS marketing!

Previously Melissa was the CRO/EVP at Cheddar, a live video media company at the intersection of business news and culture. For her brand work, she was named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30, Business Insider’s 30 Most Creative People Under 30, and as one of Digiday’s “Changemakers.” Prior to Cheddar, she led BuzzFeed’s Global Creative Team.

Questions and topics include:

• The importance of establishing a brand personality from the first day of a company’s existence
• The skills a marketer needs to lead a creative department
• How to become a better taste-maker and editor
• How to iterate on brand guidelines and Melissa’s thoughts on “team swipe files”
• How to scale an internal creative team to become an “in-house agency”?
• The balance between looking at the competition while charting your own path
• The benefits of scouting creative talent on behalf of your boss
• How to level up your brand’s social strategy and experiment on new platforms?
• How to recycle old content and creative
• Dealing with loneliness in a remote work world…

And more!

You can connect with Melissa on LinkedIn here – https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissarosenthal5/

Our Podcast Partner – MarketerHire

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Music for this podcast comes from www.davidcuttermusic.com

Full Episode Transcript:

Melissa Rosenthal  0:00  

So I think you know, brand plays just such a pivotal role and being able to do that it’s just such a competitive advantage. It’s have the best product in market and continue to move forward and build on that, and at the same time, have a really strong brand and market that allows you to be able to kind of like add fuel to that fire.

 

Kenny Soto  0:17  

Hey, you just heard a clip from our latest podcast guest on the people digital marketing, Melissa Rosenthal. And before we dive into today’s episode, I want you to do a quick favor for me that serious now, pause this episode, go on LinkedIn, and search, click up and look at any of the videos that they are sharing on the channel. Why is this important? Because it will give you context into why Melissa and her creative team over at clickup is amazing. They are in my personal opinion, one of the best b2b SaaS organizations out there in a highly competitive category that being productivity software. And on this episode, Melissa will be explaining everything there is to know about scaling creative. Melissa Rosenthal is an award winning marketing executive and the chief creative officer over at clickup. Previously, Melissa was the CRO, slash ebp at cheddar, alive video media company at the intersection of business news and culture. For her brand work, she was named to Forbes 30 under 30 Business insiders. 30 most creative people under 30. And as one of digit days changemakers. Prior to cheddar, she led BuzzFeed global creative team. If you want to know how to scale creative, and how to approach brand marketing, this is the episode for you. As always, the people digital marketing is a podcast dedicated to helping you impress your boss, and eventually helping you become your boss, the CMO, the marketing leader of an organization, and without further ado, let’s learn from Melissa Rosenthal.

Hi, Melissa, how are you? 

 

Melissa Rosenthal 1:34

I’m great. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

 

Kenny Soto  1:59

Awesome. So before I asked my first question, I just wanted to give a preview fuel to the listeners. I discovered Melissa on LinkedIn because of click ups, awesome. Creative that’s being posted almost every week. I think the first ad I saw was will chat TBT and AI replace you. It was an awesome oh to like those 90s Detective slash horror films. It was awesome creative I saw from a b2b company. And we’ll go deep into what Melissa is doing. I click up what clickup is, etc, for anyone that has no context. But before we even get into that, Melissa, my first question for you is how do you become a marker? 

 

Melissa Rosenthal  2:48  

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think I mean, I fell into a lot of what I ended up doing with my career, by by nature, I’ve always been interested in how to connect messages to people and have them resonate. So I don’t know, I think that was ingrained within me, I was very passionate about things growing up like music and bands. And I always wanted to tell people and spread the word. And I think that’s the most like, you know, kind of earliest stage of like, my marketing, right. And it was just a passion about telling people about things that I cared about. And then as I grew up, my dad had a career in event marketing. So on the weekends, I would help him, you know, just put on larger scale events just help out where I could, I thought it was really cool to create these experiential events where people could actually experience brands. And I thought that was very interesting. And then, as I went to college, and just got to be in the world, of kind of what marketing was at that time, which was very kind of in its infancy, or or in that capacity. It was also very old school, I fell into marketing in a in a new way, which was, you know, how do we build the media machine that can power the internet? For for millennials basically. And you know, in that a byproduct of that is a lot of like, how do you market to millennials? And how do you market to them through great content. So I kind of fell into it through just things I was very passionate about. I always just kind of followed my passions and follow the things that I thought might be the future and it wound up you know, building a really amazing and rewarding career in marketing. Awesome. That’s really cool. I listened to recently to a podcast this is for the listeners as well. It’s called My first million. And I think it was the episode that launched today. If not yesterday, they were talking about how one of the hardest businesses you can start is productivity software. So could you give listeners an overview of what clickup is, and what is your role? What do you do every day at Clico? So clickup is productivity software. It is the hardest and most competitive industry or category next to CRM. So that is right. And we are an all in one productivity platform that brings all of your work your goals, your dogs, your cats everything into one place. So you can work across your entire team and across your entire organization in one tool, which is really awesome, and it gives a ton of visibility. I wish I had click up my, the, you know, the past years of my career to it’s just such a great, great place to, to kind of work and honestly, like having all of your team work in one tool is just like mind blowing. It’s mind blowing ly efficient, and, and wonderful. So yeah, clickup is, is that all in one productivity platform?

