Full Throttle Leaders Podcast-Andrew Perry

Hello everybody, Michael Falato here from Full Throttle Leaders. I got a good friend of mine named Andrew Perry who's at Immediately, been a longtime client of our company but also a good friend. Andrew, how'd you get To immediately— what was your growth? What was your pattern? What was your, your, your path to get to SVP of Growth?

Yeah, so it's, uh, it's definitely, uh, a non-traditional path, uh, to, to marketing and sales. But, uh, uh, I actually started out— I went to school to be a teacher, uh, an elementary, uh, yeah, an elementary special ed teacher, um, and I'll never forget the conversation that I had. So, I was actually working for my— I was working for my father, like, during school, right? I was living in Providence. I went to Providence College. Go Friars! And I panicked. It was June after I graduated. I panicked and I said, hey, Dad, I don't want to be a teacher. He goes, what are you talking about? You went to school to be a teacher. You went to Providence College. Elementary, really good elementary special ed program. And I said, I don't want to do it. He said, well, I said, you know, 20, 21, 22-year-old me, can I come work for you? He has a printing company in the Northeast here. And he goes, you really want to work for me working, you know, doing marketing or sales or whatever, whatever I could find for you? I said, sure, no problem. I said, as long as it's not driving the van, I'll do— that's what I did during school. I'll do whatever. And he said, are you sure you want to make— you want to work twice as hard and make less money? And I was like, than a teacher? Okay, Dad.

Sure.

No problem. Well, it turns out he was right. Yeah, I worked twice as hard and I made a lot less money. But what I did learn were some pretty interesting trades. My father was not He was, you know, not definitely a mentor and a baptism by fire kind of kind of person in that way, which I really appreciated. Looking back now, I mean, he's nearing the end of his career. He's 83 years old, but but but certainly one where I eventually I into sales. I did the sales thing. I was cold calling. I was. Following up on leads. I was not successful at all in it. And I eventually went over to this thing called marketing and to run ads on this platform called Google Ads, doing search engine marketing for an agency that my dad wanted to not pay anymore. So I started doing Google Ads for the printing company. And I just, I learned as much as I could. You know, it was new, it was intriguing. I was building something, quite literally building ads and everything like that. And then I started to say, well, what if we, you know, one of the biggest things that my father taught me was the entrepreneurial spirit. Why don't we start selling this stuff, you know, that we're doing here? And so, you know, 6 years into working for my father, basically said, all right, I'm done working, uh, for my father. And, uh, eventually went on to join that agency that I was tasked to, uh, to replace. So, uh, same agency.

Same agency.

Yeah, same agency. And actually that agency moved, you know, at that point they were starting to get out of kind of being everything for everybody and, and paid search for this type of company and CRM implementation for that type of company. And they were really focused in on on healthcare and working with healthcare providers specifically, the, you know, the hospital systems. And so they were building a CRM, but they were also keeping that legacy service of campaign services. And so when I joined, we were building this thing that ended up becoming Campaign Center, Campaign Center, which were the campaign solutions side of the CRM business. And long story short, that agency or that company Evariant eventually sold off to Healthgrades, then sold off to WebMD, and is now a variation of the WebMD brand. So, you know, it was very cool to be a part of that. And then I found my way immediately, actually through a colleague of mine. We would attend the same conferences. We were obviously in in the same geography. You know, he was in Connecticut, I'm in Connecticut. And this agency that I knew of, right, just as, you know, frenemies and competitor in the space, they were looking for someone in the media group, specifically this thing at the time called programmatic advertising. And it's still a thing, but, you know, building this new solution, this new capability within the agency. So that's when immediately— Programmatic advertising.

Would you say programmatic is the precursor to AI or programmatic works with AI a lot?

That's a good question. So, um, I would say that there is an element of AI that is foundational to programmatic advertising. So there's, there's, you know, there's machine learning, which is a function of AI. It doesn't cover all of the things that AI does or the full spectrum of AI, but programmatic advertising and really any biddable media format like Google or Meta or LinkedIn to find an audience at the right time and at the right place on the right device uses machine learning. Now, the AI components that we know today, the generative AI and that iterative learning that the machines do in order to be better at finding that new audience or finding that better placement. I mean, that's inherent today, but back then it was just machine learning, buzzword du jour, as it were.

What would you say the biggest learning, either positive or negative, from doing something right or wrong in the last 6 months that you could pass on to our audience?

Honestly, the biggest thing, the biggest piece of advice that I tell anybody, whether they're, you know, humble enough to be further along in their career than me and asking me that question, or they're newbies coming into the space, is like, know what you don't know and be humble about that. Because there's so much to learn and to take in and to, and to iterate from, I think, especially today and especially in the space that I work in. What happened— what happens today is so different than what happened 6 months ago, 6 months ago, and what we were used to doing a year ago or 18 months or 2, you know, 24 months ago is fundamentally different. And so it's that constant need to learn and and to refine is something that you just, you have to do in today's world. And I'll be the first one to admit that, like, once I know something works and I've seen it work and I use it and I'm successful with it, I am the first one to say, I'm not moving from that tactic or I'm not moving from that strategy. And it's gotten me into, not into trouble, but it's, you know, I fell behind in some spaces.

Yeah.

So don't be afraid to learn, you know, learn from the past, know what you don't know and, you know, enhance.

What's been the most successful way to get top of funnel for yourself in the last couple years?

