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Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice
The Predictable Revenue Playbook Most Founders Are Missing | Josh Troy
00:40:34
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- [00:00]
Josh Troy
To build these outbound agents, you can't just know AI. It's going to do a horrible job. You have to know everything about sales. You can't just know sales. You have to know how to build context engineering and prompt engineering and all the right frameworks. With AI, you have to have both. We have AI engineers and then we have our sales department and resources that collaborate to build these.
- [00:20]
Ryan Alford
You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right about now with Ryan Alford.
- [00:41]
What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now. A lot of companies think they've got a sales problem, when really it's a systems problem. Josh Troy is the CEO of WFS Group, a B2B outbound sales organization generating nearly $100 million a year. This conversation with Josh is about what actually predictable revenue looks like, how we there and why relying on top performers can kill scale, and really how operators build growth behind systems. And that's why we got Josh Troy. He's here to talk about repeatable scalable revenue systems. What's up, Josh?
- [01:18]
Josh Troy
What's going on, Ryan?
- [01:19]
Ryan Alford
Repeatable scalable solutions. I like it. Sales is the lifeblood of any business, but most people either hate to do it or don't know how to do it right. You're seeing this. I'm sure everyone knows they have the AI tools at their fingertips, but what the hell do I do with them? And I'm sure you're seeing all of that, aren't you?
- [01:35]
Josh Troy
That's a big part right now. Revenue ops is completely changing and in a really exciting way. I look at this stuff, if I had some of this stuff over a decade ago when I was starting out, it just would have made my life so much easier. But there is a lot of confusion with AI and some of the stuff that it gives you because it definitely speeds things up. But what good is it if you're going 100 miles per hour in the wrong direction? There's a lot of misdirection and what you led with. I love predictable revenue. I love scalable systems. It's what I've obsessed over my entire career because it doesn't matter how much money you got, how much revenue you're doing, what level of scale you're at, if it's not predictable, you're still the business owner that's losing sleep at night. It's all about coming up with the predictable revenue motion and that's what we love to talk about.
- [02:18]
Ryan Alford
A lot of you probably hear it and even I hear it and they go, well, that works for certain types of B2B sales. Is that just a false excuse?
- [02:26]
Josh Troy
It would depend what they're saying that about. Does every B2B legion strategy work for every business? Absolutely not. I would also venture to say that 9 out of 10 prospective customers that we talk to that haven't had success with the certain strategy motion approach was because they did it entirely wrong. There's a lot of nuance to this stuff. You have to get the approach correct and the strategy correct. And based on your type of business, your tam, your ACV and average sales prices, your economics, all of those things change what strategy you would actually use in B2B sales. It's about figuring out that balance, that right mix. But it's definitely not one size fits all. That's for sure.
- [03:05]
Ryan Alford
Josh, it's a good time to talk about the evolution of the sales process. I'm one of those tweeners, I would say young enough that I'm still tech focused, but I came up analog world, relationship sales world. You go on the golf trips and you go have dinners, you have fun and you build a relationship, not just economically like buying them things. It's relationship driven. This age of social media and now AI. And you have people younger than me, they're now in leadership positions that have grown up all digital. I'd love your opinion on global landscape of sales and personalities and technology and the intersection of all of those things.
- [03:43]
Josh Troy
I own a rev Ops agency. We specialize in building rev Ops functions. It's all AI enabled and staff augmentation, some outsourced sales stuff. That's all I've done for a long time. In one of the first slides of our engagement, it's a screenshot of a real system that I built. And this is what's funny. Or it's a screenshot of an image that was created a lot of years ago, man. Before AI was a thing at all. And at the top it said artificial intelligence Lead gen strategy. Don't be confused. I'm not saying, look how smart I was back then. I'm laughing because I called something artificial intelligence, because I probably thought I heard it somewhere and thought it was cool. There was zero AI incorporated at all. All it was, it was a flow chart of essentially a sophisticated lead scraping tool that I paid a full stack web developer to build for me. And I called that AI. And it just had some simple conditional logic branching and so Basically I owned a video marketing business for a number of years until I sold it a few years back. And in this business, what I found, I used to call it the order of consumption. What I found was our prospective cl. There was typically things that they had in place first which would indicate a higher level of propensity to purchase our services. For example, let's say you're going to spend 15 to 25 grand, which was our average sales price on a really nice corporate company. Overview video. Well, you're probably not going to spend that kind of money if you have a really shitty outdated website. We found out that there were certain things that they had to have in place. I built a bot where it would scrape Google based on search queries, where we would search in different industries or verticals. We would literally put best construction production companies in California or whatever it was, would have all the search results back when everything was very, very SEO optimized, not that it isn't now, but it was a much heavier focus on a strategy back then. It would scrape those and then it would basically look for, hey, do they have a new website? If they do have a new website, are there any videos on it? If there are videos, are they at least this outdated? It would go through all this stuff and then it would pull from different SCM tools to show how much they were spending on ads. I was trying to build a manual bot to scrape the Internet really just to get me leads. Now this was really before they had the data providers they had. They probably existed back then, but not to the level that they did later. All the data companies blow up and the way that the data is presented with Apollo for B2B outbound sales, they have Apollo. You got your zoom infos and you got all these big data companies that started shifting the game. Then they came out with signals and buying intent where it does that stuff automatically for you. Now you go all the way catch up, all the way up to speed. Today we have full on outbound agents that are doing everything from the data process to segmentation, to enrichment, to pulling website intelligence, to finding the voice of the customer, to looking for everything that they have online, pulling the custom signals and then they're automatically writing all of this outbound emails for you. It's crazy how much that has changed. Just in the tools that we have and the way that you would run these teams. I could speak to like four different angles on how sales has changed, but that's the first story that comes to mind and that's a big part of what we do today is building these sophisticated pipeline generation engines.
