Welcome everybody to the first ever Blind Zebra Sales Operating System podcast. My name is Bryan Neale, and I'm the founder and creator of the Blind Zebra Sales Operating System. And I also happen to be a long time, long time podcaster. I've got my little sound machine too. So um, hey, if uh this your obviously it's your first time, no one's ever heard this before. So welcome to the podcast. This is going to be a uh a two-fold podcast. So uh, and by twofold, I mean it's gonna split all the audience a bit. Here's how it's gonna split the audience. So this podcast is gonna go out to um those of you who are practitioners and users of the Blind Zebra Sales Operating System, BZSOS. I'm gonna keep saying BZ SOS, mostly for short. And so it is meant to be number one, a reinforcement tool for those of you who are using all the tools in the Blind Zebra Sales Operating System out in your sales life on a regular basis. Um, if you know by now you've been on the system for three years or two years or 10 minutes, you know that the system is made to do one thing really and one thing only is to make selling simple for you and for your customers. That's it. Make selling simple. That's the charge of the blind zebra sales operating system. I quote one of our uh certified operations coaches, certified OCs, if you will, Dan Richards. I quote him frequently by saying, This is really just organized common sense. And when he first said that, he thought he was going to offend me, but then he followed it up by saying, But nobody does it. And that's the uh that's the magic of the Blind Zebra sales operating system. It's very, very simple to implement, very common sense oriented, and left alone, nobody does it. So it's for those of you who are practitioners to reinforce as you're driving around, windshield time. Uh, most of our clients are out and about out. They're all outside salespeople, they're all B2B salespeople. And um, this is meant to be a reinforcement tool for you. So it's gonna be tool-based. I'm gonna hit some of the tools, uh, go a little deeper on them, maybe tell you some backstory, tell them some personal usage uh samples, maybe give you some samples on how things might sound so you can hear directly from the from the founder and the author of the operating system for you. So no, that's just the first set of the audience. It's gonna be to um those of you who are users and practitioners of the uh Blind Zebra Sales operating system. The other group, the other group is people that have no idea what I'm talking about. No, seriously, it's also meant uh to introduce people to BZSOS in a very light fashion with some value in it. Now, here's the fun part. So, those of you who are listening, because you listen to the advanced selling podcast, or maybe you listen to my other podcast, Sales Unscripted with Margaret, you listen to Advanced Selling Podcast with Bill. This is just me for now. Now I'm gonna have BZSOS practitioners as guests on this show down the road, but the first few episodes are just gonna be me. And if you've heard me talk about it, you may have even heard me sing the jingle. BZSOS said blind-zebra.com. I can also play that on the piano, by the way. I figured out how to play it. But um, you've heard me talk about it. You wonder what it is. It's literally a set of systemized checklists and processes that help make your sales life easier, making selling simple. That's all it is. And so that you don't have to think of this stuff on your own. And secondarily, if you're a sales leader and you're leading a big team and you're trying to get consistency in the way that you operate, and most CFOs and CEOs would love that if you're the CRO and you want to be a good um practitioner and owner of your domain, they love consistency, they love predictability, and they love simplicity and being real. That all those things are in this. That's what it's for. And so I'm going to uh highlight some tools and talk about things that you can at least think about and get exposure to uh here, and you'll still get value from it either way. Now, because of that, sometimes I'm gonna be talking in code. I just am. So the people that run on BZSOS, you'll get the code. You'll be like, I know what he's talking about. And those of you who don't, like, wonder what he's talking about. And then maybe you'll call us and see what I'm talking about. That's not on purpose. I'm not like trying to play Taylor Swift and drop Easter eggs. Although she's done pretty well with that. Maybe I should. Maybe I should. I wonder where they came up with the name Easter egg for that. I don't know. Someone shoot me a note on LinkedIn and tell me where the Easter egg concept actually came. I guess because you go find things, but Easter eggs are colorful and you know, I don't know. Uh anyway, so that's the that's the setup, what this podcast is for. It's for those of you who are running on this BZ uh SOS, the blind zip yourselves operating system, for reinforcement, gonna be tool-based. So today's just an intro episode, but after that, we're gonna start getting into some tools. And then it is for those of you who aren't running on the system but are intrigued or curious, or maybe you follow us because I've got another podcast, or you follow me on LinkedIn or something like that, to kind of introduce you to some of those tools and ideas. And at some point, you'll get the courage to email me at BZSOS at blind-zebra.com, and you'll learn what all these hundreds and thousands of other people already know, which is BZSOS is the way to do sales. It just is. Okay. So in today's episode, I'm gonna talk a little bit about the backstory. I'm gonna tell you how we got to here. And some of you may not care about