Yeah, I, you know, honestly, like doing as much outreach as possible. Really just focusing on who your target audience is, your ICP, whatever acronym you want to give it, really focusing in on that. And then understanding, like, you just, you know, it's a quality numbers game, but in my opinion, it's still a numbers game. You know, you have to be able to, you know, to do outreach at scale, whether that's, you know, honestly, Michael, through it's, you know, what you are providing for us, you know, to reach an audience at scale en masse, you know, with a message that's slightly tailored for the audience that's receiving message. I think that's very powerful. Or it's paid media, or it's the email newsletter, or it's the blog article you write. You have to be able to produce that Very quickly and at scale in order for it to be effective. Unfortunately, in today's world where everyone is bombarded with millions of messages and marketing at any given day, week, month, you know, scale is important.

Yeah, like we talked about before, is give before you ask, right? Yeah, give to get. So yeah, doing these things like roundtables and masterminds and podcasts.

Yeah, I, you know, that's something I'll be honest with you that took a long time for me to, uh, appreciate. You know, I, I think as—

Me too. I was, I was like feature, feature dump on people. Yeah, people were trying to teach me like 20 years ago. What is it? Don't put that you do this. What do you do for them? Like, what are you talking about? I know what I'm doing. I closed millions of dollars. And they were right. They were just right really early because that's how we were taught. Like, how do we solve a problem? We have a CRM. What does the CRM do? What does the advertising do? Because that's what matters to the buyer, not what you do. It's what do you do for them to keep their job?

Yeah.

Keep them happy. Make them look successful and, you know, be able to feed their family. That's the common things you got to think about when you're saying something. So what? How does it affect me?

And I think, like, not to discredit the work that you've done or the work that I've done, and we've been successful in what we've been able to do, like, by not talking about them as much as we probably should have in the past. I mean, there is a buyer that wants features and benefits. They want to hear that, right? But like when you're so commoditized, look, paid media, right? You could buy paid media from anyone. You could buy it from a single consultant or you can buy it from a massive, you know, 10,000-person media agency. You have to differentiate. And we've found it successful to be, to talk about the client first. Solve their problem.

You have to sell things the way people buy. If they buy features and functions, you should change your pitch to what they like to buy. So like my roundtable podcast, the pitch slap approach, whatever works for that particular client.

Yeah.

And that's why A/B test it. But there's tools out there that are trying to get good at like, how do people buy? What's their What's their whole personality? What's their DISC thing? It's like, great, that's really great for the large big companies, right? Just go really slow. But you gotta, gotta go really slow, get the elephants, go medium for the light enterprise mid-market, and for the SMB, you basically kind of just throw it out there, you know, because you can't spend 3 different discovery calls on something that doesn't really pay the bills.

It doesn't work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what's the biggest life lesson would you tell someone that's getting into paid media space today? Like, you should start— what can you tell them with your knowledge of being in the space for a little bit? Like, do A, B, and C before you decide to go into the paid media industry.

You know, I don't know if I could pinpoint it to one thing, to be honest, because there's so much out there when when you think about paid media, you know, you have people that focus in on digital, you have people that focus in on traditional, you have people that focus in on experiential, and then there's overlap, right? There's to all, you know, those 3 buckets. I would say like, don't— and I've only come to appreciate this in the last couple years— don't Assume or feel that any one thing is better than the other, right? Oh, well, digital's got to be the way to go because who watches TV anymore? Who, who really pays attention to that billboard? Or experiential doesn't work because who's going to events, right? COVID, right? Who's, who's, who's doing that nowadays? It's all about Google. It's all about Meta or LinkedIn and you know, the digital element. And I think that people tend to go so far in what— whether it's that direction or it's the other one, you have to appreciate that in paid media, again, consumers or, you know, business buyers or any persona really, they're inundated with marketing messages day in and day out. Appreciate the many things that a consumer or a buyer interacts with, whether it's digital or traditional or it's experiential. Or it's that newsletter, or it's the direct mail piece that you might get that, oh, I, I throw those away. No one reads those. Well, maybe, maybe not. Depends on the buyer.

Some of the old school ways of doing things get more attention. You know, for me, it's like people say, oh, I do phone calls and it works. I'm like, yeah, it might work, but I, I don't answer my phone. And not many other people I know answer their phone. You gotta, you gotta have some sort of relationship before you should just go, hey, it's Michael. Yeah. I work for this. But tell us, tell, tell us, um, how people should reach you. Like, what's your email address? Sure. Cell phone number would be good, probably. And how they should— why they should reach out to you, just to close out this, uh, this podcast.

Well, I, I appreciate you, uh, giving me that opportunity to do that. So, uh, you can find me on LinkedIn, first of all. Uh, if you just search for Andrew Albert Perry, you'll find me. Uh, but my email is, uh, andrew.perry@ @mediat.ly. It's right there in my, uh, on the lower left of my, uh, my Zoom handle. Uh, phone number, 860-773-3917. That is my work phone. It comes right to my, uh, comes right to my cell phone. So please, uh, please do call. Um, you know, as far as what people can, uh, can leverage me for, one, well, I'm a great soundboard for all things paid media. Certainly, if you're looking at a particular media plan or, or a strategy that you might want a second opinion on, I'm more than happy to do that for folks. But looking to get that message out there, whether it's brand awareness or it's driving leads and engagement for your brand, that is what Immediately does for most industries. But we do tend to specialize in healthcare and higher ed. financial services and B2B. So, uh, we're, we're, uh, always willing to take a look, help somebody out.

All right, thanks, Andrew. Appreciate you being on the show.

Thanks, Michael. I appreciate the time. Take care.