 

Kenny Soto  5:39  

And what would you say is your day to day responsibilities at the organization?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  5:43  

Yeah, so I’m the chief creative officer. It’s interesting, because probably a new role for b2b companies that I’m actually seeing more often. And, you know, the interesting part is, originally, I was interviewing for the CMO job. And, you know, when we had a real like Heart to Heart conversation, I was like, I don’t want you know, your cmo who’s going to be driving your performance marketing campaigns. From an analytical standpoint, I don’t have the background and CAC payback. This is my first foray into into b2b. But I am a strong brand builder. And if I joined, I could completely differentiate clickup from every other player in the category. And you know, that was the vision it was, we want to build a 1020 year brand, and how do we do that through great creative and really strong brand. And let’s be the first b2b company to kind of act like a b2c company in the style in which we advertise and inserting humor and really connecting with, with people through, you know, emotional resonance.

 

Kenny Soto  6:44  

Yeah, and when I can think about the category specifically, I obviously don’t have full context, but I have to assume, features price, there’s like a cat and mouse game going on there. And then aside from customer support, you really have brand as part of that competitive infrastructure with that category, and then any other b2b software category in mind, I’ve seen and tell me if this isn’t a cliche, but I’ve seen a cliche, where performance growth and sometimes even product, supersede, and take more, more focused and brand, what’s the importance of establishing a brand personality from day one.

 

Melissa Rosenthal  7:30  

I mean, I think they all should go hand in hand where you know, your product marketing and your product, and everything is kind of like a, you know, a loop. And there’s a connective tissue that goes throughout. But I do think establishing that from day one means that you’re not playing catch up, you know, three years from now, when all of a sudden it’s like, hey, technology has been like completely democratized, it takes two months to build the features that it did, you know, years, you know, a year ago, it took three years, just because the the state of tech and that is moving so fast. Like what actually differentiates us when you can’t leap leapfrog yourself five years. So I think, you know, brand plays just such a pivotal role in being able to do that. It’s just such a competitive advantage. It’s have the best product and market and continue to move forward and build on that, and at the same time, have a really strong brand and market that allows you to be able to kind of like add fuel to that fire.

 

Kenny Soto  8:27  

So when it comes to the creative team, which in most cases owns the brand, and there’s collaboration across departments, what does it take to become the leader of a creative team? What kind of skills do you need to be successful in that role?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  8:45  

Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question. I mean, I think it’s a deep understanding of, of how to stand out. I mean, now, especially, I mean, there’s, there’s hard and they’re soft skills, there’s identifying great talent and being able to hire amazing people and trusting them to do best in class work. There’s that right. And I think a lot of creative leaders like Excel in that, but then there’s, you know, you can join a b2b brand and build a brand. That’s just status quo. There’s a lot of b2b companies out there that feel a look the same. They use the same color schemes, their advertising is Robert dry, it’s all feature focused. So I mean, I think like when I was looking to build this team, it was, it wasn’t the traditional, I’m gonna go to every other SaaS company and try to find their creatives and like coach them, it was I’m gonna pick people that have maybe never been in SAS before, and find the most talented people hard and soft skills across multi multi facets of you know, hard and hard technical skills, and hire them and see what they can do. And I think having that differentiated point of view and perspective and hiring people that have been in media before and understanding the landscape of where content would be headed, and where how content can fuel growth. That’s sort of how I approached it. So I think there’s just different ways of approaching it. My mentality and my viewpoint on how, and what I’m looking for. And what I was looking to build was probably very different than what a traditional creative director, or Chief Creative Officer at a traditional b2b company, or a b2b company that didn’t want to really excel and brand would have hired because a lot of them have it. They just, they don’t, they don’t operate like we do.

