Jim Williams is the VP of Marketing at Influitive
Jim (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimcwilliams) is a strategic executive, growth hacker and advocate marketing thought leader. He's had a successful track record of leading and growing, early stage technology companies. At Influitive, he oversees marketing automation, including lead nurturing, scoring, website personalization, sales enablement. advocacy, social and everything marketing. His most important work at Influitive is in mobilizing hundreds of fans, influencers and customers to refer leads, build brand affinity and accelerate the sales pipeline.  Jim Williams is considered a thought leader in strategies to acquire engaged advocates (customers, partners, fans and evangelists) that support the growth of referral leads, dozens of product reviews and thousands of content and social shares. Prior to his work at Influitive, Jim was a marketing leader at Eloqua and worked alongside Triblio's CEO, Andre Yee (http://www.triblio.com/blog/andre-yee-interview/).

Press play and hear advocate marketing expert, Jim Williams, share his valuable B2B marketing insights.
The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/Influitive (http://www.triblio.com/blog/Influitive)

 

Beginning of Transcript

 

Jeff Zelaya: Welcome to B2B Content Marketing Leaders. I’m here with Jim Williams, a VP of Marketing at Influitive. Welcome, Jim.

 

Jim Williams: Hi. Thanks a lot, Jeff. I appreciate the opportunity.

 

Jeff Zelaya: So Jim, I know a lot of people that are listening already know you. They know Influitive, but for those that this is a new name to them, start off by giving us just a bit of background on who you are and your role at Influitive.

 

Jim Williams: Thanks, Jeff. Yes, so Jim Williams. I’m the vice president of marketing at Influitive. I have been in B2B marketing for my entire career, and usually, at either startup or growth-oriented, growth-stage companies. So prior to Influitive, I spent 7 years at Eloqua where I worked with Triblo's co-founder (http://www.triblio.com/blog/andre-yee-interview/) to help build that company and bring it eventually to IPO when I left, and prior to that, there was a number of different startups, some successful, some not successful, but you know, that’s how I kind of cut my deal with marketing.

 

Jeff Zelaya: Influitive is on the right track. I mean I hear tons of buzz about the company, and one recent marketing strategy tactic that you guys used was the BAM!TV, and wow, I was amazed. If you guys haven’t watched it yet, make sure you check it out, BAM!TV. It was a talk show, late-night talk show style video interviewing B2B marketers and sharing insight about Influitive, and really focused on the B2B marketer. And I want to just ask you like where did that come from because that was so outside of the box, so new, so refreshing. How did that start and how’s that been working out for you guys?

 

Jim Williams: Sure. I’ll definitely address that. Before I do, let me just give you a quick introduction to Influitive because I think that helps set some of the contacts. We’re an advocate marketing company, consider ourselves the advocate marketing experts, and advocate marketing is essentially using your fans, supporters, evangelists, promoters, the people that had a non-financial investment in your company, using them to help generate their low brand recognition and affinity, more leads, and using them to help accelerate revenue in pipeline. That’s what our platform does. While people in B2B world are generally familiar with terms like, you know, referral marketing and references and word-of-mouth marketing, there really isn’t... there has not been today a scalable way to actually execute on those various programs. There’s been no way to systematically manufacture buzz, right, and I think that’s what a lot of companies want to do. They want to manufacture buzz because, yo