Eric Stockton | Constant Contact
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When Eric Stockton took over as head of marketing for SharpSpring by Constant Contact following the company’s acquisition, he immediately set about shifting the focus from outbound to inbound marketing with the goal of building a pipeline of high intent hand raisers. The result was a doubling of the company’s demo attend rate, from 20 to 40 percent, and a 23X improvement in the number of leads that turned into closed won deals.
While making that shift sounds simple, in practice it requires top to bottom organizational buy in.
In this episode, Eric breaks down exactly what changed, how he built a solid foundation for it via internal communications, what the company’s new demand generation motion looks like, and the new KPIs he’s using to track success.
Get the details on all of this, and more, in this week’s episode.
Resources from this episode:
Visit the SharpSpring by Constant Contact website
Connect with Eric on LinkedIn
Eric and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:00):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Eric Stockton, who is the vice president of demand generation at Constant Contact. Welcome to the podcast, Eric.
Eric (00:26):
Thanks for having me.
Kathleen (00:28):
I'm excited to talk to you because you have been navigating some interesting challenges in the last several months. And Constant Contact is a company I think virtually all marketers know. And so I love anytime we have an opportunity to give a peek behind the scenes at what's happening at these companies where we see from the outside, but maybe not behind the curtain. It's always fascinating. So with that, let's start with having you do an introduction of yourself and your story and background, and how did you wind up in this demand gen role at Constant Contact?
Eric (01:02):
Yeah, that's a great question. So it was not a normal path to be honest with you. So I, I came in to SharpSpring through an acquisition. SharpSpring was acquiring a company called Perfect Audience, which is a retargeting platform in, when was that, November of 2019. And I came in to help with just consulting due diligence, that sort of thing. And the CEO at the time, you know, once we got through due diligence and we were getting ready to close, offered me this GM position to be able to run the business with a focus on new customer acquisition and growing, you know, growing the the business. And so I, you know, I handled things like product along with a really sharp product manager and then also, you know fronting customer acquisition, customer success, really the whole sort of the whole gammut. And then we were acquired <laugh> in October by or sorry, September 2021. Gosh, I can't believe this. So it's kinda like
Kathleen (02:16):
Time flies when you're having fun.
Eric (02:18):
Right? Yeah. So we were acquired by Constant Contact and now we are SharpSpring by Constant Contact. And the, sort of the premise behind that acquisition was, Hey, look, we obviously really widely known brand at Constant Contact. We're known for, you know, email and digital marketing, but we really have a lot of customers that want to grow into a larger, you know, you know, platform to be able to do things like marketing automation, sales, CRM, you know, that sort of thing. And you know, that, that was sort of the, sort of the justification. And it's been, you know, it's been interesting, right? It's been, it's been eight months and we're pretty deep into it by this point.
Kathleen (02:58):
Yeah. And, and so I talk a little bit about when you got in you know, you're joining a company that has been around for a long time. It has very established ways of doing business and going to market. And when you and I first talked, you know, that the TLDR or the highlight was like a lot has changed since you joined. And specifically around how the company approaches going to market outbound via inbound. Maybe you could just start by giving some background and, and what was, what was happening when you joined and, and, you know, how did that change?
Eric (03:31):
Yeah. So with, with respect to the SharpSpring brand, once the acquisition was completed you know, one of the things that was immediately changed was just, you know, we, our, our CMO had moved on to bigger and better things. They were looking for somebody else, you know, to run the, you know, the marketing for the, for the product, the SharpSpring product. And I, you know, I sat down with a CMO and, and she offered me the position. And one of the first things I said, is it like we are too heavily dependent on in my thesis was we're too heavily dependent on an outbound motion and we really need to get away from that. And, and we need to start shifting to true hand raisers, right. And, and be able to scale, you know, brand and, and demand.
