The Predictable Revenue Playbook Most Founders Are Missing | Josh Troy

23:26We 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 a 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?

23:58Within 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 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.

24:32And 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 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. a point scoring. I knew. If you've got kids in middle school or high school, you already know homework can turn into a whole situation.

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27:05And 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 slash Ryan.

27:45We get there.

27:50I'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 works, right? There's a reason the wheel goes around and around and around 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.

28:23Calling 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? 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 RevOps 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.

28:49And 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.

29:22And 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. 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.

29:57Doesn'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.

30:30The amount of time just this year alone, in 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.

31:00You 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 has really changed here is omni-channel 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, LinkedIn, cold email, in that order. That's kind of the main three things, cold calling, LinkedIn, cold email in that order.

31:33Pretty much everyone I know will say that. But because there's so much AI and automation, this stuff has got really sophisticated. So the omni-channel approach has to communicate 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. 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.

32:10There'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 mirror ads to people that are engaging in your content, specific call to actions that get them into an inbound call.

32:45Now 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.

33:17I 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 called a lead magnet. You call it a lot of different things.

33:48My mind always goes to BDI 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? When you say category, are you talking about industry maturity of what is the information and interest level? Like, I mean, you don't have to tell anybody what Uber is anymore because we know what Uber is.

34:22But you didn't know what that category was when Uber got launched. All you knew was taxis. You got to do 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. I would agree exactly with you and your friend, because I've always said I love competition because they spent 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.

34:54I'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.

35:29It'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 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 to commoditize explanation of what's included. So this is what we do.

35:59And 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. So there's techniques and all that for designing the perfect pitch, but it's an exercise in finding your differentiation and the why.

36:32Because there's endless choice sometimes or competitors and why you, why now, assuming they're in the ready to buy.

36:46The 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 WFS 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.

37:24I'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 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 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.

38:00You 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 separate 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 valued lead segment that your rep-led sequences, your LinkedIn outreach, your dialing motion is going to be catered upon.

38:31It 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.

39:02We 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.

39:39I'm gonna name a few here. I'm not just gonna 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 ZoomInfo. This is too complicated to explain math on this that we've run so many comparisons on data. I believe ZoomInfo 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.

40:15There's a bunch of different list cleaning tools. There's a zero bounce, I think it is. There's a couple of 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 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.

40:44They'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 an 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.

41:17What 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 commoditized. You could use whatever you want, really. The only note that I'd give there is make sure if you're low volume or account base and rep led, you choose something that's for that.

41:45We do all of our rep-led sequences right there within HubSpot because you can and it's really good. Another rep-led one would be 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 smartly. There's Salesforce. There's a lot of different tools there. Because 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.

42:17How 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.

42:49You 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 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 it's 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.

43:22But 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 ICPs, at 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. Yeah, because you got to 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.

43:57And 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 Claygen. 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.

44:27You 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 deets. Yeah, man. Let's leave those details for everybody too. 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.

45:05Connect 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're going 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. RyanIsRight.com. Follow him 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. We appreciate you for making us number one.

45:38We'll see you 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 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 win.