- [06:55]
Ryan Alford
Relationships don't matter. Signals are all that matters.
- [06:57]
Josh Troy
I say this jokingly, but I talk to clients about Mastermind syndrome. People join a mastermind or a business group, they hear one idea and then that's gospel to them. But you have to apply it to your business model and in the right context. There are still businesses today that are heavily relationship driven and there's even a strategy even in outbound called ABM Account based marketing, which is typically you have a lower tam, smaller tam, but really large deal values. If you got a million dollar contract, more people aren't usually handing that over because you sent some fancy cold email right away. And it's transactional. I mean, they want to get to know you. There's a vetting process. Maybe you're waiting and staying in touch with them, courting them until their current contract comes to an end. That is still a big strategy. But short answer yes, there is a lot more opportunity for transactional sales where you can generate a lot of business from cold traffic.
- [07:49]
Ryan Alford
So there's one thing I've learned running multiple businesses. It's how fast things fall apart when communication gets messy. Missed calls, scattered text threads, team members not seeing the same conversation. That stuff quietly costs you time and revenue. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U O. The smarter way to run your business communications. It gives my team 1 shared business number so everyone sees the full conversation. Calls, texts, voicemails, all in one place. No more who talked to this customer? Replies are faster, handoffs are smoother, and customers actually feel taken care of. We realized that at my new card shop, Collector station. Between customers calling about card inventory, grading submissions, trade offers, and even trade nights, things were moving fast. And when communication wasn't centralized, things got messy quick. I also like that it works wherever I am. Phone, laptop, doesn't matter. I kept my existing number added teammates in just minutes and everything lives in one clean view. And their AI automatically logs calls and pulls out next steps. Make this the season where no opportunity and no customer slips away.
- [09:05]
Josh Troy
Try quo for free.
- [09:06]
Ryan Alford
Plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com Ryan that's quo.com Ryan that's Q U O.com Ryan Quo no missed calls, no missed opportunities. If you've got kids in middle school or high school, you already know homework can turn into a whole situation. What should take 20 minutes somehow turns into two hours, and half the time it ends with frustration on both sides I've got four boys, three of them right in that middle and high school range. So I see it all the time. They hit a problem, get stuck. And it's not that they don't want to figure it out, they just don't know how to get there. That's why I've been looking into Brainly. Brainly is basically a 24,7 AI powered tutor that actually walks them through problems step by step, not just giving answers by helping them understand how something works so they can build confidence and keep moving. And as a parent, that's the part I care about. It's not about the shortcuts, it's about them actually learning the material. It's also just practical. You don't have to deal with scheduling a tutor or trying to find things that line up around sports and everything else. It's there whenever they need it. And it's a lot more affordable than traditional tutoring. Honestly, it just takes a lot of pressure off. Finals are coming up. Build your teen study plan now. It only takes minutes. Go to brainly.comryan to get 50% off your first Brainly subscription. With my code, Ryan. That's B R A I n l y.com Ryan. I came up and I still believe in it. I think it's changed a bit. There's a purchase funnel and I think it's true for business and consumer. You've got the top of the funnel being awareness. No one can buy anything that they're not aware of. Some people forget that sometimes they want to take you straight to the bottom. They're like, well, they don't even know who the fuck you are. So you got awareness and you got consideration. If you get them thinking about you and then get into intent, they're going to buy something and you might be one of them. And then you have purchase. And I've just simplified 37 other things that could be in there depending on what it is. But I do believe that that still exists on some level today. In the last five years or so, five to 10. It used to be okay. Content marketing is everything. Content marketing, website, videos, ebooks, content, you're catching them, they're becoming aware of you by you having value or something that offers them knowledge. Where does that. The content engine, the content part of the game with all of these tools and ops. Now where does that sit in importance or not importance?
