The Entrepreneur DNA - The Hidden System That Scales Sales Teams to 8 Figures | Josh Troy

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

In this episode, I sat down with Josh Troy to break down what actually scales a business beyond just “getting better at sales.” We dive into why most entrepreneurs stay stuck in founder-led sales, how systems and operations are the real drivers of growth, and the exact metrics and frameworks you need to build a scalable sales team. Josh also shares how AI is changing the game in sales operations and how to think about hiring, efficiency, and profitability at a much higher level. If you want to move from hustling for deals to building a true revenue machine, this episode will shift how you think about scaling. About Josh Troy: Josh Troy is the Founder and CEO of WFS Group (Wires From Strangers), an outsourced sales and revenue operations firm that helps businesses scale high-ticket offers through systems, processes, and high-performance sales teams. With over 20 years of experience in high-ticket direct sales, Josh has built and scaled multiple companies across industries including B2B services, real estate, and alternative education. He began his entrepreneurial journey at 21, building a video marketing agency through outbound sales, and later expanded his expertise into full-funnel customer acquisition, combining sales, marketing, and operations. Josh has recruited, trained, and managed hundreds of sales reps, helping clients generate hundreds of millions in revenue while specializing in building scalable, efficient sales systems and RevOps frameworks. Today, he is known for his focus on sales operations over just sales training, helping companies move from founder-led selling to fully systemized, scalable revenue machines. Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/troy.joshua YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@joshuatroy Website (WFS Group):https://thewfsgroup.com/ About Justin: Justin Colby is the host of The Entrepreneur DNA and The Science of Flipping podcasts and a best-selling author. He is a serial entrepreneur with over and a seasoned real estate investor with over 20 years of experience. Driven by a passion to help entrepreneurs thrive, Justin created the Entrepreneur DNA community to support business owners in building wealth, systems, and long-term freedom. Through his podcasts, books, education platforms, and hands-on mentorship, he continues to help entrepreneurs scale with clarity and confidence. Connect with Justin: Instagram: @thejustincolby YouTube: Justin Colby TikTok: @justincolbytsof LinkedIn: Justin Colby Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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We are back with another episode. As always, this is brought to you by our entrepreneur DNA community. Go to school.com for slash entrepreneur DNA. Be a part of the community to learn from the guests themselves each and every week. Today's episode will not disappoint. This is a very high leverage individual. He is a rev ops operator. He has many companies that he's helped build into a seven and eight figure business.

He himself has 150 salespeople. Josh Troy is here. What's up, Justin? Good to see you, man. Man, I love it. I'm coming with the energy. And you know what? Your success and your quick.

calm demeanor. That's what it's all about. I like it. I love it. I love too. So Rev. Ops operator. I don't think it's the term a lot of people have heard. Describe what your expertise is. Yeah. I mean, listen, I think most commonly, most often I get grouped into this bucket as like a sales guru. And I don't mind that. It's not offensive. Like sales is absolutely a superpower. I'm here because of my sales abilities. I started a sales company. because that's what I love to do. But I've always differentiated the fact that there's a really big difference between sales and sales operations or more broadly, rev operations, which is abbreviated as revops, right? Yeah.

And so to me, when you're scaling a business, it's not just about what's set on the call, which is really what sales trainers focus on, right? It's scripting, it's tonality, it's discovery. It's everything that the reps actually do on a call. Yeah. For me, I believe it's much more than that. And it's all the operation side of scaling a sales team. It's all high-intensity sales teams. And so things like your systems, your call models, even things like lead scoring, right?

Anything that's in the operation that helps revenue scale is what I focus on. That's what I obsess on. And so I think most of the money's in the spreadsheets, it's in the processes, and the actual systems, rather than just what's set on a call. Do you find most businesses probably small to me, I really don't want to focus on the operations. They want to focus on how do I just make more money? How do I make my sales team better? I think small businesses use an excuse to not systematize their business by saying they don't need to yet.

I've seen that my whole career, frankly. I actually myself a long time ago had that same mindset. I remember a long time ago I had a director of operations and he said that it didn't make any sense to create process documentation because he said, what's the point of creating process documentation when the only people that are making it are the only ones that are doing it? But the point is, that's how you scale. You systematize, you document process, you create transferable value. Not to mention there's risk mitigation there too, because all of a sudden you lose somebody when you're so small and you don't know how to do that person's job. So yeah, systemization, it's put off too long for sure.

to go backwards and rebuild everything. What would be, in your opinion, kind of senior in terms of what businesses need to do? They need to focus on lead generation and marketing or focus on sales. And I know most people are going to say both, right? I understand you got to have one another. But, you know, talk to the small to medium size business. They're doing pretty well, but they have a long ways to go to where their potential would be. What would you be focusing on more for them?

