Sell Like A Leader – Episode 32

David Kreiger sits down with Thomas R. Leidigh, CEO and founder of Infinity, to unpack one of the most overlooked growth levers in sales: the buyer data hiding in your existing customer base.

After 30 years of building high-performing inside sales teams, Tom has seen the same pattern repeat itself—companies chase new logos while leaving millions in untapped revenue sitting inside their own accounts.

In this episode, Tom breaks down how analyzing your buyer data can reveal:

  • Which customers are primed for upsell and cross-sell
  • What unmet needs exist that your customers haven’t voiced yet
  • Where your true revenue potential is (and how much of it you’re missing)
  • How to build the sales talent and structure to actually capture that opportunity

You’ll also hear how Tom’s Buyerlytics® framework helps teams turn these insights into actionable, measurable growth.

If you want a clearer path to ROI-driven, sustainable revenue—starting with the customers you already have—this episode is your roadmap.

About Thomas R. Leidigh

Tom is an entrepreneur with decades of experience building and scaling successful businesses. He’s the CEO and founder of Infinity. He started the company in 1996 and has grown it into a leading inside-sales and customer-support agency that helps businesses get and keep customers.

Tom has been named one of the Top 25 Influential Inside Sales Professionals by AA-ISP and led Infinity to multiple awards for growth, culture, and innovation.

Podcast Key Takeaways

  • Mine internal data first by segmenting customers and then identify upsell, cross-sell opportunities, and new product needs before pursuing new logos.
  • Treat account executives as entrepreneurs who own their own seat with unlimited income potential. Design simple, transparent compensation plans that connect fixed and variable pay to performance metrics.
  • Focus AI deployment on well-documented, repeatable workflows like role-playing, transcription, and pre-call prep rather than expecting AI to solve everything.
  • Financial alignment between leadership, team compensation, and company goals ensures everyone wins and drives profitable growth.

Connects

Connect with Thomas R. Leidigh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasleidigh/

Connect with David Kreiger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkreiger

Subscribe to the podcast and follow our Podcast LinkedIn page so you don’t miss any episodes!

Transcript

David: Welcome back to another episode of the Sell Like a Leader podcast. The podcast for revenue leaders who are on a mission to cultivate a high performing sales team within their organization. I'm your host, David Krieger, founder of SalesRoads, America's most trusted appointment setting and lead generation firm.

Today we are bringing you another amazing revenue leader. Tom Lighty and Tom and I have gotten to know each other the past few months, and so I was thrilled when he was open to coming on the show and sharing some of his knowledge with all of y'all. 

So just to give you a sense, Tom is an amazing entrepreneur. He has decades of experience building and scaling successful businesses. He's the CEO and founder of Infinity, which he started back in 1996 and has grown it into the leading inside sales and customer support agency, [00:01:00] helping businesses get and keep customers. 

Tom has been named one of the top 25 influential inside sales professionals by the AISP and has led Infinity to multiple awards for growth, culture and innovation. With that, thank you so much, Tom for taking the time to be with us today.

Thomas: Well, thank you for the introduction. That's awesome.

David: Well, thank you Tom. So what I would love to dive into a bit today is you've been leading Infinity for 30 years and you know, the company, and I'll say the sales landscape right, has changed a lot over three decades and. 

From our conversations, one of the biggest shifts for Infinity was developing Buyerlytics®. And I'd really love to start there because I think a lot of folks can learn a lot from what you guys have put together and the rigor you guys put behind the Buyerlytics® model. 

And so what [00:02:00] I would love to start with was, you know, what are some of the trends or challenges that made you realize that it was time to develop something like Buyerlytics®?

Thomas: Yeah. Well first of all, we've all sat in a boardroom at some point in our career, or you know, some of us do that every day and every week. I've never been in a boardroom where they're like, we don't need to grow next year. 

You know, we can have flat revenues, we can have flat profits, and we'll have a great year. It just doesn't happen. But oftentimes those targets are a stretch to hit both revenue and profitability. And leaders leave those boardrooms with some ideas on how to achieve them. 

But oftentimes they overlook some of the simple things that they could do to drive growth, for example, expand your markets. You know, if you have certain verticals or certain [00:03:00] geographic segments, even, you know, company size that you've been successful with. You just want to do your addressable market analysis. You want to know what that addressable market is and how much you penetrated and how much opportunity there is left. You can look at your current client base and what are they buying, and segment those who may be buying one product or service, but not others. And so there's an upsell, cross sell opportunity. 