- [11:45]
Josh Troy
It's actually very, very important today and still today. And even more so, just as an example, if you're B2B service businesses and you're Deploying an outbound campaign and cold email or outsourced SDRs. A lot of the messaging back then, and when I say back then, I'm talking about last five years and earlier was essentially he, hey, this is what we do, blah, blah, blah, can you book a call here? And that's very. If you're talking about it in a funnel perspective, that CTA is very, very high intent, very bottom of the funnel. You're assuming they're ready to just go straight into a sales conversation. Today, what we see a lot more effective is some lower commitment types of call to actions where the strategy is first of all, it's engagement based, you just want to get a response to start the conversation. But second of all, you do want to lead with some sort of authority and content, some valuable playbook that gets them a quick win and some trust and buy in has affected some companies and industries more than others. Now, believe it or not, Covid really changed buyer psychology in a lot of ways for a lot of reasons. What happened in Covid is something that was completely unprecedented. Before people were staying home, they weren't able to do anything. They were online. Not only were they online, there was a lot of fear, economic uncertainty, fear of employment and will I have a job and when this is all over type of thing. What you had was people spending a lot of money in different directions faster because they had more time on their hands. They had a little bit more money because they weren't outspending it. And that fear drove them to look into things they might not have normally or previously. Really changed the buyer psychology. Because of that, in certain industries there was a lot of looser business being done. People were buying faster. The delivery on promises and fulfillment got weaker because of this change in buying behavior. What happened in most industries? I work in a lot of different industries, it's like 17 plus different verticals that we currently are selling in. Lots of wildly divergent industries. And they generally all agree that we're selling right now in a trust deficit. It's like a trust recession. And I always say that trust is the most important thing in sales because if you don't trust someone, it doesn't matter about anything else. You're not going to buy from them. How do you build trust? It still typically is through brand authority, through personal branding, putting out valuable content before they're willing to spend money with you. It's a heavy, heavy part in any outbound strategy. And having a content repository and content enablement is critical to having success these days.
- [14:10]
Ryan Alford
Trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets. A wise person said that once and I picked up on it. It wasn't me, but I do like it. It's true. The trust deficit is an interesting one. It's spot on. You got all these communication channels and all these things flying at you. You have a lack of sort of personal relationships that happen in this digital world a lot of times. And so you don't necessarily know how to trust. More ways to communicate than ever, but less opportunity to sort of earn trust digitally. Digitally earning trust is not easy.
- [14:42]
Josh Troy
You said exactly it it' that's what everything exploded even further. Not just because the progression of digital marketing and all of these different tools, but because of COVID really kicked it into hyperdrive. That's ruined by the bad actors. You have a lot of players that because of the technology, because of the digital era, because of all these things, they could launch a website tomorrow, start getting business. Now they get a bunch of horrible customer reviews or whatever. Today in a digital era, buying from somebody that you don't know and buying from somebody that you know very little about or very little online proof. Pretty much everyone has had an experience like that that hasn't gone well and that's what's created this trust deficit. There's a couple different things and the main thing I usually say isn't coming to me, but we call it value based selling. And that's another thing that has changed in the sales process in the past. You don't really question if the company as much. You didn't question if the company knew how to do the thing they were selling. I hope they know how to at least do that. You're comparing who's better more in consideration. But now you have to ask, does this guy even do what he says he does? Does the company even know how to deliver on the thing they're selling? The only way you can do that is demonst expertise and true value. Even in the sales process, which has changed call frameworks even for AES and
- [15:54]
Ryan Alford
sales reps. Talking with Josh Troy. He is the CEO of WFS Group. We're talking sales ops, the current state of sales and B2B sales and earning trust. Here's how I interpreted that. Josh, you fill in the gaps for me. Let me give you three things before I ask you for one. My good friend Gary Vee wrote a book in 2009 called Jab Jab jab jab, right hook. That sounds a little bit like what we're talking about.