Yeah. I'm kind of like a sequencing guy. So it's like what has to come first? What's the prerequisite? So although I'm sales and revops, the prerequisite is leads. You can't sell somebody you don't have. So you definitely want to get the lead flow. But I'll tell you this, depending on your business model, depending on what kind of business you have, it's not always predictable day one like everybody wants it to be.

Like your lead gen might be channel partners and referral partners and guerrilla marketing and generating opportunity, right? but you have to start with the leads. Yeah. Plain and simple. And so you're not a sales manager. You're not a sales trainer. You're not a sales guru. You're brilliant at sales.

And I will tell you, I've worked with you and your company. So I vouch for Josh Troy, everybody. Phenomenal. Reach out to them immediately. Where do we want them to go find you? Yeah. Honestly, it's always best to just go to my Instagram. It's actually Troy.joshua.

I'm Josh Troy. It's backwards. Troy. Dot Joshua. I also, I don't have as much as you, Justin, obviously, but if you go to my YouTube channel, I have a new channel. It's not new. I mean, it started it maybe a year ago. The frequency is not that high yet, but there's like eight or nine videos there, and you could get a really good feel for the way that I approach RevOps.

Yeah. So when you're talking to a company that is leaning into growing their sales team, getting more efficient in sales, what are you first focused on? Well, so it kind of goes back to what you were just asking me on, you know, what happens first. I think the hardest part for a smaller business. Let's say they're starting off and then we'll obviously compound and speak to some of the more successful operators here too. But at a basic level, one of the hardest places for a company to get out of is founder-led sales. It's a business that the revenue only comes in if the founder brings it. And I think as entrepreneurs, a lot of the times we get stuck there with a ton of other roles as well, but especially, especially revenue. And, um, and it, that's the whole thing.

You're not systematizing the business. And so we bring a very predictable approach to how do you create process? How do you create transferable, transferable value in systems where you can plug other people into it? So you're bringing in revenue without relying on yourself as a founder and you could actually focus on being a real CEO. Most CEOs and operators at small levels of revenue are just glorified salespeople that also give some marching orders. Yeah. So I think that to get out of that and to really work on the business, not in the business like everybody says, you have to know how to build some of those things out to get off calls

or to get off the Legion piece. Do you see a lot of, and I'm going to, I think I know your answer. Do you see a lot of these smaller solopreneurs have a really hard time getting out of their way to let go of that control? Absolutely. And do you think it's their control? control issue or do you think they're just not built operationally so they don't feel like they have the safety net for them to actually do it?

I think it's a few things. I think, and I'm not a woo-woo type person, but I will tell you, like, I think there's a lot of limiting beliefs that really stunt the speed in which they take action on these things. And so one of those limiting beliefs that I hear all the time is, well, I sell a certain way. And I don't have a script. I don't have a process, so I don't have a way to document it. I can't teach it. It's just I do it naturally.

And I, first of all, document it regardless because you're still going to get good examples and good stuff. But the other thing is the way that you build a sales team and the standardization, it does, it is different. Like, here's my example. If I have a, you know, a sales guy say to me, you know, let's say they're a really good sales guy with a lot of credibility and they say, Well, I would do it a little bit differently, and I probably wouldn't have the talk track in the way that you have it.

I would say to them, well, neither would I. But I've sold tens of millions of dollars on the phone. Go build a team of 100 sales reps, 150 sales reps. And now, how do you standardize it across the board? Yeah. And so there's a way that you have to do things differently. I had a mentor a long time ago tell me, if somebody can do the job 80% as well as you can, that's a win. And so, again, it's an expectation.

it's a limiting belief that I think they have to sort of get around. And then the other part is they've never done it before. They've never been there. And I think that's a big part of like the clients that come to us, whether it's just helping them build out their systems or whether it's fully outsourced sales. We have the playbooks. We have the track record and they don't have to pay the ignorance tasks, right? We're collapsing the time frame to their desired level of scale.

So a lot of it is just general note. They don't know how to do it. Yeah. What do you see most of your clients coming to you for right now? Because you guys are very diverse. You guys are really good at a lot. And I mean, there's not a lot of companies that I could vouch for that I could say. You guys are like top tier and not just like a single thing.

Like you're going to come in and change sales. Like you guys are great. And rev operator, right? Revenue operator. That is what you guys do operationally. Yep. What are you seeing a lot of these small to medium sized businesses kind of needing at this point? Is it more on the sales?

Is it more on the operations? Is it document? I mean, I know it's probably all of it. But what is the leading? factor. Now, I'll tell you this, from working with small companies, and when I say small, you know, I don't know, 100 grand a month. Now, by the way, like we actually have certain engagements where we can start to take on clients under that. But typically we say we're a scale team. We look for businesses that have some validation and they're ready to pour some fuel on the fire. But what I'll

tell you is whether we're taking over a business or coming in to help scale the sales team on a business doing a hundred grand a month or you know someone that's already an eight figure business you know which you think to yourself well why would somebody that's already got there's some people that are like i would do anything to trade places with that person why would they still need you guys and the word that comes to mine at any level of scale is efficiency it's all around how efficient is your system and in that concept by the way is like how we run the whole business so for example with sales reps we have one kPI that manages sales reps it's CDPBC, which stands for collected dollar per booked call.

