Gil Allouche: Optimize Sales and Marketing Strategies to Break Through the Noise

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So to learn more and get started today, go to HubSpot.com and check it out. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And today's conversation is with Gil Aguch. Now, Gil is the co-founder and CEO of Metadata, the marketing operating system that eliminates repetitive marketing tasks and improves performance at the same time. And we had a really cool conversation. He's got a fun background. He started as a software engineer and then got into marketing and he used his background in marketing to really start to look at it from a truly analytical way, which puts him in the top tier as far as marketers are concerned, because it's not necessarily about art.

It's about science and more and more of it these days. And we had a great conversation about how to build and sell in tandem, right? Because we're always looking for that sales and marketing divide and how to create a better organization moving forward so we can complement each other. And that's where we went. We talked about ABM and how we can work together more effectively and how some of the best sales reps have a marketing background and how the best marketers have a sales background. And talked about measurement, what's important to measure, what's not. Talked about his outbound efforts and how they complement all the inbound work that he does. And then talked about AI and the impact it's having on us as an organization.

And I got two different perspectives from him. One as a CEO and how he's looking at the future and the growth of his own business. And then how he's currently leveraging it in a lot of the technology and tools and resources he's using today. And last but not least, we talked about personal brands and how personal brand matters more than ever right now. So I really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays. I am here with Gil. What's going on, my friend? How you been? I've been great. It's great to be on your podcast. I'm really excited about that. Thank you for having me. Yeah, we were having some fun conversation before this that I think we're going to parlay into some really interesting stuff of where we're all going because you and I share very similar thought process and where we are right now.

from a market standpoint and where things are going with AI. But before we do that, give everybody some context here, Gil, where you're coming from and what you're up to these days so that people have some understanding of the expertise you're about to drop on us here. All right. My name is Gil Alos. I'm the founder and CEO of Metadata.io. We're building the operating system for the B2B marketer using AI and other things to automate the demand generation and other functions in B2B marketing. My background, I'm a software engineer. I'm a robotics engineer in my background actually and security before. I always wanted to start a company. In between starting a company and being a software engineer, I did an MBA in Boston and then I spent almost a decade running marketing for a few B2B companies.

It's the first one I was actually in Somerville above Citizen Bank in Davis Square. Somerville kid. Yeah. Somerville. Somerville. It's hilarious. It's not that bad. I don't know why it has that reputation but I think it's just because it's an easy name but it's not. I actually lived in Somerville. I loved it. Somerville was super nice. In comparison to some other places it was actually super nice. And yeah, as an engineer, I didn't have any of the Don Draper, madman intuition and I don't know the coolness of I didn't come up with cool branding ideas. What I did do is I ended up using my technical and quantitative background to essentially experiment my way into marketing. I found a framework that I put together to guarantee that every company I go to I can use data and experimentation and software to make pipeline happen for my sales counterpart.

And after doing it a few times I realized every CMO needs a technical marketer. What if we can build the technical marketer and essentially bring marketers back to doing creative strategic content work and move away from UTM tags and buying CSV files and doing attribution and logging into seven different systems to launch campaign and so remove them from all the technical repetitive and mundane and move them back into what they signed up for when they chose marketing as their career. And I'm solely focused on that area in B2B marketing. I think that's where we're going to take this conversation because I think AI is going to be able to take care of a lot of that both on the sales and the marketing side of the house and I'm curious you know look you drive a lot of you know the whole idea is inbound right even HubSpot right now is they're trying to go all bound right now because it's not just inbound anymore.