Eric (04:23):
And, you know, of course that's not entirely knowing what the future brand was gonna look like. <Laugh> you know, cuz we were just, you know, we were just acquired and you know, we have this, you know, very core established small business. So entrepreneurs, audience, you know, within the Constant Contact universe. And then now we have, you know, more what I would call you know, traditional B2B marketers, you know, that are more sophisticated with sales CRM and you know, marketing automation. And the, the great thing about it, to be honest with you was like, I had a lot of support from the executive management, you know, from the CEO CMO CFO, which was huge by the way <laugh> yeah. You know to invest in that area. Right. So it's, you know, and for everybody who's done this, like obviously there's a balancing act, right.
Eric (05:17):
Your pipeline, you know, when you start thinking about an inbound motion the biggest scary factor is holy cow, my, my MQLs are just, you know, they're, they're dropping in half or, or even more you know, and so that's scary to sales. That's scary to, I think everybody, but there was a lot of conversation prior to that about, you know, sort of like reading through what the playbook is going to look like when we do this. And part of the support I was getting was look, you know, and, and I was, I was sort of like having these conversations ahead of time with again, the CFO, you know, FP&A you know, obviously it's a fairly large organization to set expectations for what we think ought to happen. Right. You know, so, you know, if you sort of read through the playbook already and you've seen the movie, played the tape to the end, this is kind of what's gonna happen, but here are all of the, the big chunk points, you know, between here and there.
Eric (06:15):
And we, you know, spent a, I mean, I feel like that was probably half of my job for the first five months is, is really kind of like laying that out and, and talking about the chapters and by the way, we're not there yet. Right. We still like, there's still things that we want to do. And we're not quite where I want to be. But the, the big shift from a sales team who had a BDR, you know, a large BDR, outbound motion to drive new deals, you know, passing them off to AEs after qualification started like we, we, we sort of kept that motion going for a, a fairly significant amount of time. And then while we were doing that, we were working on the inbound and, you know, working through, you know, what does it look like for an inbound lead, you know specifically, you know, you know, really focusing in on you know, paid search, you know, sort of dialing back some of the, maybe some of the fluffier stuff, outlier stuff that we were doing down to the core for demand capture and then really, you know, doing away with a lot of the other, you know, perhaps the, a lot of the other stuff that wasn't working anyway and allowing us the, sort of the flexibility to start rewiring some things, right.
Eric (07:35):
Because, you know, if, if you have an outbound motion, you need that BDR army, you know, filter before you get to the AEs, but on the inbound side, you don't need that in a lot of ways. Right. You know, you can route those guys directly to, you know, the AEs, as soon as they get scheduled on the calendar. And, you know, we were, you know, lots of quick wins like that, right. So we went from, you know, something like a 20, 20, some odd percent demo attend rate, you know, <laugh> to, you know, something that was in the forties within low forties. But within, I don't know, a month, month and a half, something like that at the time that we got it rewired, luckily, you know, we, you know, we do sort of drink our own champagne here. We use our own product.
Eric (08:20):
So we had the delivery. And so we, we were able to go in and, and get that stuff rewired really, you know, sort of a nice, quick win there. And then at the same time in the background, or in parallel, we were really starting to stand up our paid social campaigns and, and some of the other stuff that we were doing to be able to drive demand or create demand. And because that's just not something we've ever done before. Right. you know, so it was a completely new muscle <laugh> that we were building. We didn't have any, you know, theoretically like the, the staff didn't have that kind of experience or, or, or knowhow. So we started building that and you know, getting this into a place where we got the basics blocking and tackling in place, you know, just the, the, the basics started to see what was happening, you know, for number of, you know, a number of inbound demos.
Eric (09:21):
And I, I built out a model that I, that was part of my communication tool. Well, I was using it internally, but I was really, it was as much as anything using that as my communication tool to the non-marketing executives in the room. Right. And, you know, I was, you know, we, the way I did it is I built it backwards from the business objectives. Right. You know, thinking about pipeline and revenue, C LT V unit economics, that sort of thing. And it worked my way sort of up funnel you know, to, you know, the, the sort of the main KPIs, which, you know, we can dig into if you'd like, but those, those sorts of things to be able to help people sort of visualize and understand what was happening as we made that shift. And I would say, we're probably I'm gonna call it halfway to where we wanna be. You know, maybe 60% if I wanna be aggressive, but you know, it's, it's, we're, we're coming along pretty well.