- [16:18]
Josh Troy
There's a balance that believe it or not. It's very simple conversationally, but it's a lot harder from an executional standpoint. Another thing that really shapes culture and process and tactics is it is personal branding and social media and whoever gets the most amount of exposure and views. You have a lot of sales trainers these days that have got a lot of notoriety online. They have a very, very large following. They teach tactics that work really well from a viral content perspective, but they need to be really looked at in questions from an actual delivery perspective. An example of that is there's sales trainers that pre reach these very high level question led frameworks in discovery where it's just question, question, question, get the prospect to talk about them, blah blah, blah. But I'll tell you when you're dealing with a sophisticated prospect that is scheduling a call to learn more about a service and by the end of the 30, 45 minutes they know nothing more about what your company does, they get annoyed. What do you have to do? You have to know how to have these expert led insight led conversations and discoveries that they don't just ask questions and extract information from prospects, but they're also amplifying desire and interest for your services as you go. You're continuing to qualify their time throughout the discovery framework. The balance that's intricate and complex I was describing is you can overcorrect and now you're basically pitching in your discovery process and you start to get into the weeds on things way too premature. Some of our selling frameworks we have something called sales management augmentation where we're coming into businesses that have a proven sales team. They might even have a sales manager but they want some additional capacity in rep development support. We have to train them on still have a really solid discovery process. Don't get too into the weeds, but lead with insights, show them that improve to them that you have the expertise, demonstrate that to them. So you build confidence in your solution. Sometimes some of that sales enablement comes in handy. I'll just give you one more example, but if I'm on cold email, we book an appointment. Someone comes in from one of our AI led appointment setting engines. I can't just get in there and assume that they have a high level of interest. What led you to book this call and why are you interested? Because a lot of them are. I don't really know, it just sounded interesting so I looked into it. There's also an issue businesses and a lot of them that can't validate pipeline generation and cold outreach is because they will categorize that as, oh, it's bad lead quality. All of these leads are shit. Well, no, it's not. You just have a process issue. You don't know how to meet them, where they're at in elevate that interest and awareness prior to taking them into that core sales conversation. These are all of the tactics and strategies that really matter if you want to have success with that today.
- [18:59]
Ryan Alford
I've heard the crappy lead flow a hundred times being on the agency side. And I was never in sales ops, but always marketing. Marketing would get bad for bad lead quality as well.
- [19:10]
Josh Troy
It doesn't mean that there's no such thing as bad leads, but as a from a culture perspective, seriously, this is something that's trained, it's taught, it's in our training. We talk about, we reference it often with management. Culturally, our company is not allowed to use the words lead quality. I'm tired of it. A leads, a lead. I'm not even saying everyone should buy, but let's assume lead quality is an actual issue. How does that help by blaming it on lead quality? What you have to do is be a lot more specific with that. What is the actual issue? Why aren't they qualified? How do we tweak that stuff on the front end? But more importantly, we have a framework called the 10 Steps to Wires from Strangers. Even WFS Group, even though we are going through a rebrand, we're excited to announce that this week just because it doesn't reflect the breadth of our services and the scope of who we serve now. But WFS Group stands for Wires from Strangers and it literally comes from the fact that we're able to take cold traffic and convert it into high paying, raving, long term, loyal customers. That's the whole concept. We have a selling framework called the 10 Steps to Wires from Strangers that we teach our sales reps on. I'm not going to get into the framework right now, but the reason I bring it up is because we actually have something called step zero, which is how do you start a sales conversation when they aren't ready to have it yet? They don't have the level of awareness or interest.
- [20:19]
Ryan Alford
Zero to hero.
- [20:20]
Josh Troy
That's right. But sometimes you have to remember a cold lead is the same exact lead as a warm lead with just less awareness at that given point in time. If you know what to do with that, you can create warm leads. And that's what you have to teach the sales team.
- [20:34]
Ryan Alford
You got to have pipeline. Not everybody's buying that day. You got to have them at all stages back to that repeatable scalable income is because if you get introduced to five people or your cold outreach gets five bites on the hook, you might have gotten lucky. But they're going to be somewhere in the sales process of consideration or budget or whatever that you've got to have them in different stages of the pipeline. And I'm sure that your ops deals will lot with pipeline because that's the only way to get scalable, repeatable. Talk about pipeline.
- [21:06]
Josh Troy
Josh, a big part of our positioning and what we help our clients with is we're full cycle, end to end sales. It's not just appointment setting and pipeline generation and creating leads. It's okay, well what's the next step through full sale cycles and actually closing the business? Okay, what's the next step? It's what you're saying. It's pipeline, it's long term follow up. And most people, most companies really struggle with long term follow up because they don't have the systems. It's not a manual approach. That's all stuff that has to be configured within the CRM. A lot of that needs to be automated and I'll speak to that in a second because one of our services revops as a service is we go into businesses and we say how do we generate X amount more revenue without spending a dollar more on new leads? And it's all reactivation stuff. It's hitting their existing pipeline or past deals that didn't close and having a strategic personalized cadence to go back to them. You can guess this. Yes, it's way fricking more effective and easier with AI now because you can do hyper personalization and reactivation campaigns. There's a lot of really cool stu we do there. I just thought it was interesting to note it is a little bit flipped on the head with pipeline generation. When I say pipeline generation I'm really referring to generating new leads on the calendar through some sort of outbound motion. When it comes to that, the funnel does still exist. You're right Ryan, but you do almost flip it on its head because with signals through data enrichment, through website intelligence and through these outbound agents we're able to build, you are trying to find people that you're able to indicate somehow, some way have a high level level of propensity to be in market for your services right then you are looking for that low hanging fruit, someone who's open and ready to get into a conversation right then. Then the reason