Okay. And so the point here is, wait a whole time, I want to even try to do it. CDPBD. CDPBC. C, DPDBC. We also have GDPBC, which is gross dollars per booked call. But anyways, collected dollar per booked call. That's how efficient your rep is.

The reason why is because a lot of people don't know how to manage sales team. And so let me give you a quick example. I'm not putting you on the spot here, but I am. Let's say how would you manage, you know, who your best sales rep is? What, what, what, you can't say my metric? What other metric would you use? Besides, like, how much revenue they brought in? Or that could be it.

Yeah, how much revenue. Yeah, how much revenue come in. Now let's table that for a second. You have to pick one other metric to see who your best salespeople are. What would it be? How many calls they made, outbound calls they made? Okay. I'm not going to say you're wrong. It's your opinion. But that's, that's productivity. But how do you know what if nobody answered? So what is one other metric that shows who your best rep is, not your most hungry rep?

So it's not revenue. So I already said revenue. I already said energy outbound. I mean just conversion. Conversion. So every conversation I ever have with people, it's one of two things. It's revenue or it's conversion or they say close right usually, right? Revenue or in close right. well revenue i can have a rep and i've had tons of sales reps they had way more revenue than the other reps but they had three times as many calls so okay but then you say well well that's why we look at close rate well you could have the top close rate but what if their show up rate is the worst because they suck at getting people back onto their calendar and what if you have multiple different levels of products and they're selling the lowest tier product with really low collections.

And, well, hey, I can manipulate close rate. Yeah. Anytime I want, you say, Josh, I want the best close rate, nothing else matters. Okay, I'm going to sell the lowest package on the longest payment plan. Yeah. Right. But is that really your best rep? Most people incentivize incorrectly because they don't know how to analyze this.

Collected dollar per book call, it takes all that into consideration because it's, you're tying a dollar amount to every call that hit your calendar. So it's, you do that by taking, you know, it takes into consider show rate because it's booked call, not live call. So it takes in the consideration show rate, close rate, collection rate, and, you know, average sales price, basically that entire thing. So when I'm looking at this, it's, you know, efficiency. We're saying, how much are you putting for a call on a calendar? How much are you paying to put a call on a calendar? And how much is that rep taking back?

If you're paying 50 bucks a call and you want to be at a 4x row, as I need to take $200 out of every single call. And now we could manage the return on every rep with this one individual metric. So to go back, you think I maybe forgot where we came from, right? To go back to the question, it's regard, you know, why customers come to us. Well, we help them dial in efficiency. How to make more money from the same spend or more money from the same team or with what you already have, that's how you actually win in sales ops because it's not just revenue,

it's profitability. Your bottom line's the only thing that matters. So I was going to use the word when you said efficiency, I was actually going to say people want to come to you for profitability. That's how it would show up as an out. That's right, because the efficiencies get tighter. And so you're able to manage better, which will create more. That's the result, right? So I was leading with the result. But the reality is what you guys do at a very high level is help businesses become a lot more efficient in their sales organizations. 100%. And so, like, that would be the outcome, right?

Now, what are the actual reasons they'd come to us? Well, their sales reps aren't performing. They're struggling recruiting sales reps, and they have a really big turn rate or they don't have the right talent. Their CRM is a mess, right? They don't have any of the right data or reporting in the CRM. They've paid thousands and thousands of dollars, and they still don't have it where they need to be.

A really big thing, companies will come to us. I have a database of 100,000 leads. Why aren't any of them buying? Well, you don't have any reactivation campaigns, right? You don't have an SDR motion. You don't have engagement scoring to be able to contact the leads at the second that you see them engaged because they just watched three of your podcast and downloaded two things on your website. So it's the whole ecosystem of converting opportunities into revenue.

And SDR for those that don't know. Seder. Sales development rep. So, you know, we sell. two industries, right? B2C or consumer services, a lot of like info product, coaching companies, mastermind type brands. And then B2B, which is, you know, obviously B2B service companies or B2B SaaS platforms. In B2C, it's setters and closers. In B2B, it's SDRs and AE, sales development reps and account executives. They're interchangeable. Same thing. What is, so when talking B2B,

what type of businesses typically are you working with? Is there industry? Are you agnostic? Does it not matter? We're agnostic, especially because we have so many. Our bread and butter is outsource sales. If somebody comes to us and they say, Josh, I just want to put this whole thing turnkey. I want to make it turnkey. I don't want to have to worry about it.