Kathleen (10:25):
All right. I have so many questions. The first being, I think, at least in my mind, it seems like there would be two reasons that you would want to make this shift from primarily outbound to primarily inbound. There's the philosophical reason of we, you know, fundamentally believe that it's a better way to market and that it's more customer friendly, et cetera. And then there's the performance reasons where there, you might have a hypothesis that look, our results will improve. And you talked a little bit about like demo completion rates and things along those lines, when you first came in and you went to the CMO and the CFO, what were, what was the basis of your proposal to do this?
Eric (11:07):
Yeah. So, you know, that's a great question. I, I didn't know anything at the, at the beginning. So I was sort of out on an island when I was running the you know, the other business. And when I came in, it was really from scratch trying to understand. So I had to map everything out myself just to get it right in my own head. And, and then what sort of emerged was, you know, there's a very clear delineation between, you know, what a you know, what a BDR to AE motion looks like, right. In terms of, you know, unit economics scaling everything, right. Compared to what was at the time, very, very, very limited amount or of, of inbound. And, you know, I, I think we, we, some somehow in the past, and I don't know what this is one of these legacy, like things that I was sort of trying to get.
Eric (12:07):
Right. My head when we, when we, when I came in, cause we always, we always thought about inbound maybe differently than, than I was thinking about it. We, you know, the, the historical thinking was, oh, well, you know, these are people that are coming in from the webinars. And, you know, the, the other kind of like content syndication, you know, we have a, we had a a massive content syndication program going at the time. And like, you know, you, you start, I did it in Lucid Chart, you know, I just sort of like pulled up Lucid Chart. And I said, okay, show. And like, I got together with marketing ops and like, show me all of the funnels. And, and, and like how they all flow through like, well, the two funnels and how they sort of flow through and you know, how do I, well, what, what I came back with, like, after I was getting it in my head was like, holy cow, like, you know, the, in this inbound motion is something like 23 times more efficient than, you know, the outbound.
Kathleen (13:12):
Sorry, efficiency measured how?
Eric (13:14):
By lead, like just lead that we are feeding to the BDR team. Right. So we were just sending
Kathleen (13:20):
Better quality leads
Eric (13:22):
And yeah. Versus somebody that's coming in on the inbound side.
Kathleen (13:29):
Is literally a 23 X and inbound was 23 X better than outbound.
Eric (13:31):
That's right. It may, it may lead to a deal. So that's skipping a few steps obviously, but it's from a lead to a deal. It was 23 X more, more efficient, and that's not a typo. Right. I mean, it was, it was actually pretty dramatic. And I remember like the, the conversations were very clear. It was okay, well, I'm sold now, what do we do? Right. You know, it was that sort of discussion with, you know, again, CFO, et cetera. And, and that's when I went into like, okay, well, here's what I think we ought be doing. Like we ought be coming in and, and we ought to install sort of this package to be able to, you know, essentially target and drive more of these types of people and create the same sort of of, of outcome and, you know over time, you know, that was the sort of the constant checkpoints was, okay, well, how are we doing against what we originally modeled? Right. So that was always the graphic that people had in their head, which, you know, when I would show it, I would always show the same graphic and then show it over time and show the improvement over time. And you know, that was the easy way to communicate.
Kathleen (14:45):
So you talked in the beginning about how you had this, it sounded like a milestone driven plan for turning the ship. Right. <laugh> can you give me at a high level of sense of like what those milestones were?