 

Kenny Soto  10:25  

When you have a lean team, and there’s one designer across product, and marketing, and then marketing, like each person has a request for designer, there’s a challenge that I’m finding where you have to be a good editor and taste maker, if you will. How would you define taste as a skill or editing in this case, as a skill? Is there a way to, to refine it?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  10:51  

I mean, yes, I think it also like a lot of that also ladders up to kind of the tone and the brand that you’ve built. Because once you have a framework of of your brand voice and how you speak and I think we’re talking about copy editing, if I’m not mistaken, right? Are we talking about?

 

Kenny Soto  11:10  

Well, it can be a combination of copy and design.

 

Melissa Rosenthal  11:13  

Okay. I mean, it all kind of stems up to the same thing. It’s like, does the does the message come through clearly through this design? Is it doing what it’s meant to do? Because ultimately, design is meant to both convey your brand and also a message in the most simplistic form. So how do you do that? And I think once you have that, like Northstar, if this is how we speak, this is how, you know this is our tonality. This is like what we stand for. It all should ladder to that. And then you’re able to then kind of like have a Northstar of No, it doesn’t do this because of x. I might have what what was the original question? Because I think I deviated a little bit. But

 

Kenny Soto  11:52  

it it’s really just, if someone’s new, yeah, to being an editor, what are some parts of the skill or things that they need to consider in this new role that they have editing content that’s being created, where they’re not the creator, but they now need to give direction to

 

Melissa Rosenthal  12:11  

the Creator? I mean, I think, again, I think it like really depends on what you’re editing. But at the end of the day, like, our team has, you know, our brand guidelines, our brand book, it’s very understood what that should that outcome should feel or look like or encapsulate, right. So I think it all kind of ladders up to having that and making sure that that directive is clear across your team. You know, that it doesn’t mean that that that’s so prescriptive, that they can infuse their own creativity into it, I never want to do that. But at the end of the day, you know, our motion graphics designer can say this feels really off brand for us, right? But instead of that he can also say this feels really off brand, or, Hey, I have an idea, why don’t we do this. And he knows how to do that, and infused, you know, a new portion of our motion language because it fits with our brand, and he wants to evolve it. So I think it’s a balance of like allowing your team to understand kind of the, hey, this is the barometer of what we want to produce. And this is the bar, and then at the same time, like allowing them to have that runway where they can infuse their own creativity into it while still aligning with the brand and up leveling it.

 

Kenny Soto  13:27  

What are your thoughts? I know brand guidelines are one foundational document and kind of key focus point to help with brand governance. What are your thoughts on a creative team having a team swipe file where they’re not necessarily just following like brand guidelines, but they’re constantly sourcing inspiration for future ideas?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  13:53  

Yeah, I mean, I think brand guidelines are there, like that failsafe, like, hey, is this really missing the mark before it goes to stakeholders, but I don’t think that they are the things that should prevent you from exploration and iteration of of that, and I would never have them there as this like, Hey, don’t try different things. And I think there’s a huge difference. I mean, some companies like, you know, that are much bigger than us, actually, you know, to some extent, I think certain, certain certain groups within those companies are allowed to experiment more. Like, you know, Google, for example, has very, very Apple Google, very, very clear definitions of their brand guidelines, but within certain campaigns, and certain, you know, segments and certain like areas within the company, they experiment in really cool creative ways. And not that it doesn’t feel like apple but you’re like, oh, wow, that’s an apple lab. It’s really awesome. Like they’re continuing to innovate even though that they have this very clearly defined Brand Book. That is is, you know, probably rock solid, but it doesn’t prevent innovation. So I think that’s the, you know, the balance that you want to strike always.

 

Kenny Soto  15:08  

You mentioned earlier that one of the key skills to being a good leader of a creative team is finding good talent recruiting. And this ties perfectly with our community question, which comes from the head of marketing of fun, nada, Destiny de. And she asks, How did you scale your internal team and built an in house agency? What advice do you have for anyone who’s considering taking the same path?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  15:35  

