Episode #334:
Zach Calef, Chief Revenue Officer at Infinity, explains how customer obsession becomes a practical revenue strategy. He explores client economics, strategic alignment, innovation, trust, human capital, and disciplined execution. Zach shows why understanding what customers truly need can help revenue teams differentiate, strengthen relationships, and build repeatable growth.
“The obsession is where it starts, and without the obsession, you’re going to minimize the revenue that you’re capturing for your clients. You have to start with the centerpiece, which is the client.” – Zach Calef
Customer obsession becomes more valuable when it shapes how revenue teams make decisions. Zach explains why leaders should understand customer economics, align strategy before applying technology, invest in people, and execute with discipline to produce measurable outcomes. He also explores how trust, experimentation, internal influencers, and repeatable proof can help companies differentiate in increasingly commoditized markets.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:10] Steve MacDonald: Welcome, everyone, to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and today, we’ve got a really interesting conversation with Zach Calef. Now, Zach, you’re a part of a company called Infinity, and I want to hear a bit more about the company and what you’re doing. But you’re not only a consulting company, but you’re also an outsourced sales organization and execution arm for your clients.
[00:00:36] Steve MacDonald: What that means is that you’re not only recommending what they should do, but you’re actually executing what they should do, and that’s a big difference, because it’s easy to make recommendations when you’re not the one that’s actually having to live the go-to-market and deliver the goods. And so, I think that gives you, many times over, a purview into the marketplace that a lot of us just don’t have.
[00:00:57] Steve MacDonald: We’re going to be talking today, if there was an umbrella, the title of the episode is The Revenue Logic of Customer Obsession, and what I love is the way that you think through understanding the customer. And we all know the customer is our North Star, right? We all say that we’re customer-obsessed. Not one of us wouldn’t raise our hand and go, “Yeah, we’re customer-focused, we’re customer-obsessed.” But Forrester actually did a study, and only 3% of companies are actually truly customer-obsessed. And what’s important about that is that customer-obsessed organizations, according to Forrester, go on to have 41% faster revenue growth, 49% faster profit growth, and 51% better client retention and ARR, all of that, which is what we all want, and we’re all held accountable. There’s a real business case to be made here, and I just, I love the way that you think about it. But if you wouldn’t mind just taking that and expanding a little bit more on your background and what you do at Infinity before we get started.
[00:02:01] Zach Calef: Yeah, that’d be great. Thank you, Steve. So, yeah, I’m the Chief Revenue Officer at Infinity, and Infinity, we’ve built a very exciting company over 30 years that really, we have disrupted a fairly commoditized BPO industry and embraced not just the execution side of what that industry looks like, but incorporated, as you alluded to, the consulting side of it through our product called the Buyerlytics Revenue System, to where we can go in and build extremely high-performing sales and retention teams that drive results that matter to the organization that we’re servicing, whether it’s a financial result, or a sales outcome, or customer loyalty outcome.
[00:02:50] Zach Calef: At the end of the day, it all ties down into the economics. But we’ve really built a client-centered company that delivers what we refer to as a new 100% through understanding the company’s needs and executing at the highest level possible.
[00:03:09] Steve MacDonald: So, I have to ask you right away, because I would say one of the toughest parts of outsourcing would be to outsource the sales organization. From SDRs, BDRs on up, that is where the rubber hits the road. If you could take us through your mindset when you start working with a new client, or even in the prospecting and the buyer’s journey, how do you reorient their thinking about their go-to-market? How do you take a consultative approach and help change the perception of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it? That’s valuable learning for all of us who are in the middle of a go-to-market strategy every single day, fighting the constant changes that are going on, and the world’s being torn out from under us every single day.
[00:03:57] Steve MacDonald: So, just a little bit about how you think about this. As you mentioned, a commoditized world, and I hear it every day from CROs that are coming in and saying, “We’re replying to RFPs,” and everybody that’s replying is checking every box. Everybody says they check every box. The world feels more commoditized today than it ever has been. Take us through your thinking about how do we combat that? How do we just start thinking about that?
[00:04:26] Zach Calef: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It’s not easy, especially when, and to your point, in a world that seems to be more and more commoditized. But really, the way we approach working with new clients and going through our sales process is to drive the differentiator in who we are, what we do, and how we do it. For example, when we’re working with a new client, we are not just looking to have somebody tell us, “Hey, I need this many people, and I need them to drive this many sales a month.”