Eric (15:04):
Yeah. so the, the biggest pieces were going to be, you know, let's get a, let's get an actual, I mean, from, from start, like let's actually map out what it is that we think, you know, the, the, the inbound funnel is gonna look like for these hand raisers. Right. So, you know, like what does it look like? You know, where's my starting point, where's my baseline. And then, you know, get a decent understanding of what the conversion rate looks like. Why, again, in parallel, while we're standing up, you know, the, the actual campaigns, and then as we were doing that, sort of the as I described earlier, sort of the rewiring of, you know, the, the, what we, anyway, what we called a direct, like a demo request to an a direct, to an AE flow. Right. So we were doing that before we, we sort of ripped that out.
Eric (16:04):
That was sort of like a, for lack of a better word, sort of like a stage two, and then stage three was, okay, now we actually have some traffic. Right. And we're actually seeing some of those folks that are coming through. And of course at that time, like lots of it was through just retargeting, like lower funnel stuff. Right. and, and bringing those people in the door that we kind of already had a, you know, like either an audience around, or, you know, somebody who, you know, some of these groups that were, are, are sorry, some of these channels that were, you know, pretty low funnel, paid search, et cetera. And that gave us a little bit of traffic to work with right. On a very small scale to be able to figure out like, okay, well, what, what is starting to happen in the funnel now that we're starting to bring people through?
Eric (16:54):
And they're starting to trickle trickle through to a demo demo, attend, you know, that, that sort of phase and as we were doing that, I it's funny, like I actually launched my podcast about the same time, because it, well, it actually wasn't even a podcast at first. It was really more me trying to understand our customers better. And so we spent a lot of time just like having conversations, sort of like this one, right. If you were theoretically in my ICP, I was just sort of like really trying to pelt you with questions, trying to understand more about what was keeping you awake at night. And then we would turn those into these level of you know, insights, you know, the, that eventually became the pain points that we now, you know, talk about every day, really in, in our marketing.
Eric (17:45):
And, and so, you know, if you think about like, what are the stages it's, you know, from beginning, it's always gonna be like, you know, like set the baseline. Second step is typically what's the lowest hanging fruit stuff. So, you know, killing off the stuff that doesn't work. And then this next stage is really, you know, what is the, you know, what are the quick win type of things that we can do within, you know, the actual leads that we're getting? Like, how do we win more of those or be better or more efficient with those. And then the third stage is really sort of like, you know, again, trying to bring some more traffic through, to understand more, fill out our funnel a little bit, and then, you know, you, you kind of wanna scale from there. And luckily, you know, I was able to like, again, we, I had a lot of buy in, so we had the budget to be able to do some of these things in parallel. I didn't have to sequence them maybe as much as I would've had, you know, if I was at a different company. But you know, the, the idea of, you know, trying to get us to the goal faster right. Was, was definitely the, you know, the, the directive.
Kathleen (18:53):
I imagine that when you first started socializing this idea internally, particularly amongst folks who were on the marketing or the BDR team, that there was some trepidation <laugh> especially I would, I would guess amongst the BDRs, as far as, like, what does this mean for the future of how this team is gonna be structured and yeah. The way our roles are aligned. Talk to me a little bit about how that conversation unfolded in how you developed buy-in internally.
Eric (19:24):
Yeah. So I had a great partner in our head of sales. It, you know, so it's funny. I remember sort of walking him through his name's Greg. I walked him through this process, you know, kind of what I was thinking. I don't know, day three, <laugh> something like that. And, and he's like, I've been waiting for this for, you know, two years. Right. And and so
Kathleen (19:52):
There's no pressure <laugh>
Eric (19:54):
Yeah, I know. Right. So, yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't hard to get him to buy in. He, he kind of got it immediately. But the, the staff, right. The BDRs, especially, it's like, okay, well, what does this mean for me? You know, what does this mean for my job? And, you know, the, the, the way that, I mean, I remember that meeting too. And, and one of the things I said is, look, I have a ton of empathy for the SDR role. It is hard to do that job. Right. And, you know, you come in every day, 50% of your, you know, wins are gonna be like, it's all in your head, you know, it's tactics skills. Sure. But a lot of it's just in your head and like, you gotta have that attitude going in and you need to know, like, you know, you got support, you know, from folks, you know in the marketing, you know, on the marketing side to be able to help, you know, drive things forward.