I want to focus on content, marketing, lead generation, fulfillment, expansion. You know, they're building the team. They're building other services. Whatever it might be, there's always more you could do to scale. And they say, I want this piece to be managed entirely by somebody that we trust. So think about a marketing agency. we are the same thing but for sales. So you go to a marketing agency, they have all things marketing, media buying, graphic

design, funnel building, copyrighting, email marketing. It's the whole suite of marketing and they could manage it all for you. We're the same with sales and revops. So sales enablement, you know, recruiting, sales management, sales training, like I said, CRM services, outsourced SDRs, outbound engines, cold email. We do all things sales. right? In B2B, so because of that, we're industry agnostic, but there's a certain, it's not an industry, there's a certain criteria we look for. So we work with SLG based businesses. That just

stands for sales-led growth. You grow through a sales team, as opposed to e-commerce, right? They're putting a product in a cart and buying it. There's nothing for us to do there. We're not e-com. So it has to be an SLG business. And we typically, to justify a high-performing sales team, you typically are going to have something higher ticket, referring to the average sales price or the ACV, average contract value. So if you are growing rapidly, your lead generation based, you're building a sales team and it's a high enough ticket where you can justify building a really good sales team, that is what we come in and scale. What criteria do you want to like really get involved with the business, right? Like a lot of salespeople,

high revenue, does it matter? Are you looking for businesses that have certain criteria besides the ticket price? Like, do you want to come into a shop that has 150 boiler room style, you know, the image of the movie boiler room? Or are you thinking more small and tight and create efficiencies around the, or does it matter? Yeah, you know what's interesting? I don't know. I normally wouldn't say this, but just knowing you and what you do, this is what came to mind. I'd compare it kind of to real estate. I don't care that much to what's in place. Of course, I have a buy box, but I look for the upside. Sure. And the opportunity. So it might be a distressed sales team, but if I know exactly what to

do with that and I can clearly see the opportunity for upside, I'm taking the opportunity. More than that, though, we look for growth-oriented companies. They need to be, they need to want to grow and they want to grow rapidly. Those are our best clients. Yeah. Because if you don't want to grow. Like, there's a bunch of businesses out there that they're flatlined year after year. And we can help them. I'm not saying we can't, but it's not that exciting and we could only help so much. You're not that far from zero, right? Like, it's like, again, in real estate analogy, how do you increase NOI? You increase revenue or you decrease expenses. You could only decrease expenses so much. Yeah. So it's kind of the same. Like, we can create efficiency,

but you're capped if you're not growing. So we look for really high growth oriented businesses that really want to rapidly scale. And with those, we have some very impressive case studies. It's all about growth rate. When should a business owner actually get out of this own way or her way, right? When do they got to get out of that sales role and they have to hire or they will literally be their own ceiling? Well, sales specifically you're saying? Yeah. Well, so it's interesting because I suppose there's a lot of methodologies and philosophy that would come into play here. But typically they say, do what you're good at, right, and do what the most leveraged thing is. And so you have to consider that.

If you're a founder and you're a sales business and you suck at sales, it's probably like your first hire, literally, right? Because you're not going to do anything if you can't sell. If you're really good at sales, which by the way doesn't mean you're a great operator and it also doesn't mean you're a great sales manager, but maybe you're good at sales yourself, you might stretch that a little bit further, but at a certain point there will be a dollar per hour activity

that makes more sense than you selling depending on the business model that would dictate when that is and when that changes. Do you feel like the small to medium sized business owner tends to hire out of laziness versus need? Do you feel like they're trying

to just, I don't want to do this anymore so I'm going to go hire someone and then you get in there and say no wonder your sales team sucks. This guy shouldn't be in the seat. No, I don't. Justin, I think they hire because they're confused. I think that getting out of sales a little bit for a second, because at the end of the day, right, like, I am a CEO,

and my business is all focused on sales and revops. But for every entrepreneur watching this, I think that companies don't build their business in a spreadsheet. They don't build budgets. Most entrepreneurs, they don't build budgets. They aren't financially fluent. They don't look at forecasts. So they don't really understand.

These are all things you do. This is why everyone go follow Troy dot Joshua. Like this is the stuff I swear as an entrepreneur for 20 years. His skill set is my weakness. I'm great at sales. Everything else operational that you just discussed. Spreadsheets and CRMs and flows and structures and procedures suck. I will make an argument.

I have no way to prove. prove this. I would say 90% of the actual founders of these companies likely suck at it too. They do. And I'll tell you the other thing, you don't have to be the one that does it yourself. You know, you could hire an accounting firm to build a budget for a few grand for you. It's just a skill set I developed over time because I'm a little bit obsessive. And I mean, true story, I wanted something done by Friday and they didn't get it done. So I had to wait until Monday. and I didn't want to wait through the weekend. So I literally, that was when I started teaching myself spreadsheets.