Yeah. So I think you can still do it in a lean way. But it does require investment, that’s not, you know, that’s like a real thing. So my first suggestion is to create a proposal and get buy in for what you exactly you need and what you’re going to be able to produce, how it’s going to differentiate you what the outcomes are going to be, what the expectation would be, and align with leadership and key stakeholders on that, because you never want to, you know, like, cheap out on the investments that you actually need to make to make it run really well. Where people don’t think it’s a success. But at the same time, you definitely need that buy in, I mean, I think it’s kind of easier than ever to really get that buy in, because of the way that you know, content is moving, people are producing, like, you know, tons of different pieces of content across video and performance marketing, and every type of content, ebook, everything you can imagine and to go to market strategy. But I think, you know, to build that agency and house, there are a lot of benefits. First of all, you know, there’s there’s an education process that needs to happen for anyone that hasn’t worked within an agency or been around that before. And the reality is, external agencies are able to push up their numbers so that their margins are really great. So a video that might cost them 20k To produce they charge $200,000. For now, can you imagine if you were creating 20 campaigns a year, or you want to create more, because you think that volume and consistency matters a lot, which I believe it does. And you can have a team that creates videos that look like they were produced for $100,000 for less than 1000. Now you start to think about the volume and at what, at what number and it would velocity in which you’re producing? Would it actually make sense to do that in house rather than paying crazy margins? Now that’s one right, just financials. The second piece would be, how can you differentiate yourself by making sure that you have people in house that have worked with the brand, understand the brand, connect with everyone at the company. So you don’t just have, you know, a random team working on your account and 50 other accounts. So there’s a lot of benefits to it. It, you know, again, it requires that investment, but the investment pays for itself, especially if you’re creating at the volume that we are. And it’s also just beneficial, because you have a team of people that are dedicated to your product and your brand. Their mission solely is to create the best possible thing to grow it. It’s not a project, it’s not often in the bucket, it’s something that they’re a part of building. And in many times they have equity and a stake in it too, which I think makes all the difference. So those are the two sides, I would I would say it’s you know, strictly financially, it makes a lot of sense if you’re producing a lot of content. And then from the side of actually having people that understand your brand deeply.

 

Kenny Soto  18:29  

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Melissa Rosenthal  20:19  

yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would say at Series A, and even at seed, you should probably hire one or two people that are working on creative. You know, obviously, you need a designer for brand, and maybe a motion graphics designer, and you should start to think about building that muscle Series A, you can build it a little bit more, and by the time your series B, you’re gonna want to start building out, even if it’s not a full fledged agency, at least to half of that, where you have a bunch of people in charge of your brand, internally, I think that becomes very important. Now we built out, I would say, half of our agency at Series B. And, you know, moving into Series C, we built out the remainder of it, where you know, we fully kind of built on it. But we did hire people involved in video very early on, because we were going to venture a lot into performance marketing. And we wanted our ads to feel unique and not cheap and really highly produced. And really awesome. And you know, having that creative perspective and then building that muscle, but also building that brand voice and being able to do that time and time again, and iterate and have the same people on it, and learn from past experiences. I think that’s invaluable.

 

Kenny Soto  21:29  

This is a quick tidbit of advice for the listener, when you were mentioning that. One thing that I would recommend you do like for me personally, I don’t make hiring decisions for the marketing team. But one way that I’m impressing my boss, is I create, like a personnel swipe file, just jotting down, if we had the budget, who are these people that are sharing content on LinkedIn and Twitter based on their creative powers that we want to reach out to and recruit in the future, you don’t need to make the hiring decision yourself, especially if you don’t have the ability to do so. But you can only say, Hey, I’ve done some legwork for you, the person who’s going to be doing the recruiting. Here’s a list of 15 people who I think would be great motion graphics, editors or creators. Here’s somebody who I think would be a great copywriter, a great love designer, etc, etc.

 

Melissa Rosenthal  22:18  

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a, it’s never too early to pick people that you’re you’re fond of and who are great in the in their skill set and that you admire and that you’d love to poach. If you could, I think that’s great. And then if your boss is like, do it, then you’re like, I have a list of people that I want to go after.

 

Kenny Soto  22:35  

Yeah. Melissa, do you pay attention to your competition?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  22:40  

Yeah, of course, I think it’s, it’s always it’s always important to do that. Not that it means that you need to copy what they’re doing or follow them. But of course, you should stay abreast of what they’re doing. And market.

