The Predictable Revenue Playbook Most Founders Are Missing | 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. 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. What's up guys welcome to write 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 get there and why we're 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? What's going on Ryan? 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? That's a big part right now. Revenue ops is completely changing 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 lead 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 a predictable revenue motion. And that's what we love to talk about. A lot of you probably hear and even I hear it and they go, well, that works for certain types of B2B sales. Is that just a false excuse? 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 talked 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. 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 relationships not just economically like buying them things, but relationship driven. With 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. I own a revops agency. We specialize in building revops functions. It's all AI enabled and staff augmentations, some outsource 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 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 perspective clients. 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 was 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 companies in California or whatever it was. It 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 out data? It would go through all this stuff and then it would pull from different SCM tools to show how much they were spinning 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 in 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'd 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 pooling website intelligence, to finding the voice of the customer, to looking for everything that they have online, pooling 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. Relationships don't matter. Signals are all the matters. 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 to count based marketing, which is typically you have a lower tam, smaller tam, but really large deal values. If you got a million dollar contract or 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 was a lot more opportunity for transactional sales where you can generate a lot of business from cold traffic. 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 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 you 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 ten, it used to be, okay, content marketing is everything, content marketing, website, videos, ebooks, content, you're catching them, you'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 in importance? It's actually very, very important today and still today and even more so. Just as an example, if you're a 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, 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 base. 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. Now, this has affected some companies and industries more than others. Now, believe it or not, COVID really changed by our 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 a 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 looking to things they might not have normally or previously. It 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. 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 earning trust is not easy. You said exactly it. It's the digital world. 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 it 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're know how to at least do that. You're comparing who's better, more in consideration, but now you have to ask, is 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 demonstrating expertise and true value, even in the sales process, which has changed call frameworks even for AES and 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 feel in the gaps for me. Let me give you three things before I ask you for one. My good friend Gary V wrote a book in 2009 called Jab, Jab, Jab, Jab, right hook. That sounds a little bit like what we're talking about. 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 preach 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, blah, but I'll tell you when you're dealing with the 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 over-correct 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 and 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. 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, we get bad for bad lead quality as well. It doesn't mean that there's no such thing as bad leads, but as it 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 lead to 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 ourselves 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. Zero to hero. 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. That's what you have to teach the sales team. 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 a lot with pipeline because that's the only way to get scalable, repeatable. Talk about pipeline, Josh. A big part of our positioning and what we help our clients with is we're full cycle into in sales. It's not just appointment setting and pipeline generation and creating leads. It's okay. Well, what's the next step through full-style 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 stuff 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 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? You're 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 had to 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 lead campaigns. They are automated but they look like they're on behalf of the rep and we set up a robust lead scoring in the 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 adding 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 within the ecosystem and we leverage automation in AI to send that exact right message at that exact right time and capture on the new signals within the ecosystem. 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. It works, right? There's a reason the wheel goes round 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 score. All this is the pipeline. What are the modern B2B tactics that are working? 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 refops 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 thing and we said from the beginning of my career I've been 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 what we do and with our clients is living proof of it is there's a right and wrong way to do things in 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 and a significant amount of revenue to prove otherwise there's companies doing wild numbers from cold email to 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 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 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 tons 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 pipelines so strategies change now you said let's talk about tactics what I will say though that is really changed here is omnichannel approaches really robust rich contact cadences that are tying sort of everything in now if you talk to any but kind of like outbound expert I'm pretty confident they'll tell you their number one channels are cold calling linked in cold email in that order that's kind of the main three things cold calling linked in cold email in that order pretty much everyone I know will say that but because there's so much AI in 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 these 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 when you say linkedin are we talking DMs are we talking content on linkedin 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 etc and having an authoritative voice and putting that out consistently through content it's crazy the algorithm prioritizes content in a way that you can 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 mere ads to people that are engaging in your content a 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 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 the inbound strategy is interesting it's literally it kind of lead magnet and you caught a lot of different things my mind always goes to edi and cdi which is brand development versus category development pin 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 when you say category are you talking about industry maturity of what is the information and I mean you don't have to tell anybody what uber is anymore because we know it uber is but you didn't know what that category was when uber got lost all you knew is taxis you got a day off they really 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 is new gets the sale 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 in unique service because that's how you went even by the way we have a method in 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 five 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 could commoditize explanation of what's included so this is what we do and this is how it works and blah blah blah blah and it's not compelling 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 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 the 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 I feel like I've used them I've got to 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 WFS group will be a big close here in the solution for anyone that needs it talk to me about enter 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 I'll have an interesting approach to it as well just with the emergence of these large LLMs and clawed 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 for 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 an omnichannel 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 in your leaked and outreach you want the sequences to communicate and be connected which there's a rabbit lawn 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 lead sequences are going to be separate than the automated AI lead sequences how do you do that well you want to come up with really tiered sophisticated scoring on how you're scoring your ICP in different personas so you have a high value lead segment that your rep lead 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 perspective customers and then you leave cold email for the cleanup and the higher volume stop 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 hub spot 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 hub spot it's the most robust they have the heaviest reinvestment plan in tech roadmap there are 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 hub spot in 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 gonna name a few here i'm not just gonna edgy 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 but 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 follows a good data provider then you got to clean the data as well and then you're gonna go into signals and bombar 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 it 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 an applicant tracking system they're scraping greenhouse jobs lever ashbee 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 in orchestration where we have an orchestration platform whether that be like in a day in or laying chain 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 LLM's based on the task and the function but obviously clawed 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 your low volume or account base and rep led you choose something that's for that we do all of our rep led sequences right there within hub spot because you can and it's really good another rep led one would be to outreach.io or sales law 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 is there's a smartly there's sales for just a lot of different tools there there's none of this matters if it doesn't get in the inbox 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 tenet is it shared ip's in your warm up pulls 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 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 these people are ready to buy or what are their signals that are showing me intent you could play with clawed 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 is 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 icp's the different personas within the icp's at the messaging the pain points the value props you you build all of that out first and then our agent is trained with different frameworks on that customer specific stuff 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 a system clay is obviously a big discussion of every outbound team and function and clay it's a great tool but i just really can understand how they're not going to be fully replaced with AI we're not using clay right now even they have claygent 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 gonna 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 in 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 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 details let's leave yeah man let's leave those details for everybody too my instagram is troy dot 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 there we go the man of troy the man of sales he is josh troy really appreciate it brother thank you ryan i'm glad to be here hey guys you know to find us ryan is right calm there's a lot of bad advice out there we're bringing it right to you right now ryan is right calm follow an instagram at ryan offered go check out josh troy he gave you all those links we'll have them in the show notes all the highlight clips we appreciate you for making us number one we'll see next time right about now here's the truth 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 offered on instagram at ryan and watch or listen to every episode at ryan is right calm this is right about now now quit waiting go win