history and whatever else, but I'll just tell you uh a little bit of the story. I'm gonna go way back, way back, way back, way back. I'm gonna go to uh graduating from college from Indiana University. I'm recording this in January of 2026, and my little Hoosiers are the national champions of the college football uh world. Fantastic. Anyway, I digress. Uh, we have a business school there. It's called the Kelly School of Business, it's named after a family who donated a bunch of money there. It's a pretty good business school, not bad. And um, they've got uh tracks majors like finance and accounting and marketing, all this stuff. Well, marketing was kind of my only thing. I just wasn't smart enough to do finance or operations or that sort of thing. And then when you go to get a job, the two jobs that you tend to get as a marketing major, this is in the early 90s, you either get a marketing job where you go work for Procter and Gamble and be a brand manager, or you get a sales job. And uh I happened to get a sales job, and because I just mentioned them, I got a sales job with Procter and Gamble. And so when I got into selling uh early 90s, uh selling uh diapers and uh feminine hygiene products, true story, paper towels, gif peanut butter, sunny delight, I sold all that stuff to grocery stores. Um, I learned really quickly that the way that the world was with selling did not fit my personality. Um, I was not a um an I wasn't an aggressive um persuader, um, more of a trust builder, relationship-oriented person. Um my brain was very process-oriented. I was a step-by-step kind of person. I went, you know, that sort of way, but not overly detailed, but still wanted process and system. Um and what I was taught to do was to one, follow a process that was very archaic now, but back was the early, it was the early 90s, it was okay. I was taught to follow a process on every sales call um to present my ideas to these grocery store, either managers or category managers or buyers or whatever, whatever name you want to give them. And um we were taught to do it in a very sort of like pitchy, aggressive way, flowery and persuasive, and like our deals, ideas were great, and suggest these gigantic orders. Like have this little grocery store pull in two truckloads full of Charmin paper or bath tissue, what have you. And I just didn't like it, man. I I just was very uncomfortable with the way it was going. But I love the freedom. I love the problem-solving side of selling, I loved um the results. I love seeing uh the fruits of our labor in numbers. I was a scoreboard person, and um, I I just uh I there was just something about the way that I was taught to sell that I just didn't like. So I left. I left after about five years. I started a company with a friend from college. Um, we distributed environmentally friendly cleaning equipment and cleaning supplies to restaurants and hotels and nursing homes, which is a great idea in 2026. It's an awful idea in 1996 because no one cared back then about the environment or anything. And um I only knew how to sell the way PG had taught me. And so I tried this. I was not being true to myself because I was trying to be like overly persuasive and convince everybody and do all this shticky stuff, and it just flopped. And so I was bankrupt within about 18 months, lost everything I had. Wasn't a lot, but it was everything. And so then I had brackets around my net worth. And if you know anything about finance, brackets around your net worth is not good. It's not good. You want that number to be green, not red, with brackets around it. Uh, I was in a bunch of credit card debt, bank, it was terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible. So the only good thing about being absolutely broke is it's it's kind of hard to go broker, if you know what I mean. Like once you're bankrupt, you're bankrupt. There's a degree to it, but there really isn't. Like you basically have nothing, and just a matter of how much debt you're gonna be forgiven uh to other people. But um, I'm like, okay, I've got to uh do something else. So I did networking, I was out and about uh things that I still teach in the operating system. I actually was doing back then, not knowing that it was part of a system, and um uh met a guy named Bill Caskey, who's now my other podcast partner, and he was a sales trainer. And I didn't know that there was sales training in the world. I had always been trained at PNG, and it was like big, corporate, da-da-da, structured. But there was training for little companies. I didn't know this. And so I joined Bill and I sort of fell in love with what I do now, that sales training bit. And so um, that's what I did um from about um uh June uh second or third, June 3rd, June 3rd, 1997. Um, all the way up until today, it's what I've been doing in one in one shape or form or another. I did take a stand at one of our clients. That happens when you're a consultant, one of your clients. One of my clients hired me for four years and went back to be partners with Bill again. And what we did, uh Bill was Sandler trained. Um BZSOS, by the way, is sales methodology agnostic. You can be Sandler, Spin, MEDDIC, Challenger, uh, Xerox, any professional selling systems. You can have any of those um elements to the art of what you do. Totally fine. Even like in-call process, totally fine. We lay over all those things. Miller Hyman, we lay over all those things with the operating system. So you never replace any methodology with BZSOS. You overlay it to make it better and stronger. We overlay over any process. We've got clients that still use their Sandler coach that are also BZ SOS certified and run their operations side of their sales stuff on