Today’s guest is a bit of an adrenaline junky. He’s done everything from skydiving to bungee jumping and more. Gil Allouche is the CEO of metadata.io. After suffering through 8 years of pain that all marketers go through, he built his company to take some of that stress away. Gil joins host Valerie Cobb to talk about how to find your way out of the revenue maze.

Takeaways

• To get out of the revenue maze, you want to lead with action. If things are slowing down at your company it’s your responsibility to take ownership and get it back on track.
• Starting a company during a recession is a great way to get your company started. Necessity is the mother of invention.
• During a recession, there aren’t as many high valuations and it will help so that when the recession ends your company will boom.
• Marketing in this day and age is more about A B testing rather than being something similar to Mad Men.
• The sales and marketing teams at companies should work side by side and have enough trust with each other.
• You want to build up your brand because it’s going to be hard to sell your brand and product if no one knows about it.
• You need to have a company culture of trust and accountability, and everyone should know that it takes time to build up a company.

Quote of the Show:

2:10 “If you show up every morning and you work on it, 200%,. I guarantee things will happen. Magic will happen. All the things that you hope for will start happening”

Links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gilallouche/
• Website: https://metadata.io/

Ways to Tune In

• Amazon Music – https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7d80f727-4d62-4d16-a0c9-96ec7bda6c6b/the-revenue-maze
• Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/6azAXp0qFgrmjcql0jeJM8
• Google Podcast – https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmV2ZW51ZW1hemUuY29tL2ZlZWQueG1s
• YouTube – https://youtu.be/GIXjzcOONyA

The Revenue Maze is produced by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through B2B podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Taking Ownership for Entrepreneurs – Gil Allouche – The Revenue Maze

I have a great guest. He’s fascinating to me. He always tells me he’s not an adrenaline junkie, but you can decide that. He’s into skydiving, scuba diving, and all of that fun stuff, but there’s a little bit of adrenaline in there for sure. He was one of the youngest entrepreneurs that I’ve ever met. At age eight, he used to smuggle.

I used that word because it’s so fun. He used to smuggle firecrackers across the border. It was France because who checks an eight-year-old backpack and would go sell them? He’s very much an entrepreneur. He did suffer eight years of pain in marketing, and he understands what they’ve gone through, which has led him to be CEO of Metadata.io. Welcome, Gil Allouche.

Thank you. I’m happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

This is going to be a fun show. As I told you, we always start with the audience wanting to hear your thoughts on what is one thing that you can tell them to help them get out of the revenue maze. Don’t tell me about firecrackers smuggling across the border.

The one thing I always come back to is to get started. Lead with action. If you’re an entrepreneur, a founder, and you’re stuck, you haven’t started a company yet, but you’ve been wanting to or you started and it’s getting slower, I always tell, and I have a few companies that I advise, move into the action lane. Obsessed about it and put 200% of your time into it. If you show up every morning, and you work on it 200%, I guarantee, things will happen. Magic will happen. All the things that you hope for will start happening but you have to move into that mindset and move away from the thinking, concerns, and fear. That usually gets you on the wrong path. That’ll be my one thing.

If you want to get out of the revenue maze, you have to start leading with action.

Get in the action lane. I love it. Give us some tips on how you’ve done that because it’s easy to say, “Give 200%, be active, lead by action, and all this stuff,” but a lot of people feel that that’s pretty daunting. Give us a few pointers.

I can give you a few examples. Some of them are more appropriate. Some of them are less. I’ll start with the appropriate one. When I started the company, I wanted to start it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t master the courage to put on LinkedIn that I am a Founder of a startup. The moment that you do that, I don’t know about others, but at least for me, I was very nervous. Everyone is going to look at me and say, “Gil, congrats. Now what?” Every day, every week, every month, they’re going to ask me, “How is the company going? Is it going well? Did you have customers? Did you raise money?”

