How to maintain Energy as a Leader navigating change with the former CRO at Caxton

When you look at many revenue leaders’ CVs, you see a familiar pattern: SDR, AE, Manager, Director, CRO and all within the same industry.

Melanie Vivi Mills had a very unique pathway.

She started out serving drinks and styling customers in Harvey Nichols, moved into cosmetics and creative agency work, then pivoted into edtech, fintech and finally into the CRO seat at Caxton which is a pioneering UK fintech. 

Today she’s the Founder & CEO of Connection Career Collective (CCC), a community built to support career-driven women (and their allies) in underrepresented industries and roles.

On the Sales Transformation Lab podcast, Mel sat down with Matt to talk about three big topics that are front-of-mind for modern go-to-market leaders:

• How to manage and project energy as a leader, especially in tough markets
  
  
• Why community and trusted networks are your real growth engine
  
  
• How AI is reshaping the profile of sales talent and why junior talent still matters

Beneath it all was a core belief:

In a world where everyone can access the same tools and technology, your people are your last, and most powerful, differentiator.

Let’s break down the key lessons from Mel’s journey.

The Unconventional Path: What a “Squiggly” Career Teaches You About Sales

Mel’s career story is anything but linear:

• Hospitality, bars and learning how to read people
  
  
• Fashion retail at Harvey Nichols and becoming the go-to for customers who’d leave with a full look, not just one item
  
  
• A creative agency funded by the Prince’s Trust which involved music, fashion, lookbooks and events
  
  
• Hourglass Cosmetics, a growing the UK, then the global brand
  
  
• Edtech – building and leading a 40-person sales team, moving from B2C to B2B and leadership programmes
  
  
• Fintech and Caxton – creating new B2B propositions, from faster payroll payments to M&A disbursements, and building payments-as-a-service
  
  
• And finally: Connection Career Collective, born from a community she first built inside Caxton
  
  

What’s the through-line across all these chapters?

• Curiosity – an obsession with understanding people, their lifestyle, their needs
  
  
• Problem solving – not “selling” but “helping someone leave better than they arrived”
  
  
• Bravery in transition – not being scared to step into new industries
  
  

That mindset has shaped how she hires too. She doesn’t hunt for “10 years doing this exact role in this exact sector.” She looks for attitude, behaviours, creativity, and a growth mindset.

In other words: she hires for potential, not just pattern-matching.

Your Personal Advisory Board: Stop Doing This Journey Alone

One theme that came up early in the conversation: Mel never tried to “make it” alone.

From the Prince’s Trust days onwards, she’s always had what she calls a “personal advisory board” and people she can turn to for challenge, perspective and support.

A few key principles she shared:

• Your advisory board should change as you grow. Different stages need different voices.
  
  
• Don’t surround yourself with clones of you. You need people who think differently and will actually challenge you.
  
  
• Be intentional. Mel has actively approached people she’s met at events, in sales conversations, or through partnerships and asked:
  “Would you mind giving me some time? I’d love to pick your brains.”
  
  

She’s applied the same philosophy inside her own teams, mentoring people long after they’ve moved on, and now doing it at scale through CCC.

For leaders listening to this, the takeaway is straightforward:

If you’re trying to navigate AI disruption, tighter markets and changing talent profiles alone, you’re making it harder than it needs to be. Build your board. 

AI, Risk Aversion and the Vanishing Junior Role

We can’t talk about the future of sales without talking about AI.

Matt shared what many GTM leaders are seeing: some organisations are shrinking their graduate and entry-level intake, choosing instead to:

• Automate junior/analyst work with AI
  
  
• Use the freed-up budget to hire more “proven” senior profiles

On the surface, it sounds logical.

But Mel sees a big problem.

The risk: an empty talent pipeline

If you remove junior roles:

• Who are you training to be your future leaders?
  
  
• Who brings fresh thinking, hunger and energy into the business?
  
  
• What happens when everyone is “experienced” but tired and resistant to new ways of working?

Mel’s view is clear:

• AI should remove the boring, repetitive work, not eliminate humans
  
  
• The organisations that win will be the ones that still invest in early-career talent – and build structured ways to grow them
  
  
• Cross-industry hires are a massive opportunity: someone who’s sold in a totally different sector but has the mindset, curiosity and creativity you need
  
  

The companies who default to “safe” hires might get shorter-term predictability… but risk becoming stale, tired and undifferentiated.

Energy as a Leadership Skill (Not a Nice-to-Have)

The word that kept coming up in the conversation?

Energy.

In Q4, with markets tight and net-new revenue harder to secure, energy is often the first thing to disappear for both leaders and teams.

Mel sees energy as both:

• A performance lever – your own energy fuels your team’s motivation and resilience
  
  
• A responsibility – if you’re the leader, you can’t preach high energy while modelling burnout and resentment

So how does she think about managing energy in practice?

Quarterly breaks, not annual collapse

One of her simplest but most powerful recommendations:
Treat your year like a set of quarters and build in proper resets.

That might mean:

• Encouraging leaders to have a meaningful break every quarter, not just a single long holiday once a year
  
  
• Designing your operating rhythm so you actually pause to reflect on:
  
  
  
  • What worked?
    