I call it almost a reverse funnel is because if they aren't Ready right then and there. Then you almost backtrack and put them into these longer term nurture campaigns. A lot of these nuances with Outbound, that's really misunderstood. And that's when you're going to put them on some more long term contact cadence to keep content in front of them and wait for the time for them to be in market. How do you do that? Talking about pipeline, there's really two types of conversations we're having right now. One is technically considered the marketing side and one is technically considered the sales side. Follow up. We always say there's two types of follow up. Interest based follow up and commitment based follow up. They're both exactly how they sound. Interest based follow up is following up to generate interest. They aren't interested yet. That's more of a marketing or SDR function. Commitment based follow up is somebody that you're in an active sales conversation with and you're trying to continue to follow up to gain that commitment or customer. How do we handle pipeline and how do we continue to optimize what we're really talking about here, which is lead to close ratios. Not booked call to close ratios, but the amount of leads you have. How do you get more of those to convert? Within the CRM we have a really robust configuration. Again, it falls under the reactivation campaign umbrella and we call it the conversion engine. You're getting your marketing collateral and content to be delivered to these prospects over time. But you also have rep led campaigns. They are automated, but they look like they're on behalf of the rep. And we set up robust lead scoring in CRM. It's a point system. Every time they open a piece of marketing collateral, they click a link or they visit your website. It's assigning different points. Once they hit a certain point threshold, then they will be reactivated by a sales sequence and the communication will be something that's relevant based on where they're at in that journey. For example, the sequence to somebody who went through a sales process but was a lost deal and we're circling back 90 days later, that's going to be a different sequence for someone who's never went through a sales process, but we can see that they're engaged. A lot of that is built with within the ecosystem and we leverage automation and AI to send that exact right message at that exact right time and capture on the new signals within the ecosystem.
- [24:55]
Ryan Alford
Point scoring. I knew we'd get there. I'm a creative guy at heart, but I'm an organized creative guy. I'm more creative than I am doing the same things repeatedly over and over again. My mind gets bored. It's not like I like to break wheels. That's why you just got to have other people do it. Systemizing it it work, right? There's a reason the wheel goes around and round and round over again. Because it works. There's a lot of smarts here. But my biggest questions come in. Josh, on email still works. I'm not going to ask you that question. I know it still works, but what else works? We're in a digital world. No one answers the phone anymore, it seems. But maybe you're going to tell me I'm wrong. Calling probably works better now because maybe they don't get as many. Let's talk tactics. All the scoring, all the system pipeline. What are the modern B2B tactics that are working?
- [25:42]
Josh Troy
There's a few different things. You'd probably really enjoy coming up with the ideas for the campaigns. You'd hate executing on them. Because really, in Rev Ops and Sales to scale, even with sales management, we say you have to just keep doing the boring shit over and over and over and over. That's what gets it to scale. I actually had a conversation with a good friend of mine the other day and we were talking about this exact same thing. And we said, from the beginning of my career, I've been in sales leadership and doing what I do for a little over 13 years now. And what I will tell you and the friend I was talking to has been doing this for about 20 years. And what we were talking about was from the beginning of our careers, you had a whole group of people saying shit didn't work and a whole group of people saying the same thing worked the best. What's funny is like, no matter where I've ever been at in my career or in the timeline, that like, there's one side saying that it works really well, one side saying it doesn't. And really what that tells me and my company and what we do and with our clients is living proof of it, is there's a right and wrong way to do things and strategies become outdated and have to be adapted in email. If anyone says cold email doesn't work anymore, I would want to be respectful, but I would have a hard time not laughing in their face on that because we just have so much data in a significant amount of revenue to prove otherwise. There's companies doing wild numbers from cold email. It's way harder. There's a lot of technical components that need to be involved in it now. Today, way more than they ever have before. Conversion rates are lower, which means that you have to either have higher hit rates because of the level of personalization and approach, or higher volume doesn't mean it's easier. It is harder. But crazy success with it is cold calling. And this is not just true for us. One of the coolest parts about what I do, and I love this, I have anywhere on a slow week, two or three on a busier week, 10 calls with companies looking for our services every single, single week, we have way more beyond that. I'm just specifically talking about the ones that I'm involved in. One of the coolest parts about that is I do really in depth audits. We send RFIs, we do an audit, I review their calls, I look at their motions. So I have a really good pulse on what's working, what isn't, and what people are doing. The amount of time, just this year alone, the last several months that I'm having, clients say that cold calling is their number one channel right now. It's insane. So many people. Cold calling has been working very well for a very long time. There's a surge in it again right now because people are so tired of all the bots and automated crap. That's not to say a slant to cold email because there's a ton of success. There's a preference for conversations on the phone. There is a much more sophisticated way to do that too, because even cold calling, you want to have the right data, you want to have the right signals, you want your SDRs to have the right contact cadence and the right content on how they're sharing and building pipeline. So strategies change. Now you said let's talk about tactics. What I will say though, that has really changed here is omnichannel approaches, really robust, rich contact cadence that are tying sort of everything in. Now if you talk to anybody, kind of like outbound expert, I'm pretty confident they'll tell you their number one channels are cold calling, LinkedIn, cold email, in that order. That's kind of the main three things. Cold calling, LinkedIn, cold email, in that order. Pretty much everyone I know will say that. But because there's so much AI and automation, this stuff has got really sophisticated. So the omnichannel approach has to communicate it with it, and your LinkedIn approach has to be synced up with your email approach. And the dials should be related to the signals and the content that's going out in your other outreach. And so you see a lot more opportunity for that. But that entire orchestration is more alive today than ever before. It's really just amplified our output.