I’m going to tell them, “No, none of those things. It takes forever.” I hadn’t done any of those things yet. There was a meeting where I was invited to speak about marketing with a bunch of marketers. It was a Bessemer Ventures event in which I was invited to speak to CMOs. I was talking about the decade I spent as a marketer and the methodology I came up with to do experimentation in marketing and how it led me to a successful career as a marketer.

There were so many hands being raised, questions, and people interested and asking me, “What is it? Can we work with you?” I realized, “A lot of my potential customers are here, and they want to work with me.” I told them, “By the way, I started a company around that. If you want to work with me, I’ll be more than happy to set some time with you.” If you looked at my LinkedIn back then, it didn’t show anything like that.

During the coffee break of that meeting, I went quickly to a sofa and opened my computer. I logged into LinkedIn, and I did the new position as Founder, still a startup, and clicked okay. That was that moment where I took the courage and said, “I’m doing it, and I’m doing it now. I’m not going to be judged, and I don’t care. This is going to be the moment in which I’m moving from thinking about it to doing it.”

That’s a great story. I love Brené Brown where she talks about courage. I forgot at the beginning to tell the audience that you’ve lived in 35 countries.

I haven’t lived, I traveled to 35 countries.

How many countries have you lived in?

Only three. 4 if you include the 5 months in India.

I remember it being more than just one location, which takes courage in and of itself, but also the fact that in certain cultures, you’re either in the military for a couple of years, you’re in those things. Most people know, and don’t hate me for it, I’m a Jocko Willink fan who was a Navy SEAL. He wrote the book Extreme Ownership, buttoning up with Brené Brown. She talks about vulnerability being the first step to courage.

You always exhibit vulnerability, and then you have this courage that you take and then that action happens. I’ve always thought about that, and you’re talking about being at that moment where it’s almost like, “I either do this or don’t.” Getting that courage up to say, “This is what I am.” Now you’re in action lane, and it’s like, “I’m in this action lane. I am going to keep going. It’s happening.” I said already you’re an adrenaline junkie. It probably has been quite a ride for you too.

I’m also a bit of a Jocko fan. It has been a ride. When I started a company, I was having a conversation with some of my team about the future of the company. I was telling them that when I started it, my limiting thoughts made me think about it in a fairly small way. For many people, unless they have a personal example from a family member or close friend that made it big, they have no idea what it means. I remember after military service, I worked at a company and was working as a computer programmer, but in a robotics manufacturing site.

I was fairly young. I was 22 or 23 years old. The friends I had were mostly the workers of that manufacturing facility like the logistics people. They were my friends. I was trying to convince this dude who was a good friend of mine to go to university versus buying a car. He was saving money, and I was like, “Go to university.” He was like, “Why would I go to university? I don’t know anyone who went to the university and didn’t waste their money. They’re still working in such and such.” I told him, “You could be the one.” There are millions of examples.

I say that because when I started the company, the only example I knew was a friend who started a company, got it to a couple of million-dollar revenue and sold it, and then did it over and over. That’s what I thought the brightest future looked like. One of the cool things about starting a company, there’s a lot of adrenaline in it, is to realize that the possibilities of your dreams are much wider. You can achieve so much more. If you believe in yourself, work hard, commit to it, and you’re in that action lane, you can do unbelievable things and it’ll work. If you don’t quit, things will work out.

That’s been one of the biggest learnings for me. Managing that internal psyche and getting on with all the challenges, bypassing them, and then keep growing as a person, as an entrepreneur, and as a leader. It sounds such a cliché when I hear myself talking about those things, but it is true. To me, that is the biggest reward of this startup because it has been my personal growth lab for the past years. It’s such a blessing that I don’t think I would have had the opportunity to grow that wave if it wasn’t for the company.

