Will Perry is the CEO and CMO of Orlando-based Reason Agency, a direct response ad agency focusing on apparel brands, health and wellness, and healthy food spaces within e-commerce. They help scale up growth-stage ready brands drive significant revenue through paid social media ads such as Facebook and Google ads. Reason specializes in highly optimized split testing & media buying strategies that make acquiring customers more profitable.
In this episode, Will reminisces of his ice hockey days, his dream of being an ESPN journalist as a 12-year-old kid, and swiftly shifting to sales and marketing after his college internship at a golf academy. He then shares how his past failures and mistakes in starting an agency taught him valuable lessons on sales, marketing, and what it takes to successfully build, scale and grow Reason into what it is now.
This Cast Covers:
- Growing up in New Jersey playing ice hockey and being a powerhouse on the rink (04:01)
- From ditching his dream of becoming an ESPN journalist to taking up communications and digital marketing in college (06:40)
- How his internship at a golf academy got him hired as the Marketing Manager at 22 and promoted to Director of Sales and Marketing at 24 (07:49)
- Learning about the ins and outs of the sales process and high-ticket sales before making the jump to freelancing and starting an agency in 2015 (12:21)
- What their first projects looked like in the early years of their agency (13:26)
- Niching down in terms of service and industry to build the most profitable model possible (18:14)
- Three stages of building out a sales department (21:39)
- Setting up SOPs and sales playbooks and what good it’s done for the agency (23:16)
- Where most agencies struggle and how to fix it (27:46)
- What Will had to learn from Reason’s weak points (33:19)