- [29:14]
Ryan Alford
When you say LinkedIn, are we talking DMs, are we talking content on LinkedIn?
- [29:18]
Josh Troy
Those are the two main strategies really. Just inbound versus outbound. There's really effective inbound organic content strategies on LinkedIn. It's all thought leadership, thought leadership, building expertise, credibility, et cetera, and having an authoritative voice and putting that out consistently through content. It's crazy. The algorithm prioritizes content in a way that you could actually get a lot of business from inbound once you build it up. Just people responding through your content when done correctly. So we do a lot of that and then what's really good is what we would call an amplification strategy. You would run retargeting ads or mirror ads to people that are engaging in your content specific call to actions that get them into an inbound call. Now that stuff works way better the more content you have because there's larger audiences for a retargeting pool then on the outbound side. Yes. The thing about LinkedIn is you have to connect with them to be able to send these messages. And you're also limited. That's the hardest part about LinkedIn is you are limited on volume. Are there ways around that? Yes, in a way that doesn't violate their guidelines. Yes, but it's a longer explanation on strategy. What I have found though, with outbound on LinkedIn, even though it's different inbound content strategy, you are 10 times more effective. I don't have data to support that, but just throwing it out there, you're like 10 times more effective doing outbound when you have the authoritative content content set up. The first thing they do on LinkedIn is who the hell is this? They look at your profile and if they don't see anything there, it's why am I going to respond to this person? That's another mistake that people make when they're doing LinkedIn outreach is they don't have anything that would make somebody want to respond and engage with them.
- [30:53]
Ryan Alford
The inbound strategy is interesting. It's literally called a lead magnet. You caught a lot of different things. My mind always goes to EDI and cdi, which is brand development versus category development, depending on what you're selling. A good friend of mine and wise sage marketer Christopher Lockhead says he who owns the category owns the sale. If you elevate the category, you become the default choice. When you think of inbound, how much is it about how great you Are versus how great the category is.
- [31:24]
Josh Troy
When you say category, are you talking about industry maturity of what is the information and interest level?
- [31:30]
Ryan Alford
You don't have to tell anybody what Uber is anymore because we know what Uber is. But you didn't know what that category was when Uber got launched. All you knew is taxis. You got to elevate ride sharing and app to bring the car to you and all that. So you had to educate on the category. And hey, he who owns the education of the category that's new gets the sale.
- [31:48]
Josh Troy
I would agree exactly with you and your friend because I've always said I love competition because they spend a ton of money educating the market. For me, you have to have that. In fact, some of the hardest things I've ever sold are things that there's no demand for yet and people don't understand it or why it should be right for them. I've never liked being first to market. I like to be early to market, but not first because you got a pretty big burden there if it's a brand new thing. Plus there's questions on validation and product market fit there. But the way that I look at the category is I used to always say this, you don't want necessarily a niche product because now your tam's limited, it's harder. And then you have the category awareness issue. I like to have a broad tam, a really large TAM with awareness for the category, but a highly differentiated and unique service because that's how you win. Even by the way, we have a method and a framework called pitch design. It's the irresistible pitch design framework where so many companies, man, you could just increase their conversion rates by just building them a real pitch. And this ties into this perfectly because so many companies, there's a market maturity and there is a lot of category awareness there. And they get on a call with you, they might be pitched by 5, especially how ads work in these algorithms. They get hit as soon as they book a call. They get five competitors targeting them right after. Well, most people pitch their services to commoditize explanation of what's included. So this is what we do and this is how it works and blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And it's not compelling or differentiated, just simply by crafting a really strong pitch that simultaneously shares why it's a perfect fit for them and why it's unlike any of the other things they're looking at. That's how you win in a market with real category awareness. That stuff is huge. I personally like competition and I like when other People are paying to educate your customers, but you just got to be able to cut through the noise when that's the case.