[00:04:56] Zach Calef: That’s a typical vendor relationship, and it’s been done that way for decades. Where we come in is we say, “Let’s slow down and really dig into what you’re trying to achieve, what are your goals, both from a performance standpoint and a financial standpoint. What are the key things that matter, not just to the individual that I’m dealing with, but to the boardroom and the C-suite, so that we can identify how we can deliver and exceed their ROI or whatever financial metric they’re looking to attain. How can we design a program that’s going to get them a return on their investment as quickly as possible, and then, from there, exceed what they are trying to accomplish?”
[00:05:40] Steve MacDonald: So, two things in that. The number one challenge that most B2B organizations face is internal alignment. Even asking those questions of three different executives within the same company, you’re going to probably get three different answers. Even one of the basic things, like aligning around the ICP, is difficult for companies, and then sticking to it. And then we’re always tempted to go outside the ICP because we’ve got a quota we’ve got to meet. Bringing that deal in is a really good idea in the moment, yet it’s going to be hard for us to serve it.
[00:06:13] Steve MacDonald: It’s going to take away and distract our resources. It’s going to churn; it’s going to impact all those numbers. When you’re coming, and you’re consulting, how are you helping, and then translate that into how we think about it, and the listeners here, how we should be thinking about creating our own alignment around our own objectives and what’s important to focus on? What are the questions that you’re asking? What’s the information, the golden nuggets that you’re really looking for, that you go, “Okay, I got it. Now we got something to work with here.”
[00:06:45] Zach Calef: Yeah. I think before you ever touch a client, it really starts internally, to your point, having different executives tell you to have different approaches and things like that. That is symptomatic of what we see all over the place in the business world. So, the first thing that really has to happen is you have to define what you want. You have to define who you’re going to go after and what game you want to play, essentially.
[00:07:11] Zach Calef: We’ve made the mistake in the past of trying to go outside what our sweet spot is. I call it a hedgehog concept. But you have to start with clarity and know everything that goes into what we want to accomplish. If you don’t define what you want and where you want to play, you’re going to be commoditized, and you’re going to take anything that you can. It starts to reek of desperation. So, really defining who you want to play with and what game you want to play is key to driving systems and processes that lead to success. Not every company can do everything. We don’t want to do everything. We want to do what we’re best at, and we want to be the best at it.
[00:07:58] Steve MacDonald: So, you have a way, and you explained it; you have kind of your products and services and how you work with organizations. I would like you to explain it again. I have no problem with this being a bit of a sales opportunity for Infinity here, too, because I like the way you guys thought through it. If you could explain that and how AI comes in, how the human aspect comes in, how the information and arriving at goals that drive a direction. How do you bring it together? You’ve got a really good system for how you do this.
[00:08:32] Zach Calef: Yeah. Yeah. I would start with what we have spent time, a significant amount of time, investing in productizing our company. Our key product is really at the center of what makes us different. We call the Buyerlytics Revenue System. In that system, this is our real differentiator. We break this down into four pillars, or categories, if you will, of how we operate with our clients. Number one is the strategy. We want to be a part of the client’s strategy. It’s very ROI-focused or cost-of-acquisition-focused.
[00:09:07] Zach Calef: We’re looking at the economics of the company and how we can be a strong driver of what the C-suite wants to do, okay? So, we start with strategy. The next category would be our technology and our systems, which obviously includes AI in today’s world and getting in alignment with the client on how they use it, and then how we can use their tools or our tools to enhance whatever strategy they’re going after.
[00:09:33] Zach Calef: The third piece of this is overlooked a lot of times in my industry, and it’s investment in human capital. If you want to have industry-leading sales teams, you’ve got to have industry-leading salespeople. Compensation’s a part of that: onboarding, training, enablement, AI, the tools that you can give people, that’s all a part of what we invest in our people.
[00:09:54] Zach Calef: The fourth pillar would just be the execution. We’re very KPI-focused. We can forecast with pretty strong accuracy on what to expect. If we miss our forecast, we want it to be on the upside. We did more than what we believed or told you that we would do. It’s all about the numbers, the KPIs on the execution side, and if you have the right people, the right systems, and the right strategy and alignment, you’re going to deliver what we would refer to, again, as that new 100% for our clients.
