How one FinTech filled a Knowledge Gap in their Marketing Operations

Data that actually connects, results you can prove. Well, it sounds like a dream, right? But our next customer is making it a reality. GoodLeap is a fintech company building out a marketing operation that's as innovative as the products they offer. Joining me is Eric Wooster, Director of Marketing Operations and Data at GoodLeap. Welcome, Eric.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for joining us on the broadcast.

Of course. Yeah, excited to be here.

So give us some background. Tell us about GoodLeap and what your role looks like day to day.

Sure. Yeah. So I'm the Director of Marketing Operations and Data. So what does that mean? Mean, right? So I'm sort of a hybrid between marketing and technology where sort of collect all of our data and make it usable and digestible to segment, to actually be able to market to our customers. So I work very closely with our Salesforce team and obviously Marketing Cloud Engagement, Marketing Cloud Advanced, working it every day to really be able to produce omnichannel campaigns to target our customers.

And what kind of business is GoodLeap?

Yeah, we are a fintech company. So we offer, uh, sort of best-in-class solutioning for contractors and installers, uh, to homeowners. So we offer finance solutions to over about 1.4 million homeowners across, uh, the US. So think, I don't know, if you have a need, a new roof or a home efficient, uh, HVAC or something like that, we'll provide the financing to make that dream possible.

Awesome. All right, now you identified a significant gap in how GoodLeap was connecting with customers, which led to a pretty big pivot in your marketing strategy. Can you tell us about that?

Sure. Yeah. So traditionally, we were very much a B2B organization, right? We worked with installers and contractors to really provide sort of that best-in-class technology to the homeowners. But we found there's an opportunity to actually be able to remarket and target those homeowners. We had, like I said, over a million homeowners in our network, and the relationship we had with them wasn't very deep, right? It was very transactional. Think like, Thanks for paying your bill or welcome to GoodLeap. But we weren't really sort of deepening the relationship from there. So we saw there was opportunity to be able to obviously cross-sell more sort of B2C sort of projects to them and deepen that relationship, meaning provide information, technology to that homeowner to live a more sustainable future in their home.

Oh, that's awesome. All right. So when it came to agent force marketing.

Yes.

Where did you start? How did you know what to prioritize? Because I imagine it must seem a little overwhelming at first.

It definitely is. So our core Marketing Cloud engagement was really used for, like I was saying, transactional communication. So think like, thanks for paying your bill. And what we found is that there were sort of points in the lifecycle, there were certain gaps, right? So what we found is from our servicing department, when people were paying their bills, they had a lot of questions about who we were, right? They were getting us confused with the people who actually did their project or installed their project for them. So there was a knowledge gap of who GoodLeap was and what services we could provide for them. So what we found is by using AgentForest marketing and sort of creating opportunities to communicate with that customer earlier on in their lifecycle, in their project lifecycle, we were able to deploy a lot of touchpoints to inform them of who GoodLeap was, more information about their projects and how to live a more sustainable life within their home.

Okay, well, that sounds like a pretty big shift in how you operate. So how has this new agentic, moment-led approach changed things for your wider team and, and how you think about your customers' experience?

Yeah, it's completely done a 180 for us, right? So, well, we really have to think of obviously always the customer first, right? And creating moments that matter for that customer. We wanted to bridge the gap of who they thought we were and also what information we're able to provide to them. So from a team perspective, we've really used Agentic Marketing to really honestly operationalize some efficiencies for us. So our speed to market has definitely decreased in the best way, or increased in the best way possible, right?

Can you give us like a specific example Do you have a specific example of that use case?

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll start with our servicing department. So maybe not, I'll say like the chicest of examples, right? But what we found is that we had about 40,000 to 50,000 customers each day that we were trying to target to remind them to pay their bill or to, that maybe they owed us some money. So by using agentic marketing, what we're able to do is sort of have that transactional relationship where they were able to pay their bill via an agent, right? So historically, we were using sort of outdated, like, human on the keyboard to deploy each message, which, as you can imagine, with over 50,000 a day, it's overwhelming, right?

That's a lot of work.

It's nearly impossible. So it wasn't possible to scale the volume that we needed it to. So we were able to use AgentForce Marketing to deploy at scale, right? Have two-way communications with our customer to be able to route some of our calls, our problems directly to an agent. So I think we didn't really need that deep relationship with the homeowner if they were just trying to pay a bill. But what we found is that they were providing us more information during that conversation to an agent to then be able to remarket to them in the future. They're providing us with pain points that we didn't know existed. They're providing us with information about future projects they're interested in just by trying to pay their bill. So we've been able to sort of collect that information and now put them on future drip campaigns and remarket to them.

That's amazing. Sort of turning that experience, that first use case into an opportunity to learn more and deepen the relationship.

Yeah. And it wasn't even our intention at first. We really were just thinking, okay, well, we need to collect this money. It's going to be very transactional in nature. What we found is that it actually created a deeper relationship by routing to agents, right? People felt very comfortable providing information. It also created internal buy-in too. I think that's where a lot of organizations struggle is how do we actually use agents to our advantage and what is this going to mean for myself, my team? But by seeing these efficiencies and seeing it actually created more exciting opportunities for future campaigns for us, the team got really excited, right? We saw, oh, we have all this data now, like we want to do something with it.

Yeah.

And so it's really been a sort of a byproduct, an unexpected byproduct for us and sort So, super excited.

So cool. What would be your advice for somebody who's just getting started? Like, mm-hmm, from your experience?

My experience is just to start, right? Like, don't try to boil the ocean because it definitely can be very overwhelming of how are we gonna start deploying agents, right? Like, what does this mean? At GoodLeap, we suffer from almost too much data, which is a good problem to have.

I think a lot of companies can relate to that.

Yeah, and it's very, it can be very overwhelming, sort of like analysis paralysis of, okay, what do we do tomorrow, right? Right. So my best piece of advice is first look at operational efficiencies where you can leverage Agentic experiences, right? Things like campaign briefs, production and meetings. That's one of our first use cases internally was we were able to reduce a lot of meeting times because there's a lot of touchpoints and trying to coordinate schedules. It just became almost impossible, right? So our speed to market has definitely been a lot faster and that's my biggest piece of advice.

Yeah, really quick, our last question is what does the future look like? Where do you see Goodleaf going with Agentic Marketing?

I think the future is endless. I think we're going to really leverage it for more external purposes, right, where people are going to interact and transact directly with an agent, right? So they're going to have a two-way communication without ever talking to a human, but it's going to know everything about their homeowner, everything, every project they may be interested in. So I'm super excited about what the future is going to be.

Awesome. Well, we love hearing those more high-value, low-effort use cases. Good words to live by. Absolutely. That's a personal motto for me. Well, Eric, thank you so much for joining us and sharing Goodleaf's story. We appreciate it.

No problem.

All right, if you'd like to learn more about agentic marketing and build your own playbook, scan the QR code on screen or head to sforce.co/agenticmarketingguide26 to explore resources and get started.