I love that you said growth lab and self-limiting beliefs. We talked about the show being The Revenue Maze, but some of the challenges with revenue, and whether we talk about it in light of streams of revenue coming in through a growth phase or whatever, we want to talk about revenue in light of it does boil down to forecasting what you can do. If you have limiting beliefs, sometimes you undershoot as much as you overshoot. I have people who say, “We want accuracy. We don’t want to shoot over and under.” It’s limiting to me.

I’ve always wondered because we’re shooting for accuracy, I get that, but I don’t think you ever bound things. You bound them for the moment. If we talk about the snapshot in time, “This is what we want to achieve by this time.” Why wouldn’t you celebrate that it was even better than you thought it would be or the data set it would be?

I’ll tell you why. From what I can tell, it’s completely limiting. When you shoot for $1 billion, you either made it to the billion or you fail to $500 million. I was telling my wife when I do a workout, if I think I’m going to do 30 push-ups, then I’m going to do 30 push-ups max. I’m feeling good about it, but it’s like, “Why not 50?” If I try to do 50, then maybe I do 50, maybe I do 45, maybe I do 41, but it’s definitely going to be more than 30.

The reason the accuracy comes is because of the stock market. People want to have a good idea of how a company wants to perform, and they can make money either by longing or shortening it. They can say it’s going to do better or worse, and based on their bet, they’re going to make money. Whether the company crashes and burns, if that’s how they predicted the company is going to go, they’re going to make a lot of money. That’s a public company like 10,000 people company, not a startup. With a startup, you need to be realistic, but not too realistic. You have to have a crazy goal in mind and do the best you can to achieve that goal, and if you fall, you fall short of that star and not a very interesting goal, to begin with.

I don’t know if it was my mom or if it was something, I got to qualify that. I’m not sure where I got it, but it was around that time. There was a thing that was like, “It’s better to shoot for the stars and miss than shoot for a pile of manure and hit.” I’m fortunate, I get to interview a lot of different leaders of companies at different stages in the life cycles of their companies. Fear and self-limiting beliefs sometimes cause a lot more problems than people think.

The energy in the universe comes back to that. If you think you’re going under, you’re going under. We’re talking about recessions. If people forget that even in the global depression of the ‘30s, there were industries that were excelling. We all focus on limiting belief. With the recession now, it’s like, “I don’t want to buy a house now because next year, it might be X.” Especially in the United States, the lifespan of a mortgage for a house is 30 years.

A lot can happen. Unless you’re in the real estate market like a developer or some of those things where you’re doing that, you’ve got a lot of people that are going, “I can’t do this.” Yet, they’re missing out on many great opportunities because we’re hearing the word recession, and we’re also hearing the word Great Resignation. What does that mean? That means a lot of job opportunities are out there too.

I couldn’t agree more. I have a friend who is starting a company, and he was talking about the recession. I told him, “Please Google for a second about companies that started in recession because the biggest, most successful companies in the world started in a recession.” There is no better opportunity. Many times, it starts out of necessity. There is a recession and you can’t find a job, so you’re creating a job.

That might be the actual story, but the truth is, in a recession, there are millions of opportunities. All BS is aside. Suddenly, the truth comes out in a recession. What is actually needed? There are no crazy valuations and insane investments coming through. You have to build a business that is fundamentally extremely healthy.

When the market is back, now you’re a super strong company in a thriving economy. You’re going to boom. The rocket ship is going to happen even further. I truly think that a recession is the best time to start a company. Those hard times are the best time to differentiate yourself, because 99% of the population is going to go one way, and you’re going to be that unique person who goes and finds opportunity in that adversity.

Recession is the best time to start a company. Be that unique person who goes and finds opportunity in adversity.

I always say marketers are the insatiable beast. You banged your head up against the wall and you’re a glutton for punishment. Let’s talk about that a little bit and start dealing with and building a company Metadata.io.

When I think about it, particularly B2B marketing, especially now, is a little bit of a bait and switch. People go to marketing thinking, “Don Draper for Mad Men.” They started a job and realized, “This is no Don Draper for Mad Men. This is no whiskey in the middle of the day and showing cool presentations.” This is more like AB testing a subject line 7 times, changing UTM tags 1,000 times, and getting into Google AdWords, Facebook, and attribution and 17 different applications.

