Infinite Financial Helps Companies Target Sales Efforts

By George Walsh, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

For many types of companies, general advertising is all it takes to bring customers in the door. However, for some, such as those selling cars and houses, the effort to generate leads needs to be as targeted and cost-effective as possible. If you target the wrong audience in the wrong demographic, you may not have any buyers for the high-end automobiles you're trying to sell. If you seek out those who can afford to buy your products, however, the likelihood of a sale is much higher. Helping companies increase their sales by locating people interested in their products and services is the goal of Infinite Financial, located at 4780 Chabot Drive.

Infinite Financial was started in February of 1997 and moved to Hacienda in January of this year. The company got its start offering high-risk car loans for dealerships across the U.S. Since then, Infinite has diversified several times and expanded its services to include marketing and lead generation for companies such as mortgage brokers and automotive dealerships. Infinite locates the target audiences that its clients are seeking through relationships, then addresses these potential customers through a variety of mediums.

"Infinite Financial is a marketing and finance company, and we build software applications to facilitate our marketing endeavors," says Todd Gibbons, president and CEO. "Direct mail is our main business. As a high-risk car loan provider, we learned how to identify and contact the right audience for those services. From there, we moved into generating sales leads for other companies. Now, we can find the right target audience for any client, generate direct mail pieces for them, send them out, and handle the calls from people interested in their products via our live-operator call center. After getting information from the potential buyer, the operator is able to transmit the information to the client via email and fax. The client can also log into our online system to view the information that's been gathered."

Gibbons sees a move toward the Internet in generating leads, though right now he sees it as complementing direct mail and other efforts. "We have a web site called AdSoft Direct (www.adsoftdirect.com) that offers one of the applications that has powered our company and that we're now offering to other companies to help them organize, manage, and track direct marketing campaigns and order printed marketing collateral over the web. Right now, the application is being used by RBC Mortgage, Washington Mutual, and others."

Independence is important to Infinite Financial and Gibbons is pleased with its success as a private company. "We have no investors and try to run the business of our own accord," he says. "In the very near future, we will be in position of not owing any money to anyone. When we moved into this office, we paid for all of our furniture and most of our equipment. We're not involved with investors that take a percentage of our company or tell us how to operate." Infinite Financial currently has six employees in its Hacienda office, with 11 sales representatives in a variety of metropolitan areas.

Photo: Todd "TJ" Gibbons (front left) and the staff of Infinite Financial provide a growing range of targeted marketing solutions.

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