[00:10:22] Zach Calef: Now, we have two other products. One is our innovation lab, and that is how we would pilot new concepts, new products, and new addressable markets to help establish a company that might not know exactly what needs to happen, or can’t get its existing teams to focus on new things of that nature. That pilot process generally takes us into a scaled Buyerlytics world.
[00:10:48] Zach Calef: The other way that we can get a client into that Buyerlytics world, aside from just starting out that way, starting out in an innovation lab, is to go into a traditional BPO model, which we don’t want to stay in long term because we know that it’s not going to get the client everything that they’re wanting to achieve. But we can begin to apply some of the Buyerlytics methodology into that BPO model and then convert them to a full-on Buyerlytics program, where we’re adjusting economic models, investing more in human capital, and things of that nature.
[00:11:27] Steve MacDonald: What I love is, so I’m going to try to break down two or three things I want to follow up on. The fact that you have an innovation lab. What I love is that that takes the idea of innovating and, as you said, productizes it. I think it was McKinsey, in a study a couple of years ago, said that one of the greatest sources of ideas and innovation is the voice of the customer.
[00:11:49] Steve MacDonald: So truly understanding the customer, and one of the things that you said in there was that you really want to understand the economics of your customers, and tell me a little bit more about that. Then I’m going to transition into, because I don’t want to forget, so I’m going to say it here live, that you talked about strategy before AI, and the AI isn’t a strategy itself; it’s an execution, right? But we’ve got to know what we’re doing. So I want to transition to that. But in terms of understanding the customer and having that fuel the innovation that goes in, tell me a little bit about how you learn about your customers and their customers in that innovation lab, and how do the economics come into that?
[00:12:34] Zach Calef: Yeah. It starts before the innovation lab. It starts in our sales process, and we take an approach. The first thing we do is make sure this is the right fit. We have criteria built around the clients that we want to work with, the clients that we can produce for them at a high level. It’s not always the right fit, quite frankly, and we don’t want to waste anybody’s time on something that isn’t going to make sense, whether it’s performance, economics, or whatnot. So we establish the right fit. We learn about their desires, their company, their customer base. We learn all that as we go through the sales process, and that sets us up to identify the appropriate product for this prospective client.
[00:13:19] Zach Calef: If there are unanswered questions, that’s where the innovation lab can really come into play. If they can’t define an ROI based on KPIs or the appropriate addressable market, that fits into an innovation lab scenario, where we’re going to build out a five-month engagement. The first three months are critical because there’s a lot of variant testing.
[00:13:41] Zach Calef: We’re going to test offerings. We’re going to test the addressable market. We’ll even test the background of the account executives selling the product. We’ll test numerous things: pieces of technology, messaging, talk tracks, whatever that might be. We’re going to have controlled environments where we map out what we’re going to test and identify what leads to the appropriate KPIs to, at the end of the day, be able to build out an ROI model for the client so that we can then take that to scale and show them what’s needed from an investment standpoint, when they should expect to break even, and then what the upside after the break even will look like.
[00:14:22] Steve MacDonald: So tell me a little bit about that. It’s a lot of testing and a lot of different variables, and really important feedback on the customer. The idea that most customers are only 3%, only 3% of companies are truly customer obsessed. How do you develop that obsession? Like, how do you keep the customer as the North Star?
[00:14:43] Zach Calef: At the end of the day, without them, we don’t have a business. To me, it’s that simple. I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t be client or customer-obsessed. But at the end of the day, the values of our company drive that, and we set out to, the term we use is, create life-changing experiences for our clients, our people, and our stakeholders. They’re all a key part of that solution. If you’re operating in a world where it’s just about you, you’re not going to have clients that long, or you’re not going to be able to build the scale of program that you would otherwise.
[00:15:19] Steve MacDonald: So I would imagine that a lot of your clients come your way because of what I’m hearing from other CROs, and what I’m hearing from other CROs is, Steve, it’s getting access to the right executives is getting tougher than it ever has been. Gartner, Forrester, all the leading consulting firms have talked about how everybody’s waiting longer and longer to talk to us in the sales organization. It’s harder and harder to get executive access. When you do get it, it happens less often. It’s harder to re-engage, and when you do engage, the time that you have is shorter and shorter.
[00:15:54] Steve MacDonald: I’m sure that a lot of your clients are feeling that they’re not getting the results out of their sales organization that they want. I imagine that’s a big driver of why they’re talking to you in the beginning. How do you combat them when they’re saying, “We’re having difficulty. We’re not getting as much ROI out of our sales team.”