Eric (20:47):
And then like the, the kind of conversations we were having were like, well, clearly, like what we're doing right now, isn't working, right. Like your lead to connection, rate's not working, you know, your conversation to demo is, is really low. Like we can keep doing the same things. Right. Or we can actually start putting something in place that allows us to be able to look at our business sort of holistically and say, is this the right thing for the company? And then, and then you specifically, like the idea of some of these some of these BDRs not ha like they didn't have the support, like they didn't have air cover, for example, like, and when I say air cover, I don't mean, you know, like brand stuff. Like what we did is we took actual leads that they were, that we were feeding them.
Eric (21:46):
Right. We scored them for ICP. We, we used Lead Space for that. And as our, as our CDP, we brought all of those in, and then we created audiences around that coupled with Metadata.io. And we pulled those together and create and created a real campaign that supported them, you know, as we're working on some of these other things. Right. we have a, you know, we had a few other tactics too, that we were employing that helped give them some of those better, you know, sort of quality conversations. But ultimately, you know, I needed them to feel it, not just like, I don't know, in my experience, like SDRs are not real data driven. Right. It's a lot of it's right, right here. Right. You know, and they get stuck in their head, but really a lot of it's got feel and like, how do I feel the day and emotions?
Eric (22:35):
And so we spent a lot of time, like every day just going through like, okay, what are the leads? What's the retro like what's working, what's not working. And we spent a lot of time getting that feedback and then very quickly making slow, like micro changes. And then coming back to the BDR team and saying, okay, this is what we did. Right. So that they feel heard. And I think more often than not, that's like a real challenge, you know, is BDRs feel like, you know, they're sort of the low person on the totem pole. They don't get heard, they get burned out and then, you know, they Ari and then you gotta backfill for 'em. Right. So we spend a lot of time just walking them through the process and helping get buy in, and then, you know, employing a few tactics to be able to help make their lives a little bit better while we're working on some of these other things.
Kathleen (23:24):
Now talk to me about top of the funnel. Did you, in order to do this, did you have to substantially change the volume of inbound that was coming in top of funnel?
Eric (23:41):
Yes. So we we, I mean, rough ballpark in order to hit budget, you know, we needed to basically three X, the number of, you know, actual hand raisers that were coming in the door. Wow. So, yeah, so it was a big number and, you know, we, you know, we were looking at, you know, in order to, you know, to be able to accomplish that again absolutely. You know, had the buy in, had the budget, those sorts of things, like that's, that's everything. And, you know, we were able to, to, to, to take a look at what we were doing, sort of cut those things out that were, you know, sort of like no brainer things. And then start to build up like what I would call that inbound, you know, kind of muscle and, you know, it starts, you know, for us anyway, I not for everybody probably, but for us, it started with what I could control, which was gonna be, you know, paid social and, and things like that because, you know, it allowed us to be able to have a pretty good handle on dialing in, you know, job title targeting, you know, and, and, and getting really specific.
Eric (24:50):
And then bringing in metadata was, was a big help too, because then we could translate a lot of those learnings into some of the Facebook campaigns that we were running and some of the other things that we were doing. So ultimately that's what has been able to help get our pipeline or sorry, those, those inbound hand raisers up. And it, it, you know, upfront, it started showing up as things like you know, people coming to the homepage never heard of us before. Right. And, and we were dealing a lot with, you know, like a lot of problem solution type, you know, content. It's funny. I, I actually got called out by somebody on, on LinkedIn one day where they were saying like, I, like, I keep seeing all of these SharpSpring ads, but I have zero idea what they do. <Laugh>, you're like,
Kathleen (25:41):
Well, one part of my process is working really well
Eric (25:43):
<Laugh> and, and that's, so I commented, like in his thing, I was like, holy cow, like I, you know, it's like the the, what, what I basically said was, you know, I did not want to be one of those brands that you see that is too much and tells you all the same things over and over again, to the point where you just get nauseated and didn't give you enough breathing room to, to get value first, before we ever made an ask. Right. And so you know, I didn't, I just didn't wanna be, I didn't wanna be known for that. Yeah. And, and so we probably in, in, you know, all, all honesty, I think we probably over rotated too much on the, you know, too much problem solution or too much problem, not enough solution you know, in terms of like things like call to action, that sort of thing.