I'm very fluent in Excel. I build all my own budgets. And I like the control I have over it because building a budget is not just an accounting rule. It's strategy. You have to understand the business model and, you know, all the different assumptions of like, you know, how does this grow and how many units do I need? And how am I going to get?

Like, it's all the strategy that shows up. For every business owner, and I'm going to circle back to your question, you said, why do people hire? You said, are they lazy? I said, no, it's because they're confused. And when you build a business in a spreadsheet, you can see how that business scales. So, for example, I build it all top down, which means you start with revenue, and then you extrapolate all the expenses and what you need to fulfill on that. When I build a budget, and I'm updating these forecasts, I build it out at certain levels of revenue. So I could see. see what the business needs at each level of scale. And it's all based on capacity models, meaning for every single position, there's a capacity that shows all a function of revenue as a percentage of revenue, right, or a division of revenue. So for example, if I say, based on my sales reps performing and the amount of calls that they could take, every 100,000

in revenue, I need a new rep. Well, for a million dollars a month or a year, whatever you want to do, at a million bucks you need 10 reps i could see exactly in the business model when that happens then if i'm looking at it i say oh okay wow now i have six sales reps well i probably need a manager you know or you say well i could only manage myself sales reps until i have three so we'll look in the budget it shows you that's when you hire that person my point in saying this is when companies don't have that amount of clarity on how their business scales how does the revenue scale? How does the expenses scale? How does the org chart scale? When they don't have that clarity, they just start hiring people out of typically overwhelm, typically to fix

a problem that's probably just a symptom. They start making all these random hires, and now they have a bloated model that doesn't actually scale because the org chart will break at scale. That is the number one thing I see. They don't know who to hire or when to hire these people. Then you help them that, right? I mean, because I see my role in the like I'm not the expert as you are. That's why you're here. But

I see people hire too fast and they hire with operational blow that cripples any level of success that they're going to have. Yep. Right? Whether there's one person they think is the A plus player because you always hire up and I get it. I'm not

saying that that's not the right philosophy but then you give this person a salary that is really big. And if they don't perform, by the way, this has been done by yours truly. And if they don't perform, you potentially are fucked. I mean, like go out of business. Yep. And I literally just did this in 2024 in my tech company.

Hired the resume, three exits, big tech guy, Bay Area, whole thing. Everything said on paper, this guy's taking us to the moonshot. Yep. And it got fucked because he took us left and we needed to keep going straight. Yeah. Yeah, it's, I mean, I see that all the time. It's really hard. And I think a lot of that is role definement too, right? And again, I know we're getting into a slightly different subject, but I'll say this and we'll bring it back. It's truly just knowing how to operate a business. And so what

I recommend everybody does is you need, I think people, all entrepreneurs, and it's because they react based on buzzwords. They react based on soundbites. They watch influencers online or business people and they hear them say this one thing and they think that's what they're supposed to do. So a lot of people hire based on titles, right? They say, oh, I need a C-O-O because that's what I heard people hire when it's like, well, what is the responsibilities that are needed? Like, what are the tasks right now? Define it. So what I, what I always recommend is you have, you know, you list all the main responsibilities that are happening, that are bogging you down. And right. next to it, right in a run rate, right? So how long did these tasks take and how often does it

happen every month? So essentially you land at how many hours do these things take a month? You finally, and I have, I've done this for every single role we've fired. I've done this for years. And I look on a piece of paper and I say, okay, wow, there's 40 hours a week of this. We need a person for sure. And then I think to myself with these tasks, with this combination of, you know, this responsibility set, who is the type of person I need to own that? And I think about the skill sets. I think about the track record, the experience. Title's the very last thing I think of.

In fact, at the end of that, once I say, these are the responsibilities they need to own, these are the skill sets the person needs to have. This is a track record and background I would like them to possess. Then and only then do I go into chat GPT and say, what should I title this? Right. And that's why I have some a little bit unorthodox titles in my org chart. I have a lead flow manager, right? Most people would say, well, why don't you hire a marketing manager or why don't you hire a head of growth?

Or there's all these other titles that, you know, we've considered over time. The reason why is because I'm very clear on my model, the responsibility. It is a specific function. And it gives so much clarity. Yeah. And then I build a role playbook for every single role. So that clarity is what ends up actually creating profitability because it's operational velocity at the end of the day. How important is giving playbooks scripts?

Literally, I mean, you use the word playbook because you used it to every person in every role in your org. It's everything. Like a physical playbook. Well, to find physical, I don't print it out, but it's a- Well, it's a Google Doc or something of them on. understanding exactly what is expected of it. Every single one. You know, in private equity, they called a role charter.

A role charter. I guess I'm not in private equity. Yeah, I'm not either. I love it. I study it. Might as well study the best people at playing the game, right? Man, brother. But I don't know why they call it that.