You know, there could be new product development that your customers are looking for new capabilities and new products or services. So, Infinity sits in the boardroom with our clients and helps with the strategy. To develop these plans that then can be executed either by their inside sales team or if they choose, they can outsource to a company like Infinity that can build sales teams or retention teams to achieve these targets.

David: Yeah, so that's [00:04:00] great. So there's a lot to unpack. You know, maybe if we could start with, you know, walking us through some of those steps. So, you know, if your clients are sitting in the boardroom, they're trying to figure out how to grow, you know, where do they start or where do you start with them? Which types of data do you look at first? 

And then how do you look at that to try to come up with some of those insights and recommendations that you just laid out?

Thomas: Yeah, I mean, well first of all, I think you have to start with your existing customer base because you have relationships there and when you mine your customer base, you'll have insights. So I'm a firm believer in segmenting by some of the attributes I mentioned earlier. 

By geography, by company size, by vertical, even, you know, in some cases by divisions where there could be multiple buyers within one large enterprise company. And then looking at what products and services are they [00:05:00] buying, you know, what are the future needs of the market that maybe aren't being represented today? So that's a great place to start. 

Once you exhaust those opportunities within your existing base, you can look at what those attributes are and overlay that in terms of the entire US businesses, assuming we're talking about a business to business sale. So then you should be able to size the potential that you have not reached yet. 

And then make some assumptions around how much you're going to penetrate in terms of product and services sold. What's your average order value? What does it take to convert an existing customer versus a new one that might be more difficult to convert or take more time? So, these are all just simple things that are part of our Buyerlytics® DNA that we can help clients with.

David: Yeah, so that's great. And I, I think a lot of times folks forget that [00:06:00] very fundamental first step and realize that they have so much data internally and sometimes just don't think to do it or don't know how to do it. And I, so I think that rigor and that methodology is such a nice framework for companies as they're thinking through their strategy. 

And so, as you come up with some of those insights and you determine certain segments or, you know, generate different things that you think might power their sales engine. Can you walk us through how you guys either, you know, Infinity or the clients take this internally and how they take those insights and make them actionable and layer them into their sales team?

Thomas: Yeah, well, we start with an ROI process. You know, if you have an existing sales team, you should know some of the key KPIs that usually start with activity-based KPIs. How many [00:07:00] calls are you making? How many contacts with those calls that you're having, meaningful conversations, being able to qualify a customer. And then, you really need to shift to more of the outcome metrics, which are the conversion, the unit sales. You know, is it a single product? Is it a bundle? 

You know, what are the offers needed to incent the customer if any, but oftentimes that really helps stimulate. So it's really understanding what the current state is and then trying to forecast and anticipate what your potential is based off that existing data. And so the insights are really being able to understand what your current state is, understanding what that potential is, and then building the plan to get there.

David: From what I've seen with the Buyerlytics® model, it's built on four key pillars, right? Which you've kind of broken down here as we talk strategy, [00:08:00] talent, technology, and execution. And if I had to push you on it, is there one of these four pillars that is more challenging for clients? And how do you help them with those challenges?

Thomas: Well, I think I just talked a little bit about the strategy. There's generally some low hanging fruit that just is overlooked. People are always thinking about acquiring new customers, new logos, but there's a lot in the existing base. And so a balanced strategy wise of doing both, I think is great. 

But I think one of the most often overlooked elements of successful sales teams is the human talent. And aligning, you know, the skill, the compensation. Both base compensation along with variable and with Buyerlytics®. We're a big believer that each account executive that's either selling or retaining customers, owns their own [00:09:00] seat. They're like their own entrepreneur, and so they have an opportunity to make unlimited income. And so you want to attract people that are motivated to have that level of success, but also can understand how the compensation and the rewards fit together relative to performance. And when they can connect performance and compensation both fixed and variable together, they're going to strive to hit that home run and to really knock it out of the park with success in terms of sales and also success for their own career.

David: Yeah, I like how you broke down a few different things there. One, I do think giving people the perspective of it through the entrepreneurial prism is both motivating, but also I think some of the best salespeople make great entrepreneurs because they have that drive. 

They want to build a business for themselves. And I think putting it in that light is really [00:10:00] powerful. I know when I was a young manager, my boss had told me basically that what I was running was like my own business. And that was very motivating to me as somebody who was aspiring to eventually be an entrepreneur. 

And I think something as simple as that actually can be extremely motivating for the right salespeople. And then the second part that I think a lot of sales leaders struggle with is the comp side of things. And oftentimes we can make things too complicated and, for all good reasons. You know, we're trying to incentivize different types of sales or this and that, but simple, like you said, is so much better when people really understand what their comp plan is and how they can move it. It is a magical thing. 