How do you see the relationship because I give you some context on this question you know I fundamentally my background is marketing right so that was my degree and I look at sales and marketing as almost two sides of the same coin in the sense that I believe sales reps need to become many marketers right now because it's all about positive impressions right so that cold call even though it might not get an immediate response if done well and left a good impression and a good voicemail that might lead to somebody saying oh and that familiarity with it oh okay so the next time I hit it so what's your perspective of right now especially with all the AI stuff the relationship of sales and marketing and how they work together because I because I think it's changing drastically right now and I'm curious from your perspective somebody on the front lines of the marketing side of the house and how it affects sales how you see it I first of all I completely agree that it's the same thing and two different sides I also completely agree that sales I think the best marketers have been sales before and I think the best sales people have some marketing I don't know some house marketing hustle going for them I agree you know I remember being a VP of marketing for this company for this startup and there was one day that me and the head of sales we were just like buddy heads and we were just like you know classic a classic argument between you know because we were not closing deals so like who is to blame if it sales if it's marketing I will I will be blaming him he'll be blaming me and then you know then we went to Vegas and I had many peers and a burger and fast forward that magical event of us just spending some time face to face together the next week instead of sitting across from one another we sat next to one another every smart list I built in HubSpot I built together with him with the head of sales he actually gave me a lot of his credits from I don't remember what system it was not Luminifort something else something drain I think long story short I remember that time it changed the way I saw sales and I realized sales is the only the VP of sales is the only person who's gonna get me a seat at the table it's the only person I actually need to make sure is successful at their job versus think about them as some kind of other entity that now has to take what I did and take it to the next level no it's like it's completely different and so I think the relationship with sales and marketing should be that tightest it should be based on trust it should allow for some failure on both ends the feedback loop has to be intense you know super fast and brutally honest and I think those organizations are able to create that level of honesty for example in metadata I need to see my head of sales and my head of marketing like this you know I need to be I need to see them building trust I need to see them hanging out together and to see them coming up with ideas and initiatives and closing them together because I think that's where the magic that's where the magic happens so absolutely I think that's that's fundamental and organizations who don't do that who are still kind of thinking oh it's a different kind of job well we're going to build the leads but they have to do a good job and develop them into a closed deal it's extremely correlated there's a causality between those two and if you don't understand and deal with it from the very first time you even send an email out you're not doing it right and just for the last point what you mentioned about outbound emails even if they don't close a deal yeah I you know we have one of our largest customer ThoughtSpot Logan who was like a marketer and a salesperson back in that day and in SDR he sent an email yeah it didn't make sense he did the demo this person who who was getting the demo was working in a small startup so it wasn't a fit fast forward four months only she took a job at ThoughtSpot the first company she called was us and we closed a six-figure deal and so absolutely it's you don't know what will happen with that outbound email it's not just transactional that moment it will close or not hey I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JV sales membership it includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses filling the funnel and driving to close it also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific skills and different tech like ChachiBT and how to leverage it in the sales process and it gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done you get all of this for $420 a year as an individual or $5,000 for teams and as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners if you go to www.jbarrows.com and click on the individual or team membership and use code podcast you'll get 20% off let's make this happen together so I didn't know I was going to go this but this this is interesting to me because I think a lot of it has to do with how they're incentivized right and I and I want to get some tactical things from you of how do you align that but you know a lot of times you know it's SQL's MQL's and you know moving more towards the all bound if you will and attributing credit because I remember here for instance you know when I had Morgan on my team Morgan Ingram he would do a lot of outbound right and he would and all of a sudden we'd get an inbound and at the time I was getting all the inbounds and I would look at the inbound and it would be and then I'd look in Salesforce at the time and I would say oh look at all the activity that Morgan has had into that account but he was going after that account but like the executive level right now I would get the lead inbound from somebody else non-power you know non-decision maker but it was from that company and there's no way you can tell me that that wasn't because of his efforts right so how do you how do you track attribution when it comes to getting credit because that's ultimately unfortunately a lot of sales reps are coin operated right it's like I will do this if I get paid for it and if I get credit for it but if I'm not going to get paid for it you know I'm probably not going to do that activity so I'm not going to see it so what are your thoughts on like even like structuring your comp around who gets credit for what are we still in the world of marketing gets base salaries and there and sales reps you know it is what it is and whoever gets credit we got to do a round robin thing how can we fix that part of it because I found that commission plans solve a lot of problems first of all I think you can educate me so much more on this than I can possibly contribute but I'll try to contribute my two cents of what we're doing here our marketing since the day I hired the first marketer it was not about leads I told him you know you're going to get a big portion of your salary I think it's like 30% is base is your bonus and it's going to be based on pipeline and overnight over time we'll actually get to that pipeline number it was like okay so at first it was like MQLs then he was like let's do SQLs and today it's pipeline so pipeline is the way we measure the marketing the marketing activity now in order to make sales do outbound we added an outbound bonus component you're right anything with sales I've learned if it's not in the complaint it's not happening and you know it's I'm almost thankful for it because I can predict what's going to happen based on the complaint so at least like there is there is no like guesswork but yeah we need to we need to compensate marketing for us to explain to them if you generate a thousand leads and it's one SQL you generated one lead and one SQL I prefer the latter a lot less noise do that spend all the money on the right ones and they get if they don't have pipeline if pipeline is not happening for whatever reason then