As a marketer, that was my life. It was funny. I moved into marketing because, post-MBA, I needed to pay for my MBA. That was a good job that I had. I found it in Boston, and I thought that I was going to be doing cool marketing campaigns all day. That was not at all what I ended up doing. I ended up running a lot of email campaigns, buying data, moving data around, and doing analytics. For me, it was cool because I’m a technical person and a software engineer, so I enjoy the technical, automation, and scientific parts of the work.

For me, it was amazing. I realized I have a competitive advantage. I also realized that the rest of my marketer friends, they’re hating it. They don’t like doing it. They’re hiring consultants and agencies and anyone they can find, even programmers, to do some of that growth work for them. That’s when I realized there was a huge and insane opportunity where, what’s possible from a technology point of view and what’s available now from marketing software, that gap is insane.

The technology, the machine learning models, robotic process automation, and operating software via RESTful APIs instead of point and click a thousand times that is available, but unused, and no one tackled it. It’s a beast to try to fix it. It’s not going to be three months of development and you have a company. It’s more like three years and you have a foundation in technology. It seemed like an opportunity that if I didn’t jump on, I would forever regret it. That was the driver truly.

That gap but what is possible and no one is doing it was the driver to do it. There is so much frustration out there for marketers who are doing technical, repetitive, mundane tasks over and over every day and not liking them. That’s the vast majority of marketers. If you solve that for them and they move to do creative work, content work or inspirational work that they signed up for, or they thought they signed up for when they went to marketing, then you win their hearts and you also win their budgets.

It’s a firecracker in the backpack again. I get it because as a CRO, you end up over so many facets of revenue, and we’ve hired marketers, and they don’t like that part of it.

There’s also sometimes this tension. You’re talking about the CRO. I remember one of the sales leaders I worked with, Jeff Lansford, a great guy from Atlanta. At first, when we started working together, there was this marketing and sales tension. I realized fairly quickly that my entire job surrounds Jeff. If I give Jeff a pipeline that he can close to revenue, everyone is happy, and I get to be successful at my job. Fairly fast, I remember there was this one meeting we had in Vegas.

We went to Vegas to a trade show and decided to have a burger together. That burger turned out to be eight beers and whiskey shots. We realized quickly that we were in the same exact boat and that both of us will fail miserably if we have this tension. On the opposite side, if we sit next to one another, and I show him everything I do. He gives me feedback on it, and I execute it well.

He closes that, then we’re both superstars. That’s exactly what happened. That could be the case for every B2B marketer, VP of marketing, and VP of sales. At least, in Metadata, the VP of sales and VP of marketing are besties. They have a lot of trusts and work together in such a nice harmony. That should be the case for every B2B company out there.

It absolutely should be. It closes the loop there. There are three things that typically I will want. Sometimes I get called and we want to throw a sales team at it. I’m like, “First of all, where’s your PR? It’s hard to sell upstream when the brand is unknown. What’s your marketing? What does your engine look like? How are you getting leads? What are those leads looking like?” A lot of them want me to throw an SDR at something or let’s have them a cold call.

Most of these, especially small businesses, their brand isn’t known. They may think their brand is known, but their brand is not known at all. With the whole credibility piece of saying, “We’ve got a lot of digitals, so how do we know that they can perform what they say they can perform?” There’s that entire credibility piece that sales teams are always going up against. Kleenex is to tissue.

I talked about that all the time. People don’t say, “Can I have a tissue?” They say they have Kleenex, and it’s easier to sell a Kleenex than it is to sell a tissue. I have always wondered why there was an adversarial role between a VP of sales and a marketer. They would become best friends. The marketers also get feedback on what the conversations are for the journey of the entire customer. We talk about the customer experience in its entirety.

