Pete Williams Provides Essential Marketing Tips

Pete Williams is a marketer, author and entrepreneur. Williams is the co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Infiniti Telecommunications. Along with a great deal of experience, Williams possesses the drive and optimism that is critical for successful marketing executives. "I could never sing or paint, so marketing is the closest thing that allows me to express creativity, test my ideas and see if the market agrees. I'll never write a song that will fill a dance floor, but I can create a marketing campaign that can make people react - and that's close enough for me,” said Williams.

Not only has Williams managed to define the brand of Infiniti Telecommunications, but he has paved the way for fellow marketers in the world.

Can you define and our readers some background on the term you’ve cultivated - resuscitation marketing?

Put very simply, it’s a focus on resuscitating what would otherwise be considered ‘dead leads’.

Like every business, at our telco company we found that a significant number of our prospects, who after speaking with the sales team, just don’t buy. This could be for a range of reasons from timing, to not feeling understood by the sales person, to price, or etc.

For every business, the cost of leads is significant, so you never want to be wasteful. We put in a series of automated marketing campaigns in place, that trigger based off the classification the sales team provides when calling a lead dead.

If the leads has simply gone MIA, the campaign is very different, to the one that is deigned to recusitate the dead lead if the timing simply wasn’t right and/or if they didn’t purchase anything from anyone.

What do you believe is the biggest misconception about marketing?

The biggest misconception has to be that marketing ends when the phone rings. So much conversation around marketing is solely focused on traffic generation – be it web traffic or foot traffic. And once that prospects walks in the door, than it’s over to sales. But what happens if that person isn’t ready to buy, and are discarded by the sales team? Most companies mark the lead as dead, and forget about them.

During your career in marketing, what has been the biggest surprise or game changing element that you’ve discovered?

I think it’s the tools that give you the ability to automate a lot of these campaigns. Tools such as Infusionsoft (Hubspot or Active Campaign), allow marketers like us to set up various cross channel marketing campaigns that are set-off very easy via a sales CRM.

In fact, we recently won the Small Business ICON award for the Lead Nurture and Engagement we’ve implement using the Infusionsoft application to rescusitate dead leads.

You’ve mentioned, in other interviews, that communication is important and the back-bone of successful businesses. Can you please elaborate on that ideal and provide us with an example of how communication made all of the difference in a marketing situation?

As a telecommunications company, providing phone systems, we see firsthand how critical traditional communications is to businesses. When it comes to marketing, automating things like ‘resucitation camapigns’ to you are automatically communicating to leads and clients via email, direct mail, SMS, and phone calls – it is critical. It’s all about touch-points. The more you communicate the more you win!

What is one thing you’d like our readers to know about marketing and your adventures in the marketing realm?

I think it’s about focusing on systems and campaigns you can set-up once, that occur over and over again in your business. It’s much smarter ROI.

For example, we did a viral marketing campaign for April Fools this year that generated a lot of launch and traffic. But the resuscitation campaigns probably took the same amount of time and cost to implement once - bringing leads back from the dead each and every day. Whereas the April Fools campaign, had a very short shelf life.