Right About Now with Ryan Alford - The Predictable Revenue Playbook Most Founders Are Missing | Josh Troy

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Ryan Alford sits down with Josh Troy for a deep conversation on what actually creates predictable revenue in modern B2B sales. Josh explains how revenue operations, outbound systems, content, trust, and AI all fit together, and why most businesses are still chasing activity instead of building a true revenue engine. He also breaks down the difference between generating leads and generating pipeline, why cold calling still works, and how smarter follow-up systems can unlock more revenue without spending more on new leads. Ryan brings the operator and marketing lens, Josh brings the sales systems and RevOps lens, and together they unpack what founders, sales leaders, and growth-minded businesses need to understand if they want their revenue to become more reliable. Topics Covered What RevOps really means in practice Why predictable revenue matters more than one-off wins The role of AI in modern outbound strategy Why cold calling is still working How content builds trust and pipeline What businesses get wrong about lead quality Why pipeline reactivation is an underrated growth lever How founders can think more strategically about revenue systems

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 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. 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. 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? 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 nine out of 10 prospective customers that we talk to that haven't had success with a 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 a relationship, not just economically like buying them things, but it's relationship driven. For 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 augmentation, 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. It was 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 stringent 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 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 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 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 outdated? 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. 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. Relationships don't matter. Signals are all the vatters. 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, 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 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 in transactional sales where you can generate a lot of business. from cold traffic. So there's one thing I've learned running multiple businesses. It's how fast things fall apart when communication gets messy.

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