Eric (26:40):
But if I was gonna err on anything, I wanted to air there and, you know, obviously we were still, we were still building an audience, you know, for retargeting and some other, you know, some other things that we were doing too. But we have, I think gotten to the point where we found a nice balance between the two where we're actually, you know, making, making a, a stronger connection between the, you know, the, the, the, the problem that we're, you know, that we're, that we're sort of hammering on around the pain point and then what we do to solve it.
Kathleen (27:12):
So was that really just accomplished through a messaging adjustment? Or was there any throttling in terms of like volume and frequency of ads?
Eric (27:20):
No. Yeah. So our frequency is super low in terms of like, we, we typically, like I've got a two to three cap on, you know, frequency cap on basically anything that we do that's, that's in paid social, so it's not likely you're gonna see our stuff too often. Now you'll, you'll, you'll see us talking about the same six or eight pain points all the time, but in, you know, slightly different ways, we'll tell it 75 times in a different way, but it, it drives our creative department a little bit, or it did anyway, drove 'em a little bit crazy at the beginning because we were kicking out so much creative. And, and it wasn't something that we, again started part of that building of the muscle. They didn't have that at the, in the beginning. But it was sort of a, it was a little bit of a knowledge transfer, a little bit of a orientation on like the why underneath, why we were doing what we were doing.
Eric (28:17):
It's not like, I just want a bunch of creative out there. Right? Yeah. It's not a scatter gun it's, you know, and, and I made it personal for them. I was like, how, like, how often do you see the same ad 75 times? And you're just blind to it. You don't want that. Right. So like, let's give the, let's give other people the same experience that you want, and that sort of clicked. And, you know, they've been great ever since, but yeah, the it two to three time, you know, frequency cap on anything that we're doing in paid social is pretty much what we do. And then the messaging to your point tightening that up a little bit and showing, you know, why, you know, this problem is exists that, you know, we pretty much know resonates with, with our ICP directors of marketing, you know, VPs, and, and then what, you know, what SharpSpring specifically does to solve it.
Kathleen (29:06):
It's so interesting that you brought this up because I was in a, a, like a, I don't wanna call it a debate, but a discussion the other day in a slack group I'm in, which is all CMOs. And, and it's something that I had sort of been thinking about subconsciously and, and somebody gave voice to it, which is that, you know, as marketers were always taught to like, lead with the benefits and the outcomes for the audience, but there are actually times when you need to really lead with the product features and functionality. Like, in my case, I'm marketing a product that is whether I want to, or not, it's pretty much a new category. Like, people don't know what this product is. They don't have a, a framework or a nice box to put it in. And so to lead with the benefits or outcomes actually hurts me because everybody's like, oh my God, you sound like everyone else. And, and what do you really do? Right. And so I have to lead with features and functionality. And I think, I do think that there's a really important place for that because yeah, you have to answer that question, like, what is this product and what does it do? Yeah. And I think sometimes marketers, err a little bit too much on the side of the benefits. I don't know. It's an interesting debate.
Eric (30:11):
Yeah. I think, I think so. And, you know, we, we're in a more mature category, you know, with, you know, CRM and, you know, people know, you know, what the, what the core issues are, but we absolutely like in the retargeting and, and some of the other things that we do to, to sort of layer in that mid funnel stuff is, is really key. And, and, you know, that's, that's when we get into the differentiations, like, why are we different than X, Y, or Z? Yeah.
Kathleen (30:40):
Yeah. Interesting. So the big question I have is in terms of results, what did this look like? I mean, you don't have to obviously get into specific numbers, but like you made this shift and were there dips in terms of performance or how did that all pan out?