then then they know it's in their responsibility and the way we do attribution it's attribution is yet to be solved right like you have a thousand companies how to do attribution and get a thousand answers and we try to look at two things we have the account journey and we we share a lot of data from it the way we look at inbound for marketing is only we will give credit for the marketing in metadata for the inbound opportunity only if there was no opportunity before and the person that they brought in directly from that first click is the decision maker the main decision the primary decision maker of that opportunity so it wouldn't happen without the campaign and we wouldn't bring the buyer without the campaign now you get but if yeah of course the sales or the SDR is doing like 15 outbounds and then someone from that company is signing in you know the conversation happened there you know someone was like hey check I got this email you know check out this piece of software and then you got the inbound that's all the SDRs or the sales person's credit love it and it actually you brought something up there about using data to go after the right clients which I don't think enough companies do and you told that as I was prepping for this it was either on a podcast that you were on or whatever where you talked about how when you first started metadata you sold to everybody like you were out there and you're like oh this is great for everybody and I'm like okay great and then you quickly realize wait a minute the 80-20 Pareto's rule of okay I really only should be focusing my efforts because you walk us through that little journey and how that what was the what was it that the light bulb went off of wait a minute this isn't this isn't working we really should just get hyper focused on ICP and then how you use data to try to find that true ICP so but walk us through your journey of that light bulb going off at first with metadata yeah and it's an ongoing journey because I'm thinking about it I'm refreshing this right now it's just like we are slowly getting better at it and we can optimize for better and better thing for the first time you're right we just thought we would outbound and try to go after anyone who would pay us yeah that got us a lot of noise and also a lot of negative signals like I would have a lot of people getting the wrong experiments with the product because it would not work for them whatsoever actually the product didn't even work for us metadata when we were early you know I was worried like four years ago and we tried to use it and it didn't work I'm like shit is this thing working at all because it's not working for me and I'm you know I built this but it was really not a fit like only at a certain stage when you have when you're growing and you have you have a demand generation function then in a budget then it makes sense to optimize so we at the first stage we sell to everyone then we realize okay we're losing a lot of time here like the FDRs are spending and salesperson is spending time on someone who for sure will not be a customer and so that was what we what we've done there is we basically built the criteria based on the closed one we saw the closed ones that look good we broke it we enriched the hell out of that that data effect we learned everything there is to learn about the company that do become closed one and then we did it a few more times we've done it a few more times since the last time we've done it is not just based on the closed one because today we know how to close like new logos I wouldn't say it's all far from it but it is a fairly like if you tell me can you bring in 50k deals at a certain velocity next quarter we can take care of it the problem becomes do they stay do I bring in the right customers who actually are at 80-90 percent retention and that's how we optimize today and so today what we've done is we looked at the customer with a high health score we're actually crushing it on the platform and the ROI is there the ARR is healthy the renewal rate is healthy now we take that cohort we enrich everything about that and now we break it down into who is RIS ICP and now we only market we broke it down to now tier A accounts tier B accounts we only go to tier A and tier B accounts and we even bring a customer success person or a customer at the beginning of the call beginning of the sales cycle so that they can tell us and help us understand and help the customer understand if they're a good fit not just from a budget perspective because there is also change management with metadata you know maybe we'll get into it but you know once you use AI it doesn't it's not like a marginal change and I can do the same work you've done and now you have to do something a little bit different or an hour more a day it is something fundamentally different when you let a piece of software essentially make decisions that you otherwise have to make you have to completely change the way you do it and there is a certain kind of persona that is cool with that and there is a majority of the personas with you know AI is still more frightening than exciting and today we're actually trying to account for that in the sales cycle is this a modern marketer who is cool she's cool with the change she's cool with letting technology take over she's cool with letting go of all the technical mundane tasks that she may have done in the past and we try to actually and so the ICP is really evolving to be even psychological to an extent and personality hey everyone thanks for listening so we're going to be doing something a little different with the podcast Russell Bradley Cook is the partner manager for HubSpot out in Amia and he's going to be doing a podcast takeover for me while I'm at HubSpot's Inbound Conference in Boston from September 4th to the 8th during that week we're going to be dropping an episode a day and Russell's going to be interviewing five different CEOs and talking about their personal perspective and career lessons learned and also where the industry is headed you're not going to want to miss these oh and if you're coming to Boston for Inbound make sure you find me I'll be around all week and would love to meet up to meet up with you and that's what I think is going to have such an impact on because now that that data is there too the personality I mean crystal nose and that type of stuff I can actually see you you know and also I used to it's funny I used to look at you know the kind of analog way of dealing with this was I would look at somebody's LinkedIn profile and because I always said that when when you're talking to people specifically below the power line right it's not the worst thing in the world to talk to a non-decision maker right I mean obviously we want to talk to decision makers but there's two types of people below that power line if you will there's people who are always going to be below that power line are not your change agents and then there's the people that are on their way up and so my analog old school way of doing it was looking at your LinkedIn profile and seeing every job you had and you were you in the same exact job for the past 10 years and actually now to me that's a negative even though in the past that was a positive that to me is a negative because it's like wait a minute that means you haven't evolved you haven't changed you haven't really done anything look you can stay at the same company but show me that you've moved up two three four times in the past 10 years right so I would look for evolving ICP to find that true sweet spot because when you find it the sale I'm not saying is easy by any stretch of the imagination but holy shit is it easier and are you finding that are you finding that those leads that you drive inbound with those 20% with the hyper focus you get far less quantity but higher quality and higher