2019 Ones to Watch: Allison Stoloff, Knotel

Name: Allison Stoloff

Title: Head of Marketing

Company: Knotel

What do you consider to be your greatest success in the past 12 months? 
My greatest success in the past 12 months has been building the Knotel marketing team from the ground up and helping to shape the Knotel brand. The commercial real estate industry is new to me, and I also come from an operations versus marketing background. Over the past year, my team has built a pipeline generation machine for sales that is very focused on building relationships with the broker community. Additionally, we’ve evolved the Knotel brand to better explain who we are and what we do to customers, brokers, and owners.

Who or what do you attribute to your success?
I’ve built an incredible team, which is one of the key things to get right, yet it is not easy to do. The team members I’ve hired possess a lot of subject matter expertise in marketing, and they either have CRE knowledge or they’ve worked hard to learn about the industry and who our customers are. My hiring philosophy is about hiring those who are better and smarter than I am in that particular function they’ve been hired to do. My job is to guide them toward the “what,” their job is to figure out the “how.”

?What advice can you offer to someone who is just getting started in your industry?
Learn as much as you can as early as you can about the industry. It’s important to talk to brokers from various houses and read CRE publications. Ultimately, real estate is a relationship driven business, so the more facetime that you put in, the higher are the rewards. Great marketers need to know their customers and have a customer-first mindset. This means that it’s especially important to get up to speed quickly on the players in the industry, what motivates them, and what makes your product compelling to them.

Who are some leaders that you admire and why? ?
It’s always the leaders whom are most authentic that I admire. Phil Knight is one of my favorites. I loved his book “Shoe Dog,” where he talks about leadership and building his company from the ground up. He’s the one who highlighted that great leaders guide teams toward the what and let them figure out the how. This is a management philosophy that I adopted and find to be very successful.