And so I think there's a lot of value in just designing that right type of understanding the metrics. And that goes back to the whole Buyerlytics® model, I think, right? If you understand the metrics that are going to drive [00:11:00] the sales forward and have the strategy, they, and then translate that to a simple comp plan, that is a powerful comp plan. That's a winning recipe.

Thomas: Yeah. And once that strategy's developed, which takes time and involves some of the factors we've discussed, a critical element is the alignment with leadership and the team and helping communicate what the potential and opportunity is. 'Cause that's often overlooked. You know, I participated in three major trade events in the last month and a half. 

And organizational alignment is always a major topic of discussion. And so, I believe leaders, one of their most important responsibilities is to provide clarity for their teams. You know, how do you win, what tools are available? What's the ROI on this investment and sharing the numbers understanding what those key metrics are and helping drive those. 

And then, like we mentioned, with incentivizing those with really good comp [00:12:00] plans that allow people to experience life-changing income. And if you tie your compensation from the account executive to the manager, to the leader to the company, and you align those all together. Then every dollar that is achieved, a portion of that can be used for compensation and everyone wins. 

And so I believe sometimes leaders focus too much on cost, and that is part of the ROI equation, but also profitable sales. It is the most important element in that. And as long as you have a balance between your cost and the amount of income that you're achieving, you're going to have a very positive ROI.

David: Yeah. So I think managing that human element is super critical. And with that though, in this day and age, I've got to pivot a little bit to the non-human in the sales room, and that's AI. Which is obviously becoming a major [00:13:00] factor in sales. You know, from your perspective, is there anything you are seeing that are changes that are coming in sales and what's coming next?

Thomas: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the major revolution that will occur at some time in the future, probably sooner than later, is that the AI agent can talk to customers. I mean, that technology exists today. There's some apprehensiveness about using that technology still and what that does to the customer experience. 

But that's not only here, but from a deployment standpoint, it's going to get penetrated more and more in terms of AI strategy and execution. I think for today, companies, it's a safe bet to look at existing workflows that exist, that are well documented in terms of process, and then can be automated. 

Those are great places to start. And in our business and with Buyerlytics®, you know, things like role playing, which is part of training, quality and verification, you know, transcription. [00:14:00] Pre-call prep, you know, all these types of things, can really help make the whole sales process more efficient.

So we're seeing a lot of traction with companies, including ours. We're deploying that and having a lot of success. It doesn't necessarily always replace a human, but it certainly makes the job a little bit different. More of an oversight as opposed to having to do those workflow processes that AI can do.

David: Yeah, I think you put it well, you know, I think there's a lot of things that can be used in people's sales processes, I think where people run into difficulty right now is just thinking that the AI can do everything. And they believe that the magic and they are hoping that they can just snap their fingers and sales fall out of the sky. 

And that is a recipe for moving backwards in the age of AI instead of leaning into places where we can really help augment our processes, do things better, but also even do some of the things that humans [00:15:00] never wanted to do or invest in, from, you know, manually researching every single lead to make sure it is the right type of company. Right? 

So, I think the way you put it is good and there's a lot of good processes that really help us to do better work in the sales profession right now.

Thomas: Yeah, I mean, AI in today's sales environment reminds me of the early two thousands with compliance. And how compliance ended up being a major initiative for both B2B and B2C sales and how you have to register with states and the security that's involved in it. 

So there was a whole level of investment and infrastructure around [00:16:00] compliance that took companies years to put in place and that next major shift in technology and demands and structure, it's AI. And if you're not investing and you're not learning and participating, you're absolutely going to be behind the curve ball at some point. Very.

David: Yeah, a hundred percent. You know, you've brought up changes that happened 10, 20 years ago, we've 
talked about changes that are happening now. Looking back over 30 years with all the changes, trends, and pivots we've discussed. I'm just curious, what's one approach that stood the test of time for you?

Thomas: I think what changed Infinity and the success of our Buyerlytics® was really the investment in human capital and an ROI-based approach. Because every boardroom has to be concerned about ROI. You know, there again, there's tons of pressure on growth and [00:17:00] profits. And so when you can show your leaders a method to invest strategically, but also carefully with a really strong ROI to back that up, a conservative one, hopefully that can be surpassed in execution. 

That's really, really powerful. To do that you need great people. Even though we just talked about AI and, you know, that's here to stay. At the end of the day, customers at some point in the sales process or the growth process, they want to talk to people. People buy from people that are easy to work with, that are knowledgeable and that they can relate to. 