conversion ratios yes absolutely and there's still work to do like we're still trying to figure out you're matching chrisom nose and I'm like yeah shit I should be using those signals you're totally right that's a great great ecological data point but absolutely when they're you know either when we have a customer who heard about us from another marketer who's done this who's done the change management and got to where they are super fast but when we talk to you know if we talk to a C level sale cycle is like short into a week sometimes because you know you don't have to convince a CEO to do 10x with one with the same resources right but you may have to do it with an agency the agency is like no I don't think I want to cut my margin by 90% and so yeah when we hit the right or repeating customers are crazy we have this core I think about 30% of our customer base are repeating customers and they take us within a week to a new company and it's just fascinating to see how these deals are closing so fast trust is already at like 100% there's no we just leap all those things that are otherwise blockers just customer a fourth customer a four-time customer and you know I'm like he's gonna be successful on the platform for sure I know exactly his MO for taking in technology I know how he's gonna train his people he's gonna take professional services first etc I know he's gonna get to an amazing result and I just don't have to worry about it at all when it's the right customer it's just everything flows naturally so what are some of the tactical things what are some of your favorite kind of demand gen like once you've gotten real tight on that ICP right because right now it is so hard to stand out to break through the noise it is deafening right now and it's just gonna get worse and I personally think that you know the SDR BDR role is going to change drastically it's changing in front of our inboxes are gonna be filled in the next six months or so with super personalized super relevant emails and I don't care whether that's coming from a human or not quite frankly so what are some of the things that you're doing outside of kind of the macro ABM kind of touch points everywhere making sure that there's familiarity in the market are there some super tactical things that you're seeing one is a classic one I'm not innovating here is G2 buyer intent as well as qualified signals good buyer intent signals that end up in your sales force and you're basically getting insight into an existing buying cycle so even if you don't have lots of marketing money or your demand is low you at least want to know if a customer that looks like your best customer is currently in buying cycle at the very least you want them to consider you but so using G2 you know giving prospects who are in a buying cycle and you know they're in buying cycle using those signals you give them a piece of content that usually helps them make the decision which one to choose so we do this if you're in a buying cycle we identify you we'll give you a piece of content that compares the because they want this piece of information it's completely customer driven so it's not like you came up with this it's customer reviews driven so it's objective data that you aggregate and give it to them at the time where they're actually assessing so you basically save them some time this seems to be working well another one is user gems user gems gives you a really nice it's another intent signal that gives you data about people changing and since our best cohort are repeating customers we know so early now when there is changing the org and then we go and have an outbound motion and I want to pause on that I've said this before and I want to make sure people listening to this are very clear especially some of the younger kids out there making calls the trigger if you will of somebody moving to another role is actually a fantastic one right only if they've had experience with your solution before right because correct me if I'm wrong here if you go to another spot say you start a new role at a new company how likely is it for you to invest in a brand new software technology service you've never talked about before how likely is that very low exactly right so but I mean and look I'm the biggest benefactor and it sounds like you are too like when I get a VP of sales who loves the training and they pop over to some other company it's not a sales call it's like hey John when can you get started here I got it's like all right great done so it's like there's this misnomer out there that oh somebody just moved oh you just got a new job congratulations Gil like hey whatever it's like dude that all you should be saying in that regard is hey congrats Gil saw you just got the new role if and when the dust settles and you're open for these type of things would love to have a conversation with you otherwise here's some cool resources good luck but don't you dare try to let's meet let me talk to you because there's not a shot in hell and you're probably actually going to ruin the opportunity in the long term if there is one there right yeah it's if you one of the hundred other emails the person is getting I know you're starting your job you're getting a new fundraise you're getting like a thousand inbounds in your inbox because of that event and it's always the most non personalized email yeah I'm there with you so when it's used right and Abdelai is doing a phenomenal job he sent six opportunities in the first super small email he sent it's just like when it's super when it's when the campaign is very specific in customer like someone changing their career the messaging there everything there is about that particular trend the response rate is very high yeah I see that yeah what was the third one so there's the intent data there's the people moving in others what's the other play you said there was a third one there is another one that might not be I don't know why it's not more popular it is the Convo ads Convo ads and document ads so in LinkedIn there's a particular type of ad type that is actually more like an email within LinkedIn you can choose the particular personas who are getting it at particular companies so you can set it to a particular list an ABM an ABM if you will and it doesn't go to their other inbox it basically LinkedIn handles the email mechanism for you they make sure not to email too much they put it at the top of the inbox and what we do is we use that in combination with a gift card and say hey if you if you're if you bring a qualified if you're an ICP for us you're qualified and you take a demo we'll give you like a $50 gift card and we use document ads and Convo ads campaign type that is another way for us to it's a pay for play but it's a guaranteed it's a guaranteed demand from the right ICP the only thing you don't have is timing you don't know if you're at the right time to buy but it's the right person and it's so that's been working really well for us as well if we ever have to complement then it works I will say we're trying to do less and less of that and we're now changing we're tapering down the paid and we're ramping it up with a lot of content instead and so content is becoming I think slowly but surely our biggest driver and for the long term I think that's what we're that's the bet we're making and so what type what type of content you're putting out there right because I think there's a lot of different ways I mean you know there's the advertising content obviously and then there's this type of stuff that we'll cut up and we'll do little snippets and video stuff and then there's ebooks and I mean is it everything if you were a market if you were starting right now or you were advising somebody and mentoring somebody on starting where what would you tell them to start focusing on from a content standpoint yeah and it's never and it's