BZSOS. So um one of our friends here in Indianapolis gave me this phrase. His name's Tom Searcy, uh really good sales coach guy, uh process-oriented guy, different than BZSOS. This company's called Hunt Big Sales. And Tom gave me this quote. I think he attributed it to his dad, but um, I heard it from him. And it says that sales is 90% process and 10% magic. Sales is 90% process and 10% magic. And when I looked in the mirror when I heard that and thought of all the things I teach my clients, it's mostly magic. It's the art part of it. It's the what to say. It's let's go Sandler for a second. Let's go, it's the 30-second commercial, it's the pain funnel, it's reversing and pendulum management. That's all Sandler stuff. And let's go challenger. It's teach, tailor, take control, it's uh sharing corporate insights, um, it's constructive tension and phrasing, uh, those sorts of things. Let's go medic. So it's all of its qualification. Medic is a qualification system. And those are great. They're awesome, they're fantastic. They aren't really though process at their core. They're more what to say, not what to do. And one of the president of one of our clients who actually got certified, he's one of our certified coaches, OCs. That's the inside speak. If you want to know what an OC is, you got to email me, BZSOS at blind dash zebra.com. Um, he said, Sailor tells my guys what to say, BZSOS tells them what to do. And if you go down the process over magic, sales results are 90% what you're doing, 10% what you're saying. And we teach in this method, in this, in our system, what to do. It's what to do. And so um, I had a lot of success teaching the magic for a while, and it was great. And then COVID hit, and we um I thought I was gonna go out of business. Like a lot of people are like, what is gonna go on here? And I thought I was gonna go out of business. I really did. I'm sitting there on a Sunday night, I'm like, okay, I've got to find a job. I haven't had a job for almost 20 years working for somebody else. What am I gonna do? And I'm like, ah, hang on, let's self-coach here a little bit. Um what do people need right now? That's why I thought, and what did they need to do in COVID was learn how to sell remotely. And we had a mix of clients, some that were inside sales teams that sold Remoldi, some though that were outside sales teams who had no idea how to conduct a meeting on a Zoom, how to prospect via Zoom and LinkedIn and all these things. And so I did what any uh person in the mode of survival a bit would do. I went to Amazon, I bought TV lights to make a TV studio and built a TV studio uh in about an hour, and then started doing things online. And we blew up from about 14 clients to 90 clients. Uh, we did that, plus we made my wife our CEO. That's the real reason we blew up, but that's that's the truth. And we blew up, and I was the only coach, and I was still teaching the magic, and I was doing it in a very customized way. I was customizing every syllabus for every client and had to keep track of where I was with everything, and I would make the syllabus up with the sales leader, and it was great. It was high touch, high custom, not scalable, and not scalable to the point where I was we were so big, I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna walk off the set. I can't handle this stuff. We had grown so fast we had no operating system ourselves for our business. So we had several clients who had turned us on to a book and a business operating system. The book is called Traction by Gino Wickman, one of my favorite books and favorite people. He's a great guy. And uh the system is called the Entrepreneurial Operating System, EOS. And uh we decided after lots of uh prodding from uh clients and friends that we should look into running our company, Blind Zebra, on EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. And so we vetted out some uh they're called uh uh implementers, uh, and we we got a phenomenal implementer named Justin Most, who is an all-star, super famous guy in the EOS community. Um, and he put us on the track to operate our company on EOS, and it has been lights out unbelievably good for our company. While that's happening, now I'm getting to the end of the story. Where did BZSOS come from? This is where it came from. So EOS is brilliant, it's fantastic. It's for it's for it's for a growing company to help them scale, put systems and processes in that um allow them to continue to get traction on their growth. It's just it's getting traction, just movement forward. Well, it has a couple things in sales and marketing, but not a lot. And I'm looking at this system and I'm going, I have the sales part of this that's missing. I have it. The problem is it's in my head and on a bunch of whiteboards and pictures of whiteboards I have over the last 20 years, not really ready for primetime use yet. So I couldn't let it go. And I talked to my wife, who's our CEO, Stephanie, and said, Hey, I want to, I want to put together a system that's an operating system for sellers that they can use to teach them more what to do, less what to stay, and get out of this magic and like shticky things to say. Let's get them into just real fundamental core stuff because that's the stuff that I noticed wasn't sticking with my clients. Just core fundamental things that they did that help them get traction in their sales life. So I spent a year, hired an instructional designer. Her name is Sarah, she's an awesome human being. Uh, we're very complimentary in our skill sets. Um, uh, put a team together. Um, our VP of marketing serves as project manager and makes everything look good. And when we got an LMS, a learning management system, um, we we put a