- [33:35]
Ryan Alford
So there's techniques and all that for designing the perfect pitch, but it's an exercise in finding your differentiation. And the why? Because there's endless choice sometimes or competitors. And why you why now, assuming they're in. If you've got kids in middle school or high school, you already know homework can turn into a whole situation. What should take 20 minutes somehow turns into two hours. And half the time it ends with frustration on both sides. I've got four boys, three of them right in that middle and high school range. So I see it all the time. They hit a problem, get stuck. And it's not that they don't want to figure it out, they just don't know to how how to get there. That's why I've been looking into Brainly. Brainly is basically a 24.7ai powered tutor that actually walks them through problems step by step. Not just giving answers by helping them understand how something works so they can build confidence and keep moving. And as a parent, that's the part I care about. It's not about the shortcuts, it's about them actually learning the material. It's also just practical. You don't have to deal with scheduling a tutor or trying to find things that line up around sports and everything else. It's there whenever they need it. And it's a lot more affordable than traditional tutoring. Honestly, it just takes a lot of pressure off. Finals are coming up. Build your teen study plan now. It only takes minutes. Go to brainly.com backslash Ryan to get 50% off your first Brainly subscription with my code RYAN. That's B R A I N L Y.com Ryan ready to buy. The market intelligence thing is interesting to me, the signals and all that. I've seen those tools. I don't know that I've used them, but I feel like I've used them. I've gotten close enough to the sun to know when it burns me. Lots of signals. My good friend Steve Jobs would say. Lots of noise, not a lot of signals. How do we find the right signals and what tools are doing it? Let's finish some actionable tools systems. Obviously WFI Group will be a big close here in the solution for anyone that needs it. Talk to me about answer that sort of towards those tools, the ones that work, the ones that don't. And maybe some practical advice for our listeners that's attainable for Themselves.
- [35:56]
Josh Troy
I'll have an interesting approach to it as well, just with the emergence of these large LLMs and Claude and whatever. So I'll speak to that. For listeners that are truly interested in getting a predictable pipeline generation strategy. Maybe your outbound isn't as effective right now, or maybe you're not doing any outbound and you recognize that that could be something big. You, whether you contact someone like us to do it for you or you want to venture down this road yourself. The other important part of the strategy is remember in Omni Channel you want these things to be connected, but you're going to have a very different list segmentation for your high volume based cold email as you will for your cold calling and your LinkedIn outreach. You want the sequences to communicate and be connected, which there's a rabbit hole on what that actually means. But the point is they have to run independently because if you're doing high volume cold email outreach, you're going to hit limits on LinkedIn outreach. The rep led sequences are going to be separ than the automated AI LED sequences. How do you do that? Well, you want to come up with really tiered, sophisticated scoring on how you're scoring your ICP and different Personas. So you have a high value lead segment that your rep led sequences, your LinkedIn outreach, your dialing motion is going to be catered upon. It makes the economics make more sense as well because they're better customers or prospective customers. And then you leave cold email for the cleanup and the higher volume stuff that doesn't make sense to spend more bandwidth on. I always see people doing that wrong. If you're not doing it at all, maybe you didn't even know. But if you're doing it, maybe that's a good tip for you. When it comes to tools, it's like when people ask me about CRM. Josh, why are you a HubSpot partner? Why is that your CRM of choice? Well, you can only choose one. You got to standardize. We couldn't do what we do at scale if we were trying to figure out every CRM and be a jack of all trades. We had to pick one. There's multiple CRMs that work well. Obviously we have a reasons we chose HubSpot. It's the most robust. They have the heaviest reinvestment plan and tech roadmap their data granularity and reporting the way that we build reactivation campaigns. There's so many reasons beyond the reasons. You just have to pick one because there's a surplus of tools. I don't say that to make this all about HubSpot and the CRM stuff we do. I say that as an example for every other tool we could talk about. You have more tools than ever before. There's no shortage. So many data tools, so many sending platforms, so much enrichment, so many signaling tools. I'm going to name a few here. I'm not just going to edge you guys. You just really have to find some that check your boxes that you could dive into on data. I don't use Zoom Info. This is too complicated to explain math on this that we've run so many comparisons on data. I believe Zoom Info with their claim where they say we have the highest quality data. Fine, I'll give them that. I believe them. If that's what they say, I'm sure they're not lying. The issue is they price accordingly. And we've actually had more efficient, accurate data by going to cheaper data providers and then just pairing it with a list cleaning tool using an Apollo and then using a million verifier. There's a bunch of different list cleaning tools. There's a zero bounce. I think it is. There's a couple different ways to clean the list and you're still the price per accurate contact is still a much cheaper. So that's why we like that Paul is a good data provider. Then you got to clean the data as well. And then you're going to go into signals and bombard is a great signals intent topic. Database Signify is another one. There's a lot of tools I could name. What we're doing with agents is what we're having the most success with right now because we're building custom signals. We're telling it where to look. They're going online. They're scraping website intelligence. They're looking at recent events as an example. One of the biggest signals has always been and will always be hiring signals. Because if you're hiring for an SDR or you're hiring for an accountant, you can assume they need SDR and accounting services. It's a very clear need they're sharing with you. We've built agents that scrape every main ats, which is Applicant Tracking System. They're scraping greenhouse jobs, Lever Ashby, whatever. They're scraping all of those. They find every single hiring signal out there and they're pulling that into the campaign. What we're doing with the outbound agents and orchestration, where we have an orchestration platform, whether that be like N8N or LangChain for people that are looking for this information. They know what I mean when I say that. But that's how you orchestrate it. And then we're tying into the correct LLMs based on the task and the function. But obviously Claude is pretty superior in that way right now for sending platforms, I think they're a commoditized, you could use whatever you want. Really the only note that I'd give there is make sure if you're low volume, more account based and rep led you choose something that's for that. We do all of our replet sequences right there within HubSpot because you can and it's really good. Another rep led one would be the Outreach IO or a Sales loft. But if you're doing high volume cold email stuff, you need something that's for that. There's a limb list, there's instantly, there's smart leads, there's salesforce, there's a lot of different tools there.