never everything if the answer and ever everything is always the wrong answer for a startup it's like maybe three things that you can do I would say if you're a startup and you're trying to build pipeline and you're looking at content as your way first of all be like brutally authentic and honest because there's so much bullshit out there there's so much bullshit in SaaS extra bullshit in MarTech like your pricing page doesn't have pricing put it there and then talk about it so there is the content I would say the biggest one is is value add for the customer where they can they can read it and immediately take action on it so for example playbooks we have metadata.io slash playbooks super popular area it's like we it's like our customers many times write the content and we put it in a template where if you follow these instructions it's going to take you this much time and you're going to likely to see this outcome out of it so like very tactical workshop-y kind of content is very very helpful the other one is data so we are our most our most famous most popular piece of asset that we have is the benchmark report which basically we aggregate and anonymize all of the data that we have to show you like what call to action gets you you know more clicks so what kind of content gets you faster sales cycles so on and so forth we break it down by industries and company size and stuff like that we give the report but what I find is people are way more excited about is getting the data getting the data and the tableau and playing around with it to see what makes sense for them those those are very very successful we could work on some together because I did that with Gong and I actually use that I'm curious your perspective on personal brands as they relate to organizations because with Gong you know Gong chorus exec vision right and at the time you know and I'm not I don't even know the third one yeah well tomato tomato in a lot of ways right yeah one's a little bit better in these areas and that type of thing and don't get me wrong I love Gong but what really where I saw Gong hit the map was when Chris Orlob first started and using the Gong data to do those little snippets and then say how it was relevant and I mean that changed actually that changed my training quite frankly because I was looking at that data and I was saying holy shit and thankfully a lot of it complimented what I was doing right but there was a lot of stuff that conflicted with what I was talking about so I would use that to test and I would say okay and then we actually did a whole series around it where I would and a lot of the Gong data is integrated into my training it's like you know on average best reps do this average reps do this and this is why you do that and it was super tactile and got tons of traction but then Chris went and took a job internally right he took a sales job and all of a sudden you didn't hear from Gong at all and then Devin Reed came and started doing the same thing blew it up right and now Devin Reed took another job and I haven't heard much from Gong in quite a while quite frankly right so one is I think you're spot on is like anything that is high high value and not gated right so it's not like you gotta get in your stupid fucking email address to get this super highly valuable piece of thing because I'm gonna associate the value regardless and I'm gonna get pissed off if I can't get it so but as that ties to personal brand because quite frankly and I won't name companies but there are other companies that are doing that with data but the company page is posting it so it's getting very little limited traction but when Chris Orla posts it the personal brand so how do you look at personal brand as it relates to your marketing efforts right because I do think there's a lot of companies right now that are still worried to let their sales reps build their personal brands to let somebody you know a person represent their brand because heaven forbid what if that person goes away I mean like they will right they will so how do you look at that right now from a from a CEO standpoint what would you advise other CMO CEOs as far as personal brands and how they relate to your marketing efforts look personal brand I think he is significantly more powerful than a company brand let's just start there if there is no first name last name then it's very hard for me to identify with that entity just you know there's no face I'm like who is this person you know like I said company you know company social social page it's like whatever I think a personal brand is so much stronger absolutely if you did a great job in building a personal brand that person will go away they're not going to work for you forever no one is going to work for you forever you're not going to work for your company forever so they're going to bounce at some point and you know you did well when they are doing extremely well when they leave right they're doing consulting usually afterwards and they're just like bombarded with and I have that with some of my former employees you know they texted me thank you for great four years or three years because all the successive metadata now is translating the crazy crazy you know consult and it's amazing I think the danger for me the for me the fear gets over the opportunity the excitement when there is when when a person will divert the brand benefit to some third party website or a brand so like if an employee is doing their own personal branding and like fast forward two years and now they have their own brand their own website that's conflict of interest there I would say until it gets to that point and maybe avoid that point by setting up expectations ahead of it say hey I want you folks to build your own brand it doesn't have to be only your domain expertise too meaning we're a market company so of course our marketing team needs to have a brand I need to have a brand that's classic of course I work on that but what's preventing me from the head of sales is creating a brand on building a great sales organization that works with the market what prevents my head of people talking about building a culture that is surviving these times whatever there is nothing preventing us to do it I think personal brands are for the win I invest in them I'm happy to invest in consultants to help coach my executives or employees how to come up with better posts better content so on and so forth I'm all for it knowing that it's going to be a benefit for the person and a benefit for the company and then at some point it's going to be only benefit for the person and that's okay I think you have to be cool with that and if you set expectations ahead of it you have X amount of years that you benefit from it otherwise they're going to bounce and do it somewhere else I think a person who wants to build a personal brand a person who is ambitious maybe a little bit of an entrepreneur bug is a huge blessing you just have to learn how to divert that energy in a way that is for some time beneficial to both you and that person and at some point it's going to be just for their career and it's okay because it's there y'all know that I love being on this new network because of all the cool exposure and cross promotion that we do but also because of some of the podcasts that I'm getting exposed to here that are quickly becoming some of my favorites especially this one coming up Created hosted by John Uche Now Created gives you an inside look at how to build a business as a creator and improve your creative process and also stay ahead of the latest content trends he's an ex-YouTube and Instagram employee and breaks down the creator economy of guests like Logan Paul Paris Hilton Jake Paul and many many others and his most recent episode Why YouTube's Biggest Star Left is really interesting Liza Koshy she was actually there before Mr.