[00:16:10] Steve MacDonald: What do you say to that, given today’s environment, the B2B buyer waiting longer and longer, making most of the decisions, a lot of the sales process by the time they want to talk to a sales organization is the validation of decisions they’ve already made. That seems like an area that’s very difficult to combat, an existing state that we’re at in the industry, and I’m going to throw one more wrinkle into this. If you were to look at, like, the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, 32,000 respondents worldwide, 67%, two-thirds, think that business leaders like you and I are being intentionally misleading.
[00:16:47] Steve MacDonald: Intentionally misleading. They think we’re lying to them. I don’t know how else you put intentionally misleading together into a conclusion. So given that environment you’re producing for your clients, how are you combating that? ‘Cause everybody that’s listening right now [00:17:05] is going to be wondering, “How do I combat that?” We’re feeling the negative impact of that. That’s a very big, broad question, but you’re addressing it every single day on behalf of your clients, not just for your own company, your own sales process, but for the sales process for every single one of your clients.
[00:17:22] Zach Calef: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, that’s a great question. There’s a lot there. I would chunk it up into a couple of different things. Yes, executives are extremely difficult to get ahold of, including myself. We have technology now that tells you who’s calling or if it’s likely spam. Your email can filter out a lot of different things. You pick and choose who you want to talk to on LinkedIn and social media networks. At the end of the day, you’re not going to generally start with somebody in the C-suite of a decent-sized company. So how you treat that person you don’t know, or that you know isn’t the end decision maker, is critical.
[00:17:56] Zach Calef: The way that I go about this, and my sales team goes about it, is we want to work intimately with them so that when they take a different solution to their leadership team, it’s not about us, it’s about them coming up with and finding different solutions that we can execute on for them. So we empower the influencers, and we want to make them look and feel to the leadership team that they’re thinking differently and they understand what’s needed to really drive a different result than what they’ve gotten historically.
[00:18:30] Steve MacDonald: So, would you agree with this statement? A CRO told me this, and I asked him, I said outright, I said, “In this commoditized world that you’re talking about, what’s the difference? What’s the secret sauce in your sales team?” And he said, “We understand our clients better than our competition. We have insights that reward them, that benefit them from having the conversation with us, thus making it easier to get the next conversation to ladder it up the chain of command.” What do you think about that comment? Really, simply being a better consultant to your clients. Yeah.
[00:19:03] Zach Calef: That’s everything. That’s it. That’s the secret sauce. You can have all the flashy products in the world, but you have to, at the end of the day, establish trust and then show. I think this is a thing that a lot of salespeople miss or brush over too quickly: I can tell somebody about this product and everything that we can do for them, but at the end of the day, if I can’t show them that I’ve done it and that I can do it again in a repeatable way, it doesn’t matter.
[00:19:31] Zach Calef: In your pitch decks or in different conversations, it’s critical that you have case studies summarized. They don’t need to be long, drawn-out case studies when you’re talking to somebody, but it’s critical that you show them, “We’ve done it with this industry, we’ve done it with this company, we’ve done it with this client, and this is what you should expect along the timeframe of working with us to happen with your organization.”
[00:19:55] Steve MacDonald: So, I’m going to go back into our conversation a little bit where you talked about innovation and strategy before AI and AI [00:20:05] implementation. What did you mean by that?
[00:20:08] Zach Calef: At the end of the day, the more you know, the better you can do. That first chunk, or pillar, or category, whatever you want to refer to it as, is focusing on strategy, not just our strategy, but really that’s where we learn the client. That’s how we get to know the client and get them into a mindset of thinking a little differently. I can’t stress this enough: a key differentiator is we care about the economics of that business and what matters most to them, and once we establish what matters most to that organization, we can design a product that delivers on what matters most to them.
[00:20:47] Steve MacDonald: So, you said something that I think is one of the most profound things, after 330 episodes of speaking to C-suite sales executives, that I’ve heard. Thinking through strategy with your prospects and your clients is how you best come to understand them. I really want to pause on that for a minute because most questions go into Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and ask, what are the most questions that sales organizations ask of their prospects? Where does the conversation usually live? And they’ll say it’s at a very operational and product level.