 

Kenny Soto  22:50  

I feel like there’s certain times where like, market research is important. But like you can you can spend too much time doing it. How do you find a balance between being aware of what the competition is doing, but not copying them? Doing your own? Like taking your own path?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  23:05  

I mean, I think it’s always that way. It’s always like, let’s see what they’re doing. And then what is our angle? And how would we position this differently, even if we’re trying to say similar things and market because at that point, you are, you’re taking inspiration from, hey, oh, this was clever. I like the way they did this. I like the way they inserted this. I mean, what’s really been interesting is if you know, what I’ve seen in some of our competition has taken some of the things that we’ve done, and tried to like recreate versions of that maybe like slightly different too. But you’ve seen them infuse more humor into their ads, or they’ve cursed in their ads or things that like you would never imagine some of these companies to be doing, they’re starting to do now. And you know, you have to like imagine that some of that might be taken from our playbook a little bit. So you see it, you see it a lot. All of a sudden, all these companies started using our tagline in their marketing, you know, the one, the 1x to replace them all. So you know, you start to see it a lot. And it’s kind of it’s fun, it’s cool. I mean, it obviously means that you’re doing something, right. But you never want to remain stagnant. You want to always move forward and you know, iterate on your own stuff to

 

Kenny Soto  24:13  

speaking of iteration, how do you personally level up your social strategy and effectively experiment on new platforms?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  24:21  

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a it’s a big challenge, like new platforms are not they’re not a whole in one and so it’s like constant experimentation and iteration with different series. It’s never sticking to one thing and assuming that’s going to work it’s constantly throwing things at the wall that still resonate with your you know, your core audiences your brand, but can also potentially be hits. So you know, I mean, we try things all the time. It’s, you know, we’re coming up with constantly coming up with ideas, never resting on the fact that one thing is going to work. So we might make three episodes of something and then if it doesn’t work, we kill it. And you might never see it again. So it’s really like you know, playing to it. people’s attention spans. They’re not they’re not you know, this isn’t Game of Thrones, and they’re not tuning in for that next episode of acts unless they start to and then great, like, carry that with you and build on it. But but that should never be the expectation, that should be the exception.

 

Kenny Soto  25:17  

Is your team using any old content? And if so how?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  25:21  

Oh, yeah, I mean, we look at our old stuff all the time, and we see what worked. And then we iterate on that, and we take, you know, we’ll Frankenstein it a bit and be like, oh, people love this aspect of this video, for our new campaign, we’re gonna we’re gonna take this and infuse it with that, maybe not the same exact treatment, but definitely the ideas will will certainly do that. I mean, when we when we started to do history ads, and we decided on what our Superbowl ad would be, we obviously like did histories and then that was because we had seen it work. So um, yeah, we’re constantly looking at what is performed, and what hasn’t, what people resonate with, and then taking bits and pieces of that and infusing it in future creative, I think it’s always good to look at that. I’m looking at things that have worked in the past in terms of formats, right? Like, we do a lot with like, kind of tropes of formats, like pharmaceutical ads, and infomercials. And things where people can get that immediate context of like, I understand what I’m watching, what is this? And I think that’s great, because immediately they’re drawn in, they know, they’re watching an infomercial, but they’re, they’re like, what is it? What more is there to this infomercial? Or this looks like a pharmaceutical ad, but it’s not. So what is it, but immediately grabbing people with that, like, I know what this reference is? The reference point, I think, is a really smart thing. So in terms of looking at old content, our own but then other like styles, you know, I think that’s a it’s a great way to operate.

 

Kenny Soto  26:42  

Three more questions for you. What do you wish new incoming team members on the creative team at clickup? knew before joining your team is not necessarily a skill, because they got hired based on X, Y, and Z showcase in their interview, but what do you wish they knew about clickup?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  27:03  

That’s a good question. What do I wish they knew about clickup? Um, you know, that’s a hard one, because I think we try to hire people that align really well with our core values. So not even about like knowing about clickup. But knowing about, like, what is expected, obviously, there are people that don’t work out. But you know, the people that do like, I think we hire them very much, because they’re in line with the value and belief system of what our values are as a company, and they aspire to grow and be, you know, kind of like uplevel themselves and work collaboratively with others and really view it as a team effort. So I don’t know if I can answer that question specifically. But I think people that join clickup are generally aligned to that belief system, which makes them work out, or they learn while they’re there. And maybe it’s something that they didn’t need to know before. But now that they’re here, they are like, Oh, this is exciting. I’m gonna, I’m gonna jump into this, or I’m gonna learn more about this. And, you know, the product is really cool, because you get visibility into autumn, other things that other teams are working on, which creates this, like cross company collaboration that I think not other not many other companies probably have.