Beast and she was had I think 25 million subscribers or something like that and she bailed on YouTube and they dive into why which I thought was fascinating so you're gonna have to listen to it so check out his podcast Created wherever you can get your podcast now and let's make it happen Do you recommend so because that's I love them and I always look at it as look I'm always hiring my replacement I'm always trying to build my goal is to I always say when employees come on board you know what's your pursuit of happiness what does happiness look like for you right because my job is to help you get there and I know I'm a stepping stone to get to that point but I'm gonna do everything I can to get you there so let's have an open conversation about this if you want to build your brand and this is exactly what I told Morgan by the way I said look you're on your way you know you're at a different stage than I am I'm 47 years at the time you know 44 years old I got a wife and a kid and you know I've got my business here you're a 23 year old kid you're on your way up and I looked at him genuinely I said look give me three years give me three years I will teach you everything I need to know you need to know on how to run a business but I need you to bleed for me I need you to go out there and like build your personal brand but have it make sure it's tied to JB Sales so there's a benefit for both of us and then when the time comes we'll look at each other and say go so in this world of quiet quitting and you know quiet firing in a lot of ways too how do you have that conversation how do you personally have that conversation with the team you're building to set expectations of hey I want you to stay here as long as we both are getting value out of this but I understand this are you that like authentic and transparent about it I got there first of all god bless you for having this conversation with Morgan I think that's so beautiful that you had that and had such I think it took me time to graduate to that level at first I wasn't like that at all no at first I would take every person leaving any person doing anything else outside of metadata too hard in a bad way and get super negative about it that's like my first few years my last few years I'm the person that you've described so you know I had a boss working for that company Spotfire in Davis Square I had a boss I wasn't a great employee you know like you know entrepreneurs are usually not great employees no I had the yeah we're not not the best and so you know I had like this relationship with my former boss there and he quit and he moved to the competition and so then I had this new dude Boston Italian dude Lou Giordano he was my if you listen you're a great person you know he came in to this like problematic employee and you know he managed me so differently he was like authentic positive wasn't trying to force you know ego on me like none of that shit he was like yeah I know I get who you are I'm you know this is what I need and I was an H1B visa so I was like strongly attached to the company H1B visa when you're an immigrant you have to be sponsored by the company if you're fired you have 30 days to find a new sponsorship and you thought you're out of the country so you're like a little anxiety about that I remember you're talking about like silent resigning or silent firing my my default action would be to find a job and let them know two weeks before that I'm found a job especially that will minimize my risk because I needed to get the sponsorship with this guy he built so much trust that I came to him I told him look it's I think it was July it's July now I'm gonna move to Silicon Valley soon in like in four months I told him I already have a ticket so it's happening I'm telling you four months ahead you can either fire me now and basically that will go it's hell you know like it's not you know I don't I don't care about it anymore because I know you're gone or you know we work together on doing the best transition you know I have I didn't I told him I didn't find a job yet I'm not I don't even have any prospect I need to find a job so I could be we can basically do this together like I'll transit you know we have four months to figure out how to best part ways and he loved it you know he helped me find a job he flew me somewhere else he took care of me in terms of the visa he was a reference for me for my next job it was amazing the difference like what happened and so I remember that and I tell that story time after time in my current company to remind people if you know if you're burnt out if you don't want to work here if you find a different opportunity whatever it is tell me as early as possible we'll figure it out with you and then you know we'll give you a severance I'll be your biggest fan and I'll give you like it will be I want you to be to be successful the more I know and the more we do these things together it works out it also helps having this conversation when the person just starts you know I had a conversation with my head of marketing my former head of marketing when he just started he was with me for four years and I told him Jason let's make this deal where there is no silence like if you're thinking about moving tell me and if I think about moving you out I'll tell you and we're going to have the most brutally honest conversation and I promise to have this with you I promise to never surprise you and he told me yeah I promise to never surprise you either and we literally had this and we would have it and sometimes we would decide no this is not a time we should continue and then one time we decided no it is four years later this is a good time to part ways in a great way and it happened and I'm so thankful for it and it wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for that conversation building the trust over time yeah I love that I have the same line I actually tell people when they come on board here look I won't surprise you you don't surprise me like you and I tell them the only time you will be surprised is what I'm surprised you know what I mean so it's like I mean obviously there's certain things you can do as a founder there's certain you know if you get an acquisition thing there's only so much transparency you can legally right that would jeopardize that would jeopardize the whole opportunity so unfortunately there is a level of transparency that you can't cross but I think the more you set clear expectations with people about who you are what you're all about where they're going where you are you get far more healthy organizations because people A.