It's called a role charter. And it goes over the key responsibilities, the key KPIs and outcomes that that position owns. And then, you know, what that kind of day-to-day looks like. I follow the same model. I call it a position playbook. I like it better. Roll charters doesn't make sense.

Yeah, at all. But it doesn't matter. We call it a position playbook. Every single role has one. And they're updated pretty constantly as well. And it has the KPI's, has the core outcomes, the core responsibilities. You almost look at them in a way as training wheels. And what I mean by that is like, if you have somebody crushing the position,

I'm not over here saying, hey, you missed paragraph three in the position playbook, right? They're crushing it. But if they're not performing, if they're under KPI, they better be following it to a T. And we treat sales reps the same exact way. So, you know, which by the way, we'll kind of segue back into, and I'd love to give some really advanced nuggets here for people scaling sales teams too. But, you know, there's a lot of people that talk about scriptless selling. And I'm not talking about anyone specifically, by the way.

I don't like to put that type of energy out there. Maybe they're amazing at what they do. I don't know. I don't care. my only point is when you look in any of the ones I've ever looked into that practice script list selling they say you don't need a script it's outdated it's not modern blah blah blah

what they actually mean is know your scripts so well that you don't have it in front of you and it's funny because it's like that's everyone ever like nobody should ever read from a script so when we're scaling sales seams everyone they have their position playbook and they have their talk track

they are following that talk track until they're above KPI. Along that journey, if they find some ways to make it their own and they find their groove and their secret sauce and their personality and it deviates from the talk track, but they've proven themselves and they're above KPI, you better believe we're not correcting that. They found what works for them.

But for 99% of everybody else, that standardized talk track is going to get you better results than some unicorn strategy that can't be duplicated. Yeah, the outlier, the basketball player is a, weird-ass shot, but somehow is an All-Star, right? You're like, how is that? It's not replicateable. Exactly. That's okay. Let's go into some advanced strategies for growing a sales team. Yeah, I mean, pick a subject, you know. I think that, you know, there's a lot of, what is the audience here? Is it most general kind of business owners and entrepreneurs? I think so. It's hard to tell. Just we have a, I mean, it's download based, right? So you don't really know who they are.

what you know i know i get high level CEOs a very big you know public companies and then i get the guy who's like tired at work and needs to go jump into a business right and everyone in between all right well here's a couple subjects that i'm passionate about and not only passionate about um i've got a lot of requests and kind of demand for this type of subject um first of all people are very interested in attracted to uh sDR motions setter motions and i think the reason why Why is because the role is still to this day pretty misunderstood. People don't understand the activity model. So what is this?

Better? Yeah. In the second, by the way, just so you know, we'll come back to with the second topic, I think a lot of people are fascinated to know how we're using AI in our sales operations. We'll come back to that. So let's break it down as, you know, a function. I think this is actually even good for a lot of people to hear. We just talked about it with other roles and build.

the responsibilities and an activity model. What are they spending their time on? What are the results are supposed to get? In sales, and this was established a long time ago, I think Salesforce, to be honest with you, really popularized this concept. They were one of the biggest ones that fully leaned into it, which was being very specific and specialized in sales roles rather than what you would call full cycle sales. So historically, most sales models were full cycle sales or front to back, which means you're dialing, your opening opportunities, you're generating pipeline, you're closing the deals, you're doing the follow-up, you're doing everything start to finish. Well, what ended up happening over the evolution of scaling sales teams is some smart people. I don't really know who.

Again, I think Salesforce popularized it, but they said, well, I don't think every activity in a sales operation has the same dollar per hour output. And so it's basically like, well, what are some of the functions that are not as leveraged and that you don't need as high of a skill level? Therefore, typically you could pay less. Setters do make less than closers. And how do we divide those roles so you get more throughput of the system, more velocity or going back to that word, more efficiency. And then you have your top closers, your top earners, focus just on the most highly leveraged stuff that maximizes their skill. Now, there's more benefits to doing this,

specializing and separating the rules. The other benefit is if you only have your closers or your account executives focused on closing activities, first of all, you can scale further with them because good talent's hard to find. You don't need to hire as often because they're spending all their time on that one thing. No doubt. The other thing is, since they're not, In an activity model, so again, I'll define that for a second.

A financial model says economics. An activity model shows capacity. So I build activity models for these positions. In an activity model, when they spend less of their time on these lower leverage stuff, outbound in this instance, and if a closer spends more of their time on closing, their earning potential goes up. Seems to make sense. Which means that the OTE is higher on track earnings. So which means you could pay them more, which means you could get better talent. I wanted to explain that concept all the way through.

