Eric Stockton on Why It’s Important to Break Silos in Marketing

Sure. I was born and raised in Indiana—in the cornfields, actually. In high school, I moved to Florida and went to the University of Florida, where I studied Food Science and Human Nutrition, believe it or not. With three friends, we co-founded a little tech company right in my dorm room at UF and grew it over the years. It was never part of my plan. This was pre-tech, pre-e-commerce. There was no amazon.com back then, and we were figuring a lot of things out. Food science and nutrition really weren’t in the cards for me. Funny enough, that path eventually led me into dental school—which was definitely not my plan…

No, not gonna do that. So…

Absolutely. Gator Nation—you go to an airport, and you’re sure to see someone in Gator gear.

Absolutely. It’s such a great town too. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Gainesville, but it’s an awesome combination of a small-town feel with the university right there—young and energetic. Plus, they’ve got a huge startup scene downtown, which is actually how SharpSpring came about.

I’ve got a brother and a sister, both younger than I am.

Well, she’s married, so she has her husband to look out for her, but she still has her big brother. Fourth of July with my family is pretty awesome. We get together with both my mom’s side and my dad’s side—my parents married young, around 21 or 22, and they lived just five miles apart. So both sides of the family all get together. It’s really neat to see 100 to 150 people you haven’t seen since last Fourth of July all in one place.

Yep, absolutely. You’ve got the big barn in the background, the pond, and the kids jumping in the pond. It’s pretty picturesque—actually, it’s pretty cool.

Yeah, so SharpSpring is in Gainesville, Florida, and about a year ago they decided to open a small office in Atlanta—in Buckhead, actually. My role here has been twofold: I’m the General Manager of Perfect Audience and I’m also working on opening up our small office in Atlanta.

I think it’s where Salesforce is located. If you’re familiar with it, it’s on the north end of the city. There are a ton of really cool tech companies in that area.

Yeah, it really was. I was that silly kid who needed beer money and rent money. I was really into computers at the time, building them in my dorm room and selling them to professors. This was back when you could build a PC from scratch and mod it for someone. Or you had younger, wealthy kids who said, ‘I’ve got mom and dad’s money; let me blow $2,000 on a machine.’ I would build it, take their money, and they ended up with the best gaming system for about six months until something newer came along. It was a great turnover business because customers would come back over and over again.

Absolutely. One of those customers even turned into one of my best friends. A few of us got together and said, ‘Let’s figure out how to put this stuff online.’ It was a novel concept back then—e-commerce, a term that didn’t even exist. We built a website using Microsoft FrontPage. I created a small website with a couple of pages, and then we started advertising. It blew up when we advertised in the right places, and we built a solid reputation. In the first year, we did about 300 to 400K in revenue; the second year, a couple million; then we doubled that the next year, and at our peak, we were doing around 70 million in revenue.

Actually, no. Three days from now will be my one-year anniversary of the acquisition of Perfect Audience—right at the one-year mark.

Yeah, that’s a great question. I came in from the SharpSpring side. I used to run a group called Marketing Sherpa, which was like Forrester or Gartner for all things marketing—if you needed a data point, Marketing Sherpa had it. Shortly after I left Marketing Sherpa and returned to Gainesville, Rick was starting up a marketing automation company called SharpSpring. We got to know each other and kept in touch over the years. Then, around last August, we started talking about a potential opportunity with Perfect Audience, and they were considering acquiring it. And yeah, clearly, November 21, 2019.

Well, I’ll give you my take on it. As a marketer, you deal with various tech stack point solutions on your credit card bill—chatbots, email solutions, marketing automation, CMS, CRM, and so on—often stitched together with integrations or Zapier. What we really miss is addressing the core problem: how much money am I investing and how much am I getting back, where to double down, and where to cut back. This acquisition helps us get a full funnel view—from the first ad impression to conversion and everything in between—capturing the life of the lead. That has drawn me to this whole thing; it’s been fun.

That’s a great question. Perfect Audience started out of Y Combinator in 2011, founded in a YC class by some really smart people in the ad space and developers who were figuring out how to build this thing. Since then—and especially since we came in—I’ve come to understand the kind of marketer using Perfect Audience. A marketer wakes up in the middle of the night not worrying about which digital advertising solution they need, but about generating enough revenue to raise money, hire people, or cover payroll. For more established companies with small marketing departments of three to five people, it’s about meeting quarterly targets and driving growth. We serve customers like that, providing a holistic view of marketing from ad to conversion, and we also help digital agencies that want an independent look at all channels to determine where to double down and where to cut back.

That’s a great point. In my past marketing campaigns, I used to get frustrated when I had one conversion—a single customer coming through my funnel—and then saw a conversion in both Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics. I would wonder, “Where did this customer come from?” Google likes to claim the credit, and Facebook does too. What Perfect Audience does is remain platform-agnostic, focusing on where the conversion actually came from and providing an independent single source of truth.

That’s a good question. We have multiple use cases. We’ve worked with Sotheby’s over the years—a large, worldwide auction house. Sotheby’s uses us not only for geo-targeting but also for international campaigns, especially with GDPR and other regulations coming into play. We’ve also worked with Rackspace, SendGrid (which was acquired not too long ago), 99designs, Eventbrite, Digital Ocean, and others. We serve both B2B companies that need to drive more leads and B2C companies focused on conversions and revenue. I enjoy looking at a cross-section of the web, understanding what works across thousands of campaigns. During COVID, for example, we saw significant shifts: a travel advertiser focusing on Italy had to pause campaigns due to tough conditions, while e-commerce sites and meal delivery services were booming. It was fascinating to see the numbers move and trends shift.

I don’t hold back. What we’re trying to do is get back to what I mentioned earlier—a holistic view of what’s happening in the life of a lead. When someone says they’re spending money, they need to understand how it’s performing and the ROI of various campaigns. I’ve consulted for many companies and seen that everyone optimizes based on their job title. The email person has their metrics, the ad person has theirs, and the content person has theirs. But how do you tie that to revenue? That’s where marketing managers, directors, or CMOs have to juggle everything, and it’s too siloed. We have to break down these silos and look at marketing as the overall business function. It’s not about departmentalized KPIs—it’s about putting in $1 and getting $2 out. I need to know where to invest my money and how quickly it returns, which is what drives business growth. That’s what we’re trying to solve.