want to stay longer and B. when they're done doing what they're passionate about they go find something else and quite frankly leaders out there if your reps are no longer passionate about doing what they're doing you want them to leave because they're not going to be good employees for you they're going to ultimately wither away at the foundation you've built so I love that mentality let's talk a little bit about measurement right because I think a lot of this it comes down to I mean you come from a data background and you know as it relates to employees we can measure all sorts of stuff about them but I think the expectation is more important but when it comes to go-to-market strategy and messaging for instance right we talked earlier about the agile framework here of making sure that you're constantly minimum viable product get it out there get feedback iterate iterate iterate so how do you let's go to the messaging side of your message and your approaches how often do you evaluate your messaging to see if it's working and how often is it changing right now it's it's quite fluid we update the messaging I would say probably twice a year okay and the catalyst for those changes will be a lot of customers so a lot of gong calls for example will tell us what keywords our customers are using or prospects are using to describe us and if it's different than the way we're describing ourselves and it's good then we'll we'll tailor it towards whatever they're saying because that's what's happening in the room when we're not there anyway another one would be when we know when we use messaging to fix a gap for example with metadata a year ago if you looked at our website or our messaging you'll be like metadata is this magical box that you buy and then you click you press the button and there's pipeline coming out the other way and that was cool because that was the situation for 33% of the customer those you know modern futuristic like that worked for them they figured out how to make it a magical box like that but we realized for the remainder it's not the case you have to work you have to do change management you have to do marketing in a different manner or completely much more connotative and scientific you have to be open to AI taking decision for you there's a change management essentially and because of that we're changing the messaging to reflect that gap so that when I'm a prospect and I'm going to the website I'm not going to read their magic box but I'm reading it's a magical software that I have to put time and investment into to make it work and so these are usually the sources and the resources that we use to update and we try to update it yeah we try to be fairly fluid with it if every year the messaging doesn't change it's almost a red flag to me because there's so much happening in a year and all the feedback is coming from the market what are you doing with it do you think with AI and what you know about it right now that we are going to get to a like almost a just-in-time adjustment to marketing by analyzing what you talked about your ICP and figuring out oh we just got three new customers that fit a slightly different ICP and this is how they talk to us on the gong you know do you think AI eventually is going to get to the point where all of a sudden if you come to my website Gil it's going to say something different than if somebody else comes to my website because you fit a different persona than that and AI is going to 100% 100% is going to be a one-to-one just like you're going to Netflix and Amazon you will go into any random B2B software website and it should be fully optimized I mean 90% of the content of a website is irrelevant to me and I want to just see the 10% and I want to enrich the 10% with everything you know about me yes that's what because I remember when we first you know my first company we did you know we did the typical website right where it was you know tabs and it was 15 different things we could all sorts of great cuts and all this other stuff and then after a while we just looked at the data of the web traffic and it was like the homepage yep we got a huge hits on our homepage a fraction of them click on this link and we have like 1% on our pod you know our blog 1% on the contact you know and all these so it's like why why do we have this huge infrastructure for a website when really they only give a shit about one thing and now I think it's about I've always felt like this you should be marketing specifically should be in the choose your journey approach right where you come to a website you tell the website who you are and based on who you are and what you're looking for it brings you to different sections now previously we'd accomplish that through a type form type scenario which again is a barrier to entry in a lot of this stuff do you think it's going to automatically know who I am or do you think I'm going to have to kind of self select a little bit here because I want to talk futuristically but then reality of where I think things are going I think far future yes in between those two I think privacy regulations will prevent it from being completely automated so I think probably a hybrid between the two today I can tell you that you can tell you can know exactly which company is visiting you you can also know exactly where they came from especially if you created that campaign you can and you can also know the persona without the name meaning you can tell you know the job title you know the function you know the seniority all of that data is available today if you want to get it today it's available today for every visitor the way you can augment it is by using understanding where they came from what kind of creative content they consume where did what channel so on so forth that will give you some more data and then the final one is self reporting so asking a few questions it's very delicate right asking questions because that it's a drop there but I think a few self reporting questions that hybrid will get you all the information you need and I think if all you did is just change the menu and eliminated some blocks on your website if all you just eliminate some noise you'll see a huge increase absolutely so let's finish up on where how you two things one is two totally different topics but I want to see if you can get them in here what is what are you seeing as a CEO and how are you preparing your company to deal with what's the next 12 to 24 months and then the other is you know as a CEO what do with like if somebody is prospecting to you because I always like to give the audience a little bit of perspective of hey you're an ICP of some people out there so how does a CEO think right a lot of people like oh why the hell should I reach out to the CEO why the hell should I you know what I mean they're and they're scared but I want to talk stuff so what are you doing to make sure that you're a resilient business right now that can flex as we move into this brand new world of AI and everything else so first and first is economy I how do we