So that means that instead of having front to back generalist, you could have hyper-specific specialist. And the main split in sales is breaking up pipeline generation and the actual sales process, which is closing. So SDR sales development reps, hence the name they're developing the opportunity, their setters, they are doing your outbound. They are doing the dialing. They are taking an opportunity or a lead,

no matter how cool they are, and they are turning that into a qualified appointment with intent, with a level of interest, which a closer will then take over from there. And so that's the breakdown, right? I know that was a recap, and a lot of people are familiar with this these days, but there's a lot of people that maybe didn't understand the full breakdown.

Now, closing is what all the focus is on. Name a sales trainer. anyone that you know Jeremy Minor Okay You ever heard him Talk about How his training's focused on setters?

No No Name another one Andy Elliott Have you ever heard of talk about this? No Now by the way I'm not saying they don't

What I'm saying is There's more money in closing than setting So there's a higher desire From the talent pool to be a closer So everyone naturally gravitates towards You know improving closing

Setting is neglected in almost every business ever and all the resources around it. It's a different skill set. So for that reason, and it's critical, so much of your money comes from setters. Right. Because they can't get to the closer if the setter doesn't do good. They can't get to the closer. I mean, you could have inbound book a call straight to a calendar, but a lot of your

profitability comes from a setter motion. Why? Because you're generating more revenue from not new spend. right they're taking leads in the database or they're finding someone that didn't just opt in and they're turning it into an opportunity yeah so it adds a lot of profitability um but anyways because of those reasons there are so many setter engines that just suck or they're broken or they don't exist so we specialize in that i mean we've been doing this for a very long time um i dialed for years myself which i think really qualifies me for that um you could read a book and become good in something but I've done it. I've got hung up on more times than people have made calls. There's no world that someone should be investing in a company, an organization, or a person, a coach, a mash, if they're not doing the thing that you're looking to do, right, it'd be foolish for anyone. So, you know, again, why we started the podcast and I'm edifying you're saying,

I've worked with you. You are the guy. You are everything you said, right? And so I do, for sake of Tom in the episode, I want to dive into how AI is going to be changing sales. How do you see AI changing sales. We all believe sales should always be human to human. I come from that old school. Shake a hand. You'll close better, belly to belly, always better than over the phone. Well, now over the phone has become huge because of COVID and all the opportunity of that, which is a lot of opportunity, which is great. But now you layer in AI. How is AI? How do you see it affecting it in the positive and or in the negative when it comes to sales? Yeah. Well, I first like to disclose this. I'm really big on not speaking about things I'm not an expert on, like you were just saying.

Sure. So I do want to say, I'm not an AI expert. I don't know all the answers. I have no idea what's going to happen in the next few years. And I'm okay with that. I just try to make, you know, good guesses and intuitive steps. What I am using AI for right now, it has, I don't care what anybody says. We've done a ton of tests. It has not replaced high quality sales reps. I actually have some friends that are AI experts, some that own very successful, like AI implementation firms, like large ones, and that they're deep into this. They believe, like, high-ticket sales reps and sales processes that require trust will be one of the last things to get replaced by AI. I don't know. It makes sense how they explain it. It feels good for me, since that's a big part of what we do. But so that's not where we're focusing.

Where we are focusing on our AI use cases in the application is in what I'm, what I refer to as a capacity multiplier. All of the things that are extremely repetitive tasks that have to be done, but you could almost like never get to it at scale, we're finding really good use cases for. And automating some of these functions that don't require a high level of intelligence. And so, no pun intended, but one of the use cases is call intelligence, right?

And we didn't invent that, right? There's all sorts of companies out there that are call intelligence tools that you use for call analysis. And essentially, it uses data and AI to analyze all transcripts in every single call to turn qualitative insights into quantitative insights. That is massive for me as a sales operator and been doing this for as long as I have because no matter how good you are, you're only ever managing based on a sample size. Because if you're a sales manager

and you have 10 sales reps that all take eight sales calls every day, that's 80 sales calls a day that are an hour long each, how does a sales manager with eight hours in a day listen to all those?

They never will. Nobody ever will. But now you're missing information because it's just a sample size. What AI has done for us in call analysis, we review 100% of every single call ever had. and we give feedback and score 100% of every call that has ever had. Because you can also build your AI out to say, this is what I'm looking for,

this would be a good call, and you can build it over time. You might take 10, 20 hours to build your own chat, GPT or whatever you might be using for this, but you build it the way that you want it. So they are looking for very specific things, and they are finding the inefficiencies or efficiencies in the call itself and giving you a score based around the prompt that you said, this is what you're looking for.