Eric (30:55):
So, yeah, there, there definitely was you know, and frankly deeper than I wanted it to be. <Laugh> to be honest with you I think some of it was some unexpected sort of attrition, like, like, you know, if you think about like when we made this shift or, you know the ultimate goal was to get roughly half of our, of our deals coming from the sales team and roughly half would be, you know, from us on the marketing side. And you know, on the, on the sales side the attrition of folks, you know, was probably just more than what we had planned on it. Wasn't due to the motion. It wasn't any of those kinds of things. It just, you know, it was just natural turnover and, and, you know, it was one of these things where we, you know, we didn't replace them as quickly as we wanted. So we, we sort of like, we lost some of the momentum <laugh> at the same time I was doing the inbound side, I was losing some of the momentum on the, on the outbound side nobody's fault. Right. But, you know, we, you know, we, we definitely came up short on some of the deals that were supposed to be propping us up while we were working on the inbound side.
Kathleen (32:08):
So did anybody freak out internally and try to like kind of reverse course?
Eric (32:14):
Yeah. So I think, you know, I think that's always gonna be the natural like tendency. Right. but again, yeah, I've, it probably just sounds like I'm saying this, but, you know, genuinely speaking like these, you know, the, the, the executives have been great in terms of understanding what we're trying to do. Right. And they have been steadfast in the ability to kind of, kind of help us stay, stay the course for lack of a better word. Right. You know, so it doesn't mean that it's not as pain. It's not painful. Right. I mean, we, every single month, right. It's like, okay, what are we doing? Can we do anything else? You know, what else is there to do? You know, and then obviously we were sort of pulling in things that we weren't Porter sort of like core to the plan to be able to help close the gap.
Eric (33:07):
Right. And, you know, one of those things is obviously, you know, there are a large number of customers that are at Constant Contact that we wanna be able to bring into a more complicated product, like a, like a SharpSpring. And, and so we started doing that sooner, I think, than we had planned on doing, but, you know, it's, you know, that's just, that's part of adjusting, right. You know, testing, adjusting, you know, optimizing and, and repeat. And that's, that's really what we were, you know, we were seeing pretty early on and, and it's helped, you know, it's helped, obviously,
Kathleen (33:41):
I'm really curious if, if somebody's listening and they're about to embark upon something like this, like if you had to do it all over again, knowing what, you know now, is there anything in particular that you would change in what you did or any specific advice you have from your lessons learned?
Eric (34:05):
I think just give it more time. It, it, that's the hardest thing that no, you know, it's the one thing that nobody has, but that just give it more time and continue, continue, continue to be able to talk the, the language of the CFO and the CEO. You know, you gotta talk in terms of business outcomes, you gotta be able to talk in terms of pipeline and revenue. You, you know, if, if I was, I mean, I would've been sunk from day one. If I had been thinking about campaign performance and coming into a meeting, right. It, it has to be working your way backwards from the business objectives. And then usually like in the conversations, you never even get to the beginning, like of like what's going on with actual campaigns that are driving anything. <Laugh>, it's really like, oh, okay.
Eric (34:52):
We get it. Like, you know, this is what the pipeline needs to be, but it's, it's, it's internal communication spending significant over overinvesting over communicating your time in the day with just internal communication and, and setting expectations. I don't know that you can do too much of that. And so I think if I was gonna do anything over, it's probably just double down on that. It just makes life easier, you know, across the board, as you, as you get into you know, like you said, right. I mean, there's, you know, there's always challenges. And when you hit those challenges, you need some of that Goodwill in the bank.
Kathleen (35:30):
Yeah, definitely. All right. Shifting gears, I have two questions I ask all my guests and I'd love to know your answers first is a lot of the marketers. I talk to say that they are kind of overwhelmed with trying to keep up with everything that's changing in the world of digital marketing. Little bit of the drinking from the fire hose kind of situation. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated?