make sure that we are driving in an economy that is challenging because there are plenty of companies who do and focus on that and so we're obsessing around there around that exact element how do we become painkiller in a down economy two things together super sticky and shitty economy and that's basically the first way we're dealing with it and everything that we do should be around the metrics that are relevant for tough economy GRR unit economic sales cycle things like that as to the second one AI I try to tell people that those things are happening whether we like it or not and you can see it two ways with every AI technology you can go through the levels of denial and anger and this is not happening and then one day you wake up and it there or you try to do reconnaissance way ahead of time try to really understand what's coming years before if you're a truck driver go become the truck driver who teaches and trains the AI to do automated you know if you're working in a factory or doing logistics be the person who works in a logistics company that is using robots the early adopters are out there so if you jumped into the early adopters group you just fast forward your career you just like figured out how to use something that you're afraid of to become actually the thing that you ride into the sunset that's that's the narrative I'm using for those for those two you you know have have you ever seen the movie hidden figures have I seen the figure I don't know you should if you haven't seen it again and for this reason so you have another analogy because I use this one there's a it's when NASA went to the moon right it was the first time here in the US NASA went to the moon and there was a subplot in IBM mainframe and she said holy shit and she knew that was going to replace them and she had two choices one was go back and tell her team holy shit I saw that we have to get better we have to be smarter we have to be better mathematicians because we got to show them that we can do this better than them or option two which was she she grabbed the manual when she started learning how to use it learning how to turn it on learning how to maintenance it and then she taught her whole team how to use it how to turn it on how to maintenance it so when they turn that sucker on the IBM engineers didn't even know how to use the thing and those women went from 100% replaceable 100% replaceable to indispensable because they learned how to use the machine and I think that's going back to the 80-20 Pareto's rule that's my fear to a certain degree I'm excited because I'm trying to figure out this shit all in but there's still a very large part of the population that is not being exposed to this that's going to impact them and that's those are I'm worried for I I go but you were giving that example I think that's exactly how it is you either adopt it and write it and take advantage of it or you're afraid of it and you're going to be replaced at some so let's end on this one two punch one is let's take you just as a CEO obviously you get prospected to probably a lot by emails and calls and what do you outside of calling into prospecting thing you responded to and why I answer all the time to prospects when it's good so I would say 90% of it is not good so it's just easy I literally look at my inbox on LinkedIn on my inbox and 90% of the emails look the same oh us you know I'm not sure if you saw my last thread you know like they have the introduction like one these are the keywords or I did a quick analysis and those are interesting and I respond because they put time into they put half an hour at least homework into this email I'm going to put one minute to reply and follow up on that now it might be interesting it might not be but if they work with me like if I tell them in the email interesting can you give me a then they get direct access to the buyer then I asked my SVP engineer you put 15 minutes and give this a shot because at the very least their sale cycle is good that is working so maybe other stuff is working and they're excellent other stuff too I is going to fix the grow at all cost mentality and the mass cadences blasting out to a million things going back to that 80 20 those 20 hyper focused ICP and then doing some homework on them and making it real and not using fake triggers if you will of hey congrats on the new reward or whatever it might be so on that note Gil love the conversation here let's give the audience places to go follow you now they know what it takes to get your attention but if for metadata and what you're doing right now if you want to explain some of the cool things and who you focus on so if there's anybody out there listening to this because I'm thinking of a lot of things based on this conversation that I hundred employees and above if economical sustainable growth is something that you're investing in right now you should check out first of all even without buying anything just check out metadata.io slash playbooks these are customer best marketers written labels how to do IBM how to do outbound how to do you know branding in B2B how to build a community there are some really good best practices for B2B marketing I think it's so if you're a B2B marketer you should check out all the playbooks they're free and there's like line by line instruction how to do if you're looking to have sustainable growth and building pipeline for a sales counterpart you should check out Metamatch it's a free trial it's one month that you can get a few audiences and at the very least it makes sure that even if you just spend five grand a month in ads so you're not a fit for the metadata platform you want to make sure that every dollar that you metamatch playbooks does do good resources even for startups to check out very cool and then what's the best way to connect with you is it LinkedIn is it LinkedIn as well as gilletmetadata.io I'm always happy to talk perfect and for those of listening it's gil and then last name a l l o u c h e how do you pronounce that just so I don't water it a l gill thank you so much for coming on man I really enjoyed the conversation staying connected here thank you so much for having me absolutely and everybody hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did and got something out of it made you think a little bit differently and get on that bus as far as AI is concerned because it's leaving and if you ain't on it it's going to be a shrinking world if nothing else so look and like I always say at any of these podcasts at the end of all of them go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day went or you think it's going make somebody smile you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now so thank you all very much and I'll see you ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team look I'm out there selling every day just like you are and I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends and technology so if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales let's connect and let's make this happen together