Introduction
Every B2B business wants their marketing and sales teams to work together smoothly. But making this happen is often easier said than done. This challenge becomes even more complex when targeting large enterprise accounts, where multiple opportunities can exist within one account, and each opportunity has its own buying group attached to it.
FlexPay, a company that uses artificial intelligence to help businesses recover failed payments, found a solution to this challenge using Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation. We sat down with Steve Arentzoff (Senior Vice President) and Alexander Huzar (Marketing Operations Manager) to learn how they transformed their marketing and sales processes to drive measurable revenue growth. Here is their story.
The Challenge: Missing Important Customer Signals
Q: Can you tell us about FlexPay and what challenge led you to Oracle Eloqua?
Steve: At FlexPay, we help businesses reduce customer churn and maximize revenue with AI-driven payment recovery. However, we were facing our own revenue challenge that many growing companies encounter – what we called our “leaky pipe” problem. Here’s what was happening: When someone showed interest in our product, like downloading a report or attending an online webinar, our system would either create a new lead or update an existing record. While this sounds logical on paper, our sales team would often miss these important signals, especially when they came from existing customers who might want to buy additional services, because they would show up as “tasks/actions” in our customer relationship management system (CRM). This created a leaky pipe where valuable opportunities were slipping through the cracks.
Q: How did these missed opportunities impact your business?
Steve: Simply put, we were leaving money on the table. For a growing business like ours, not being able to effectively track and respond to all customer interactions was seriously limiting our growth potential. Every missed signal could represent a lost opportunity in revenue.
Finding the Right Solution
Q: What made Oracle Eloqua the right fit for your needs?
Steve: Eloqua aligned perfectly with our go-to-market strategy by providing three critical capabilities. First, we can engage with different decision-makers across all channels – email, social media, digital advertising, and more. Second, we now have a reliable system that allows us to determine when we want to create new leads in our CRM for relevant potential sales opportunities, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. Third, our sales team can see exactly how potential customers are interacting with our content, enabling them to have more meaningful conversations based on actual customer interests.
Alex: One of the key features we implemented is what we call a “point of interest” lead management model. In simple terms, every time someone engages with our marketing materials – whether they’re downloading a whitepaper, visiting our pricing page, or attending our events – it creates an entry in a lead table that our sales team reviews and responds to one by one. This ensures every sign of customer interest gets the attention it deserves. What’s particularly powerful is how quickly this happens. Thanks to Eloqua’s fast data processing speed and its recent migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, our sales team knows almost instantly when someone shows interest in our product. This means they can reach out while the customer’s interest is still fresh, rather than days later when the moment might have passed.
A Strategic Approach to Marketing
Q: How do you use Eloqua in your daily operations?
Steve: We use Eloqua for both bringing in new customers and growing relationships with existing ones, but our main focus is what we call account-based customer experience, or ABX. This approach recognizes that creating great customer experiences isn’t just marketing’s job – it requires everyone from marketing to sales to customer service working together. Think of it as creating a tailored journey for each company we work with, where every interaction is personalized and coordinated.
Here’s how our marketing team makes this happen in four key steps:
1. Account identification
- We work closely with our sales team to identify which companies have the highest potential value
- We create detailed maps of who the key decision-makers are within these companies and what matters to them
2. Cross-channel engagement
- We design personalized marketing campaigns that reach people wherever they prefer to engage – email, social media, or other channels
- Each piece of content is tailored to the person’s role. For example, a CFO might see content about return on investment, while an IT director would see information about technical implementation and security
3. Strategic lead management
- We track every meaningful interaction as a separate sales opportunity
- This ensures our sales team reviews and acts on each sign of interest
- Unlike traditional systems where important customer actions might get buried in a long task list, nothing gets overlooked
4. Enhanced sales visibility
- With Eloqua Profiler and other 3rd party tools, our sales team can see the full picture of how each company is engaging with us
- This helps them understand not just individual interactions, but how interest is building across the entire organization We use Eloqua to structure our ABX process, so our marketing efforts don’t just generate engagement but drive measurable pipeline growth.
Q: What makes Eloqua a long-term solution for FlexPay?
Steve: Eloqua’s detailed control over lead management is unmatched in the industry. It lets us perfectly align our marketing and sales efforts, ensuring every marketing campaign directly contributes to revenue. What’s particularly valuable is how the platform grows with us – as our business needs evolve, Eloqua has the flexibility and extensibility to adapt and scale alongside us.
Alex: The platform keeps getting better, too. The development team actively listens to users like us and regularly implements our feedback. There’s also a vibrant community of experienced users sharing best practices and solutions. Having access to this collective knowledge has been invaluable as we push the boundaries of what’s possible with the platform.
Future Plans
Q: What’s next in your journey with Eloqua?
Alex: We’re implementing single-sign-on to streamline our sales team’s access to prospect information through Eloqua Profiler. And we’re excited about the new Guided Campaigns feature, which will help us launch marketing campaigns more efficiently.
Advice for Other Companies
Q: What advice would you give to companies evaluating marketing automation platforms?
Steve: Remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Consider how your business actually works – how you identify and manage prospects, how your team uses customer data, and how your marketing and sales teams collaborate. Don’t just look at a checklist of features; understand how a platform will support your specific business strategy.
Alex: For larger enterprises with complex needs, look beyond basic automation features. You need a platform where you have complete visibility and control over how things work. Be wary of platforms that promise “simple and automagic” solutions – when processes happen automatically without your input, you lose the ability to fine-tune them for your specific needs. Ask yourself: Can it process large amounts of data quickly? Can you control exactly how information flows between teams? Can it adapt as your needs change? These are the questions that will matter six months or a year down the line.
Key Takeaways
FlexPay’s experience shows how the right marketing technology can help businesses grow by ensuring marketing and sales teams work together effectively. Their success offers valuable lessons for any company looking to improve how they convert customer interest into actual sales.
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