    
  • What didn’t?
    
    
  • What do we change before the next quarter?
    
    

You can’t sustain peak performance on a continuous, never-ending monthly treadmill. Sales might forecast monthly – but humans don’t reset that way.

Sport, movement and leading by example

Mel’s own energy toolkit includes:

• Netball in the evenings
  
  
• Encouraging running clubs and sports within her teams
  
  
• Talking openly about health, routines and energy, not just pipeline and targets
  
  

She’s honest that she wasn’t always great at “leaving the office” during the day but she was clear that:

You can’t demand high energy from a team if you’re not showing them what it looks like to look after your own.

Community and the Power of “Give First” Networks

If energy is one half of Mel’s leadership philosophy, community is the other.

Connection Career Collective (CCC) was born from something she saw while working with payrollers, accountants, and financial services teams:

• A huge amount of female talent
  
  
• Very few of those women making it into partnership or senior leadership roles
  
  

When she had a platform at Caxton, she used it to build the Caxton Career Collective – an internal/external community focused on supporting underrepresented professionals. That later evolved into the standalone Connection Career Collective.

What CCC actually does

CCC now operates across two main dimensions:

1. For individuals (B2C)
   
   
   
   • Career programmes & coaching
     
     
   • Personal brand and visibility support
     
     
   • Networking and events
     
     
   • Mentoring and advisory connections
     
     
2. For organisations (B2B)
   
   
   
   • Programmes to support women and underrepresented talent in progressing
     
     
   • Access to a trusted ecosystem of mentors, coaches and experts
     
     
   • An external community to complement (not replace) internal mentorship schemes
     
     

The model is intentionally “pay it forward”:

• There’s no monthly subscription wall
  
  
• Senior leaders are encouraged to bring someone with them
  
  
• The expectation is giving, not taking but value naturally flows both ways
  
  

This is where community intersects with commercial outcome:
People who give, introduce, open doors, and help others solve problems build trusted networks that fuel their entire career.

Mel’s rule of thumb?

If I can’t help you, I’ll introduce you to three people who probably can.

That single habit has powered her transitions, her business growth, and the expansion of CCC.

Personal Brand: Not “Influencing” Just Owning Your Expertise

Matt raised a common objection he hears from leaders:

“Personal brand just isn’t my thing.”

Mel’s response is simple: if you know it’s important and you’re blocked, get help.

She’s invested heavily in:

• Coaching
  
  
• Programmes that help leaders articulate:
  
  
  
  • Who they are
    
    
  • What they stand for
    
    
  • What they want to be known for
    
    
• Building structured content habits – especially on LinkedIn
  
  

But she’s careful with language. “Brand” can feel off-putting or self-indulgent for some leaders, especially in corporates. Instead, she reframes it as:

• Your personal profile
  
  
• The way you amplify what you’re already doing
  
  
• A way for clients, peers and future employers or partners to understand how you think and what you care about
  
  

And she’s clear on one more thing:
LinkedIn is your space. Yes, respect corporate guidelines – but your voice shouldn’t disappear just because you’re an employee.

Leaders who embrace that tend to:

• Attract more opportunities
  
  
• Build stronger networks
  
  
• Hit quota faster because people already know them before the first call
  
  

In a people-first, trust-driven market, that’s not a nice-to-have. It’s a competitive advantage.

People as Your Final Differentiator

As Matt put it towards the end of the episode:

When everybody has access to the same technology, tools, messaging and outbound tactics, your humans are the last differentiator for your business.

Mel agrees – and adds the nuance:

• People are your biggest asset
  
  
• People are also your biggest cost

So if you’re not investing in their:

• Energy and wellbeing
  
  
• Community and network
  
  
• Skills, adaptability and growth mindset
  
  
• Visibility and voice
  
  

…you’re missing the leverage that truly moves the needle.

That’s where Uhubs and initiatives like CCC intersect:

• Uhubs gives leaders data and insight on capability and performance gaps, plus targeted development through its LMS and coaching tools.
  
  
• Communities like CCC provide the human ecosystem such as mentors, allies, role models and peers which help people turn that development into real career momentum.
  
  

Technology points at the problem.
Humans solve it.

Final Thoughts: Designing for a Human-Centred Future of Work

The narrative around the future of work can feel overwhelmingly negative:
AI will replace jobs. Graduate programmes are shrinking. Leaders are burnt out.

This conversation with Mel is a reminder that there’s another way to look at it:

• AI can take the admin and give humans space for the creative, relational work we’re uniquely built for.
  
  
• Junior talent can still be the engine room of energy and innovation, if we’re brave enough to invest.
  
  
• Communities and networks can become career safety nets and launchpads, not just “nice to have” LinkedIn groups.
  
  
• Personal brand isn’t vanity, it's how you make your expertise and values visible in a noisy market.
  
  

And above all:

If you want to build high-performing, resilient revenue teams, you can’t ignore energy, your own or your team’s.

• Quarter by quarter.
• Reset by reset.
• Conversation by conversation.

That’s where transformation actually happens.

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