exactly and so you know uh this is brilliant it's great you think about a CRM so i i compared a lot to a CRM like the CRM is not the valuable thing that's like the platform the structure it's the configuration that's custom to your business that drives the results right same with call intelligence like there's all these softwares out there I cannot tell you how many people I know that have paid a lot of money for these softwares and then they churned after a few months because they're like I didn't get the value we have a custom configuration, all scoring models. There's three, actually there's four, excuse me, main scorecards that we use for our clients. We have a sales scorecard, which is exactly how it sounds. How good is their sales process according to our actual playbooks? So it's like qualitative, how good they sell. The second is technical compliance, meaning it's, are they hitting these individual steps? It's not necessarily how well they did something. like what was the quality of their discovery process? It's did they ask this question? Did they say the calls recorded? Did they set a follow up within 48 hours? It gives us insights into process breakdowns,

right? The third is compliance, like regulatory compliance, whether that be FTC or SEC or you have some other body. It's funny. I had a call with an attorney the other day and she goes, well, I don't know if you guys would be able to help me because it would take me a year just to teach you about the compliance in this industry. And I thought to be. myself, well, a week, but yeah, right? And I'm thinking, I didn't say that. I'm thinking this because with the AI, we just upload it and train it on whatever these compliance assets are and it can find it in 100% of every single call. Really important, especially if you're a heavily regulated business. Sure. The fourth is product knowledge, which is just basically the brand reputation piece. Are you on brand? Are you

representing the product correctly? Do you know your stuff? Those are the four scorecards we build. Within this, we take all of that call data and we turn it into metrics. Like this sales rep is a seven out of ten for the week on this category, right? The insights that gives us and to be able to translate it back to marketing is, it has completely changed the game from what you've ever been able to do in the past. I'll give you one example. Every marketing team typically wants to know will give us the marketing insights. And you have to have a strong feedback loop because almost everything you want to know is on the call.

Sure. Well, the hard part is. since you're not managing through 100% of the calls, how do you know if there's statistical significance? So what typically happens is sales drop a week and marketing says, well, how many times did we get these objections? And the manager's like, I mean, I've heard it on a few calls. I don't know if that's like the causality. I don't know if that's the direct impact,

but I'll listen to more calls. You don't really know for sure. With this in the configuration, we could say, out of the last 30 calls, 19 people had this objection. And that is so powerful because it gives you certainty in actual causality.

We build this for our client. We build it in our engagements. The nuance of their business and whatever because without the nuance, you can't build it. We need the nuance. And then we have our frameworks because a lot of them,

like, they don't even have a process. So we put our process in place and then we build scorecards against it. But we have extraction process. is to like learn all the things important to them to build it. That's one use case, okay? A second really good use case is it is in the appointment, appointment setting realm and what you'd call like reactivation campaigns.

So we take their database. We actually, we call it the conversion engine. We take all of the leads that are in their CRM or their database. And we can build advanced scoring models that basically it's like there's a point system. Let's say that when you get 15 points, you get outreach. You get 15 points you get outreach. Well, you get a few points every time you open an email. If you register a webinar, maybe you get five points.

As soon as they hit that, you know now you have an engaged lead. So if you have 100,000 leads in your database, you can't just dial. It will not make economic sense to just hire a ton of setters to dial them because you don't know who's actually interested in. This allows you to be efficient and intentional and precise. on who to reach out at the exact time they're engaged. Now, that part's not new with AI. That's just, you know, technology and these CRMs that have progressed over years. What's really cool now is we can build messaging and languaging agents that they're,

it's hyper-personalization based on these engagement models and scoring. So, for example, somebody hits that point system. Again, let's just assume they open a few emails. they registered for a webinar and they downloaded a leap or they watched a podcast they listened to a podcast right and you have that all synced up in the CRM well you could get a message instantly when they hit that threshold they say hey Justin how's it going this is Josh yeah I was just looking at your file and I noticed that you just saw our webinar last Tuesday and then you were watching some of our content including the new episode on the podcast yesterday it looks like you're potentially interested in some help with RevOps were you looking for something specific it's like bam, you couldn't do that in the past. Right. You didn't have that level of personalization. And then you could even have, you know, conversational agents going back and forth until it makes sense for the human to ultimately take that over.

God, if I was selling high ticket, I'd hire you right now. This is so good. I mean, everything you were talking about, what your company does. And by the way, what's the website for your company? The WFS Group.com. We don't do really any business or a website. You can't go through their book a call. Yeah, well, you know why? Because we're actually redoing our website right now, but we're kind of a white-labeled agency. As you know, we have so many clients we do outsource sales for.

Yeah. So all of our lead gen is through the brands we're doing sales for. That's how we scale our business. But Troy, Troy dot Joshua on Instagram, I'm very responsive there if it's something that deserves a response. It is. Guys, go reach out to him right now. I know all of us in business. I mean, sales cures all, right? we and we all need to be better. So brother, I appreciate you coming by. This has been phenomenal. You can tell this guy.

I know there's a couple things about sales and operations. Troy dot Joshua. He is Josh Troy. I'm Justin Colby. This has been the entrepreneur DNA. If this made sense to you, share this with the least two of your friends. Talk to in the next episode. Peace.