certification track in place. We developed all these tools. We developed upwards of 44 different tools. A tool in the BZSOS is just a mini checklist or a mini process, and it's very situational. If someone is ghosting you, you use a tool, use it called calendar first. Um, if you have uh bad data in your CRM, if you're a leader and you have bad data in your CRM, we have two tools that fix that. And I mean fix it, they fix it. And then there's a tool that makes it fixed for good. And then you want like all leaders are always going, we want accountability. You don't need accountability in the operating system. The accountability is in the system itself. So there's no nagging. You don't have to say, Come on, get your stuff together, get your plan. It's all there. Uh business planning. If you lead a team of 100 sellers, and I say, Do they all have a business plan? You're like, Oh, yeah, they've got goals. I'm like, that's not what I asked. I do they have a plan to reach their goal? Oh, yeah, yeah. I say, can you show me one of them? Or four of them, or five, or 10. And what I usually get is either no, I can't, or yeah, uh, here, let me get uh uh let me get Caitlin's and this is TJ's, and they're all different. Why are they all different? They should all be the same. And so all we've done with the operating system is we've taken 25 years plus of working the magic, turned them into tools to get them into process instead of magic, and then we bring people in, leaders, come in and get certified and how to take these tools into their sales org to make selling simple for their salespeople. And these things that you all worry about and it's tough are not hard to fix. They just aren't. And I don't want to oversell what we're doing here, but it's not hard. It's just you need a process and a and a and a checklist, one of those two, and you need to do it. Like that's it. And it's very easy to do. I'm an efficiency junkie, less is more, simple is better. The fewer steps, the better. Everything we have in the system is as simple as we could possibly make it. It is not complicated. Then it's just a matter of choosing to do it or not do it. Um, so we launched in uh December of 2023. We had a group of six people to become certified coaches. The way the model works is people, the companies that you all work for pay to get sales leaders certified in the system so that they can come back and bring the operating system into their organization. We do that for a couple of reasons. Number one is um we want the company to buy in. We don't want an individual to buy in. This isn't an individual coaching program, it's it's for a company. Um and companies, you know, have bigger budgets and they can invest more, which is great for support and that sort of thing. Um, but the other thing that solves is in the past, remember I told you in the story that I used to be the one that that I would be the one that like did custom syllabuses, syllabi for everybody. Well, I it dawned on us, you know about your business better than we do. Why don't you take our tools? They're very easy to understand, and you go customize them and integrate them into your world. And so that's what we do. So we started with six in December 2023. As of this recording, we have 122 certified coaches that are all delivering that work to nearly a thousand salespeople in just three years. Uh, we will be hosting tomorrow. I'm recording this in January of 2026. We will be hosting our largest certification class ever starting tomorrow, and we'll have 25 people in that certification class. So we are onto something. And if we get any feedback, which we get lots of good feedback, and it's most, excuse me, mostly good. It is, I wish I would have done this sooner. This is so simple. I always tried to solve this problem with training, and there's all sorts of things wrong with training. And I was a trainer for 20 plus years, 97 until three years ago. What is that? Yeah, 97. That's uh a long time. Let's do that. 25 years. I mean, and it's okay, it just does okay, but there's so much wrong with it. And when you have a system that you and and you get certified, you get the tools, they're yours now. You get to keep them. And it just solves a whole lot of problems. We've been we've been trying to solve uh the same problems the same way for so long, and now there's a different solution. That's how we got to BZ SOS. And we are super proud of what we're doing, and we're growing, and the the out the outpouring of um community that's happened, this is a an unintended consequence. We didn't set out to do this. If you if you're team BZ, you're team B Z, there's a way about you. You're down to earth, you're simple is better, you're an efficiency person, you hate cheesy, shticky lines. You're not the person that's gonna debate that you're not looking for the hook, you're not looking for the and God while is you know, have you given up on this? Yeah. Um it's not it's not that, okay. It's just like normal people. And when normal people sellers talk to normal people buyers and go through an efficient, effective process and get to an answer, regardless if the answer is yes or no, it's good for all. It just is, and that's what the blind zebra sales operating system is all about. So you heard the uh call to action, just email us bzos at blind-zebra.com. Subsequent um episodes now. I'm gonna go into some of the tools and just highlight them, talk about them, then I'm gonna have guests on all sorts of things. So we're just getting going here. So that's it. Thanks for listening to episode one of the blind zebra sales operating system. I'm B Neale. Call me BZ, though. Would you just call me BZ? It's easier that way. I'll see you next time. Cheers!