 

Kenny Soto  28:15  

This isn’t related to marketing, but it is related to how we work in 2020. Okay. How do you deal with loneliness? In a remote work world?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  28:25  

It’s almost like you took that from my LinkedIn? Yeah, it’s, it’s like a good question. And I think, like, what I wrote about was the fact that I, I was in an executive physician from like, very early on in my career, and it became increasingly lonely as I was the same age as the peers that I was managing. And I was dealing with higher level executive level meetings and things that I couldn’t, you know, share with them. So you become isolated in that, and maybe even your friends are not meant that levels, so they can’t relate to your problems or your challenges. What people always say is find a mentor, find a mentor. And that’s like, not that easy. I think it’s, it’s a balance of writing a lot. And like being your own kind of, like best mentor in the way that you can see yourself grow over time and relate to your own challenges, and then understand like, how you’ve grown from them. And then I do think it’s finding groups that are supportive, executive level groups, people that you can, you know, talk to whether it’s in person or on Zoom, I’m a part of a bunch of those now, and they’ve been really, really helpful because what you realize is everyone is going through this. And I think, you know, LinkedIn has kind of made it possible to voice some of these like work challenges that I think people were really afraid of talking about, but I think people have become more vulnerable with the challenges they face at work and the loneliness and the things that come along with you know, the things that used to I guess, be taboo to talk about, but it’s a reality I mean, how can how can it not be when you know, you’re you’re not confiding in your, you know, your executive peers. but you’re just not like that’s not what you’re doing. You’re not maybe confiding in your friends, maybe your your significant other, if you have one is, is busy working on their own thing? Are you really confiding in them I’m sure a little bit but you know, at the end of the day, I think it’s about finding these groups that can can foster the the, you know, connection and, and conversation around some of the things that a lot of people and a lot of people in the same situations we’re dealing with.

 

Kenny Soto  30:24  

Melissa, my last question for you is hypothetical, because time machines do not exist. But if one did you can go back into the past about 10 years, knowing everything you know, today, how would you specifically accelerate the speed of your career?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  30:41  

That is a great question. Um, I feel like my career has gone pretty fast. I don’t know if I would accelerate it anymore. Because I think I’m still fairly young for where I am. And I think that many times within my career, I haven’t stopped and enjoyed the journey enough. So in terms of acceleration, I don’t know if that’s actually a good thing. Because I, I did give up a lot. And I sacrificed a lot. And I’m starting to learn to like, really enjoy the process. And I’ve only been able to do that over the past couple of years. So I don’t know, if I would have accelerated, it felt like it’s gone pretty fast. And I’ve accomplished a lot, and I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. And I think, you know, your journey is your journey for a reason. And it’s worked out in the way where I think like, everything happens for a reason. So I don’t think I would do anything to accelerate it. I think I’m on the right path that works for me, and I’m just trying to, like, not slow down my journey, but flow down and take stock of, you know, what I’ve accomplished and what I’m proud of and, and what I what I love about what I do and what I love about the journey, and in general.

 

Kenny Soto  31:52  

That’s, that’s great to hear. It’s good, because I feel like sometimes I rush things. Yeah. And that’s usually when mistakes happen. Yeah. And,

 

Melissa Rosenthal  31:59  

to your point, I just like to add on to that, like, of course, I’ve gone back and been like, Oh my God, I wish I was, I wish I was here or I wish I was here when I was here. Like that is just, that’s a poisonous way to like look at life. Because you know, you’re always going to then be comparing yourself to something else. And, and in reality, you should be proud of what you’ve accomplished already. And put steps in place to get to the next level of what you want in your career. But to try to accelerate it to a place in which like, it just isn’t isn’t wouldn’t be a healthy way of looking at that for me.

 

Kenny Soto  32:34  

If anyone wanted to say hello to you online, Melissa, where can they go to find you?

 

Melissa Rosenthal  32:38  

They can find me on LinkedIn pretty easily. Just type in Melissa Rosenthal, and send me a DM I respond to all of them. I responded to you message me on LinkedIn. Right? So I do. I really do respond to everyone. So if you have a question, feel free to reach out. Always happy to chat.

 

Kenny Soto  32:55  

Thank you, Melissa, for your time today and being for being on the podcast. And thank you to you listener for listening to another episode of people digital marketing. And if you haven’t done so please subscribe and share this with a co worker because the best way for this podcast to grow is for more marketers to discover it. And as always, I hope everyone has a great day. On the next episode of the podcast, we will have Jim Kraus, the president of buyer persona Institute. And we will be talking about buyer personas and how to make them useful. We’re going to look past the demographics and focus more on buyer insights so that your marketing teams can know how to sell effectively to your target customer. If you liked this interview with Melissa Rosenthal, you will definitely like the next interview with Jim Krause. If you haven’t done so, please subscribe, rate this podcast and share it with your coworkers. And as always, I hope you have a great day