- [40:34]
Ryan Alford
Cause none of this matters if it doesn't get in the inbox.
- [40:37]
Josh Troy
None of it matters if you don't get in the inbox. But the thing is with sending tools these days, yeah, they all have their own value props. I would analyze it and evaluate it more. So for email infrastructure, which is it's all around deliverability, how are you buying domains? Is it single tenant? Is it shared IPs in your warmup pools? Is it premium domains? You have to look into all the email structure and a lot of them limit on what you can do. That's really key. But the reason these sending platforms are so commoditized right now is because most all the strategy and the heavy lifting is done before this stuff ever gets uploaded. We have an agent do all the segmentation, all the enrichment, all the signals, all the messaging, the whole contact cadence and then we just upload it to send it in a provider. These are some tools that you can use.
- [41:21]
Ryan Alford
You said developing agents that go after these signals, but they had to know what signals to go after. Can you use AI to help carve out those signals? I'm selling this product to these people. How do I know know these people are ready to buy or what are their signals that are showing me intent?
- [41:38]
Josh Troy
You can play with Claude for a few minutes and it's going to give you a list of a bunch of signals. Just like anybody uses LLM, we still come up with that stuff on our own A lot of the times. Just good brainstorming. Real sales expertise is going to give us the best ideas and then we'll use AI to kind of execute on that vision. But the first thing that we do with any client is you build an entire go to market plan. And that deck consists of all the signals we've come up with the ICPs, the different Personas within the ICP, the messaging, the pain points, the value props. You build all of that out first and then our agent is trained with different frameworks on that customer specific stuff.
- [42:16]
Ryan Alford
Yeah, because you gotta identify who your target is, what that avatar is, how to talk to them, what are the signals, all those triggers and then you build the system.
- [42:25]
Josh Troy
Clay is obviously a big discussion of every outbound team and function and clay, it's a great tool, but I just really can't understand how they're not going to be fully replaced with AI. We're not using clay right now. Even they have Clay gen. With clay it really waterfalls the data. But so much of that you could just kind of connect yourself, especially if you have this sophistication on the agent. Here's what's hard for companies right now and this is what we do really well to build these outbound agents. You can't just know AI. It's going to do a horrible job. You have to know everything about sales. You can't just know sales. You have to know how to build context engineering and prompt engineering and all the right frameworks. With AI, you have to have both. We have AI engineers and then we have our sales department and resources that collaborate to build these sales engineering.
- [43:08]
Ryan Alford
He is the CEO of the Artist formerly known as today WFS Group and soon to be sales HQ extraordinaire. I made that part up. But his name is Josh Troy. He's very knowledgeable and I really appreciate him for coming on the show. Man, talk to me about those deets. Yeah, man, let's leave those details for everybody too.
- [43:27]
Josh Troy
My Instagram is Troy Joshua. It's backwards because I'm weird. And my LinkedIn is just Josh Troy. You'll find me. WFS Group is still where it would be found on Connect with me. Shoot me a message on either LinkedIn or my Instagram. That'll be best. I have a handful of pretty good videos on my YouTube channel.
- [43:45]
Ryan Alford
There we go. The man of Troy. The man of sales. He is Josh Troy. Really appreciate it, brother.
- [43:51]
Josh Troy
Thank you, Ryan. I'm glad to be here.
- [43:52]
Ryan Alford
Hey guys, you know, to find us. Ryan is right. Com. There's a lot of bad advice out there. We're bringing it right to you right now. Ryan is right dot com. Follow me on Instagram at Ryan Alford. Go check out Josh Troy. He gave you all those links. We'll have them in the show notes, all the highlight clips. Clips. We appreciate you for making us number one. We'll see you next time. Right about now, here's the truth.
- [44:13]
Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea, make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram at Ryan Alford and watch or listen to every episode at ryanisright. Com. This is right about now. Now quit waiting. Go.