The frustrations that occur from customers, you don’t hear all of that with only a heat map. You hear them telling you certain things. You need that well-rounded situation to service in B2B. I’m not talking about eCommerce. I’m talking about B2B sales. I’ve always misunderstood that. I don’t understand why people don’t understand that.

I completely agree. It makes sense. I have a clue why it’s happening. Sometimes it’s easy to hide behind vanity metrics or actions that you took versus the results that came out of them. Sometimes, as a VP of marketing, you’re under pressure. You think that you have to generate these leads, but what are these leads? These leads are sometimes useless. You generated 1,000 leads but none of them are looking to buy anything. You handed over all those thousand leads now to sales, and they took the time, picked up the phone, called them, and got hung up on 998 times.

It’s easy to hide behind vanity metrics versus the actual results.

They now don’t believe that the leads are worth anything. That’s where the mistrust starts to build up. No one wants to take responsibility for it, but if you have an environment of trust, you understand it’s going to take a moment, and you work together on the same table, one next to the other versus one against the other, and you say, “These are the people I’m going to go after. These are the companies I’m going to go after. This is the message. I’m going to run this through. What do you think?”

You get the feedback loop. Now you’re working on those things together. It’s cliché, but it’s totally true. You work on these things together. Both of you have ownership in it, very likely that it’s going to be successful. If it’s not successful, what if you’re going to own it? What to do next so that you can make it successful? Do that cycle over and over until magic happens.

You were saying so many good things. You said, “I’m to it now.” Don’t have an intention span of a nap. It takes a certain amount of time, and you both understand that it takes a certain amount of time. As long as you’re constantly measuring that time in small bites, then you’re fine. You have that understanding. It’s not overnight.

I get people who come to me all the time, and they’re like, “We’re in triage mode but it takes time.” There’s not always a quick fix in that process that you talked about. That’s amazing. Let me ask you a few other questions.  Most people love to hear this part. What do you like to do in your spare time? I have already mentioned a few of those things, but what are you passionate about? What do you like to do?

I love to do a lot of things. I love life. What do I like to do? I love spending time with my family. I love my wife and kids. They give me so much happiness. That’s a big piece I like to do. It’s true. Being a dad has been amazing. That’s one. I like traveling. I love going to countries. I love eating spicy food and then having diarrhea for a week nonetheless, experimenting with new foods and new cultures.

I like exploring the mysteries of life. By that, I mean doing psychedelics and figuring out what else is unknown. Exploring myself as well as other areas of life. I love personal growth. I’m excited about personal growth. This is why we’re here on this planet, partially to correct our soul and grow, such a hippie comment right there. That’s part of it, and I enjoyed that. I still like listening to music and dancing. All the stuff that usually humans like to do, I like that as well.

I know humans that don’t like to dance. We’ll talk about that offline. It’s fun. It’s exciting stuff that you’re involved with. Where can people get ahold of you and learn more about Metadata.io to have a good time? I’m not going to say psychedelics.

I’m trying to normalize it. My email is Gil@Metadata.io. It’s very simple. I’m always happy to talk to entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders. These are my people, so always love doing that. If you happen to be in Miami or Santiago in the Dominican Republic, then we can grab a beer.

This has been a fantastic episode with Gil Allouche. Thank you everybody for reading. If you like it, share it, and comment on all of those wonderful things. Thank you so much, Gil, for being on the show.

Thank you, Valerie.

Important Links

• Metadata.io
• Extreme Ownership
• Gil@Metadata.io
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/GilAllouche/
• https://Music.Amazon.com/podcasts/7d80f727-4d62-4d16-a0c9-96ec7bda6c6b/the-revenue-maze
• https://Open.Spotify.com/show/6azAXp0qFgrmjcql0jeJM8
• https://Podcasts.Google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmV2ZW51ZW1hemUuY29tL2ZlZWQueG1s
• https://Ringmaster.com/

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