And so AI is really ideal for sort of those low-skill, repeatable processes. I think AI has so much potential because it ensures scalability and repeatability and these processes that [00:18:00] sometimes humans can't always achieve. But the human element of building those relationships, having discussions and really providing a comfort zone for the customer, is a really important element. 

So that investment in making sure your talent is trained properly, that they're compensated fairly in a motivating way, makes a huge difference in the success of the companies. And to me, that's just very foundational.

David: Yeah. Yeah. I think it is critical and AI is going to take us in interesting places, but I am not a believer that it's going to replace humans full stop. As people are saying at the heart of all this, it is a human endeavor. And making sure that we find the right use cases to support that. 

And if we strip the humanity from business and sales, I think that's a recipe for disaster. So we are [00:19:00] getting close to the end here. What we love to do, Tom, is do a series of rapid fire questions with our guests. And so I'm going to ask you a few questions in rapid fire. Would love to just get your perspective sound. Okay?

Thomas: Yes. Sounds great.

David: All right. What is one thing people don't give enough value or attention to in leadership?

Thomas: Besides the human element that I've talked a lot about, I think it's financial acumen and the reason why is, 'cause we've already talked about the importance of ROI, but I think that financial acumen bridges the strategy and the logic of the execution and just provides a lot of glue for those two ends. Just recently we renegotiated a contract with a major enterprise client and our compensation plan for the company changed based off our client's goals. 

And so what we did is we spent hours [00:20:00] with our team and various sessions walking through the agreement, walking through the financial implications of certain outcomes and results, and then setting our goals in terms of what we can achieve for our client. And I'm happy to say in the first quarter we exceeded the first quarter goal by like 50%. 

And it's the first time in really a year that we achieved that extra variable bonus. And I believe that tying the agreement and the financial ROI of our client with alignment with our team was one of the major factors that motivated them to execute in the manner our client wanted us to.

David: That's great. What is one skill you would advise everyone in sales to master, leaders or non-leader?

Thomas: Listening. It's so basic. You know, your customer will tell you what they want to buy and how they want to buy it, and how much money they want to spend. You just have to engage and listen and not try to pitch, but to have a discussion and show how your product or service can solve those needs that the customer has. 

So they'll tell you if you just listen. We've all seen the salespeople who show up and sort of throw up the pitch. And it just makes me cringe because listening is the number one thing and then be able to take what you learn and apply it to the customer's needs that's the recipe for success.

David: What's your favorite business leadership or sales book?

Thomas: That's easy. I participate in Strategic Coach for multiple years. Dan Sullivan is a very published business leader. He has [00:22:00] many concepts and tools that we've integrated into Infinity. 

Cultural concepts like 10x thinking and the fact that even 10x thinking is actually easier than 2x thinking, the 80% rule. Where most people procrastinate new ideas because there's obstacles and he's a big proponent of just getting motion and beginning and then dealing with those things and being okay with 80% to start knowing that you can refine that last 20% over time. So yeah, absolutely. Dan Sullivan's one of my favorites.

David: Favorite quote, mantra or saying that inspires you as a sales leader?

Thomas: This goes back to fifth grade, so it's a while ago. Ships in a harbor are safe, but that's not what ships are built for.

David: Hmm, I like that. And lastly, what is the most important goal or project you're working on right now?

Thomas: Well, we've covered AI. It's a must. And so that's a major initiative for us. I've also been doing this, like you mentioned, since 1996 so I'm working on some succession, not retirement, just handing some of the keys to the kingdom over to our leadership team, putting more scale in the company, putting more process in the company. 

That way, you know, our company purpose is life-changing experiences. I mentioned that earlier. And, I think, you know, with the succession plan, we're going to be able to achieve that for our employees and our stakeholders, our clients, our partners, et cetera. So, that's a really important initiative for us as well.

David: Well thank you again for taking the time to be on the show. I really enjoyed the conversation. You know, if folks want to connect with you, Tom, is there any place for them to reach out?

Thomas: Yeah, well I'm on LinkedIn. Also, our website is www.infinitydelivers.com. So those are two great ways to engage with me and the team at Infinity.

David: That's great. We'll put it in the show notes as well. And with that, thank you listeners for joining us for another episode of the Sell Like A Leader podcast. Don't forget to subscribe on your platform of choice. 

And Tom, thank you again for joining us today and all of you out there, please hit me up on LinkedIn with any ideas, questions you have. Thanks so much.