Eric (35:57):
That's a great question. So I, I do a fair amount of reading. And usually it's not actually like most of the time it's not even anything to do with marketing. Right. It's like philosophy or, you know, some sort of engineering book or, you know, I, I don't know, like I was studying like the theory of constraints the other day. <Laugh>, you know, it's like, it's like, you know, cuz to me, that's what sort of like somehow I don't know how it works exactly. But in your brain, right. Like starts firing different kinds of connection points. And so when I go back to my day job, my nine to five, I start seeing like where those connections are and being like, okay, this is how this might help me here and has nothing to do. Like it's, you know, theory and constraints. Right. It has nothing really to do with marketing, but somehow, like, it sort of helps me, I think in a, in some way, like I don't know, like you, maybe you can answer this question, but we over like, there's so much going on and it's almost like you've gotta discharge, like, you know, the static in your brain a little bit to be able to focus. And for me it's like doing other things, so doing stuff with my wife and kids and family and reading stuff.
Eric (37:15):
It's like nothing to do with marketing.
Kathleen (37:16):
For me it's showering or exercising or vacuuming. You know, it's when like your, your body is occupied and your brain can just wander. It's amazing what happens.
Eric (37:26):
Yeah. And then the other part is just, you know, probably just in communities, right. You know obviously LinkedIn, you know, tons of super smart people that are, you know, doing these things on a daily basis, they're in the same sort of, you know, sort of stage of, of their, either their career or, you know, maybe a little bit further ahead or whatever. Right. And, you know, LinkedIn's fantastic for that. Like just building like genuine relationships with people and you know, and being, you know, being available when other people have questions, you know, all that kind of stuff is, is super valuable too.
Kathleen (38:02):
Yeah. All right. Second question. This podcast is all about inbound marketing and the definition of inbound marketing has well, it's different depending upon who you ask. And it certainly has evolved over time. I define it as anything that naturally attracts the right customer to your business. <Laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> so that's pretty broad, but you know, using that definition, is there a particular person or a company that you think is really kind of exemplifying what it means to be a great inbound marketer today?
Eric (38:31):
Oh goodness. That's a great question.
Eric (38:37):
I, you know, I don't, I don't know, like if, if you think about like what Liam, I think is probably doing over at Notarized, those are, those are things that like the, when I think about people that they are bringing in from brand demand that are, you know, coming in of their own volition, right. Unassisted coming in and then raising their handing saying, you know, I want either, you know, a trial or a whatever. Right. I, I think they just, they've done a good job. I love what Metadata does, you know, just on their side of things like those guys are great. And they're obviously, you know, they're just great, great human beings, I think as well, just knowing a couple of 'em. So, you know, I think, you know, those are two good examples.
Kathleen (39:28):
Those are great ones. And I, I know both of those companies pretty well <laugh> yeah, yeah. I would agree. All right, well, listen, we're coming up to the end of our time. So if somebody wants to reach out and connect with you and ask you a question or learn more about Constant Contact or SharpSpring, what's the best way for them to do that?
Eric (39:49):
Yeah. You can just check it out on LinkedIn. My it's just Eric Stockton and I obviously, you know, it's technically, it shows up as SharpSpring from Constant Contact. <Laugh>, it's a very long title, but yeah. Happy to answer any questions. I, again, I like some of my best sort of interactions with folks who are probably on LinkedIn, just through DMs back and forth, never met 'em right. But yeah. You know, it's, it's fun just to have those, those connections.
Kathleen (40:18):
It's pretty cool. How LinkedIn has evolved in the last couple years. It's really, it's really a valuable platform now. I, I wouldn't have said that five years ago.
Eric (40:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They did really neat things with it.
Kathleen (40:30):
Well, I will put the link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes, which can be found at kathleen-booth.com. And if you are listening and you enjoyed this head to apple podcast and leave the podcast a review, and if you know somebody else, who's doing great marketing work, tweet me at @Kathleenlbooth and I would love to have them as my next guest. That's it for this week. Thanks so much for joining me, Eric. This was really interesting.
Eric (40:55):
Yeah. Thanks for having me on this was fun.