[00:21:36] Steve MacDonald: What you just said is it should be, if I’m taking it right, the more you can talk strategy, the more you’re going to understand the clients and how they think, and how they think through what they need to do, not at a tactical level, but if you talk to them at a strategic level. We’ve all heard of consultative selling; it’s not necessarily a new concept, but it’s not being done in the industry the way it should be. I think you just shined a real light on that. If the majority of the industry is talking very much in a sales environment, operational, product-oriented, you’re not going to learn because you’re at the end of the sales process by the time you’re brought in.
[00:22:18] Steve MacDonald: If they’re validating decisions they’ve already made, how do we talk strategically? If we’re being brought in later and later in the conversation, and a lot of the time it’s because they’ve locked the day one list. There are four or five of us on it, and they’re just trying to check boxes and make sure that they’re making the best decision based on what they’ve already decided, and what you’re saying here is to help them rethink what they’re doing and how they’re going to do it. Isn’t that harder today to do than ever because they’re so late in the journey?
[00:22:55] Zach Calef: I don’t know that it’s harder than it ever has been. It might take a little longer. But at the end of the day, if it takes a little longer and drives a superior result, wouldn’t we all want to do that? The more rushed things get, the more that leads to commoditization. The more time you spend knowing the client and what they’re trying to accomplish, the faster they’re going to get results at the end of the day. A big piece of this is, at the beginning of the relationship, you have to establish a problem and why the traditional model is creating challenges, and establish there is a different way, and that’s where we would come in and be able to offer an alternative perspective on how we work through this process.
[00:23:40] Zach Calef: A lot of times, right there, you’re going to start to identify if this is going to be the right fit or the wrong fit. There are a lot of situations where you might just have a vendor manager, and the way they’re looking at it is, “I need 10,000 hours of sales this month at this sales SPH to get to my sales goal.” There are a lot of different ways to do that. Yeah. And when you start to get into the economics and the finances, you can identify more effective ways to be more judicious about what that client’s spending to get what they want to get. And at the end of the day, that makes everybody happy.
[00:24:16] Zach Calef: We do better, the client does better, our people make more money. It’s just, you have to really, at the beginning, establish that there’s a problem in the way the industry works, and that there are better ways to do it, and we offer some of those better ways to do that.
[00:24:31] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. I guess my takeaway is there’s never really a bad time to introduce really good strategic thinking into the process.
[00:24:37] Zach Calef: Absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:24:39] Steve MacDonald: So, we’ve covered a lot of really good territory, and I kind of wish we had another couple of hours. If you could boil it all down and say, okay, for the C-suite executives that are going to be consuming this podcast episode, if there was one takeaway you wanted to make sure that they took from our conversation here, what would that be?
[00:25:02] Zach Calef: That’s a great question. I think at the end of the day, I haven’t used this term, but the end goal is to get to the ideal state. We often get caught in the current state and how things are working and don’t think about how they could be working. So, my goal is to get into the ideal state, and the key is connecting the unconnected parts of an organization. Which, again, comes down to strategy, systems and technology, people, and execution. And if you can connect those pieces to the puzzle for your own company and for your prospective clients, that’s going to be what leads you into the ideal state of your business.
[00:25:48] Steve MacDonald: I love it. I’ve got one last question, and this is a series we’re in right now on the revenue logic of customer obsession. How do you tie revenue and growth to customer obsession?
[00:26:06] Zach Calef: It’s a great question. The obsession is where it starts, and without it, you’re going to minimize the revenue you’re capturing for your clients. You have to start with the centerpiece: the client. The more knowledge about that client, what makes them tick, again, what their strategies are, whether it’s AI, their execution model, things of that nature. Again, I’ll come back to this because it’s absolutely critical, and I think a big differentiator is knowing what they’re trying to accomplish from a financial standpoint. Once you have that information, you are living in the client-obsessed world. Deviating from that will only impact things negatively.
[00:26:49] Steve MacDonald: Well, I have to say, the mission of this whole podcast is to bring different perspectives, different insights, experiences to play from C-suite executives all over the world that are wrangling a B2B ABM go-to-market strategy in this environment. If we can bring all that together, it’s like the rising tide that can lift all boats, and you were an amazing part of that today, Zach. I just want to say thank you for coming onto the podcast.
[00:27:15] Zach Calef: Absolutely. I appreciate you having me. I’ve enjoyed talking with you and getting to know you a little bit. I’m happy to do anything else that you’d want to do in the future.