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Greetings, fans and friends. It's your friend Bryan Neale, BZ here for another edition of the Blind Zebra Sales Operating System podcast, BZSOS Live. Coming to you now weekly. Going to be episodes weekly. Just launched the podcast. Again, two different audiences for this podcast. One audience is practitioners, practitioners of the Blind Zebra Sales Operating System. If you run on BZSOS, we love you. We love you. We hope you love it. We know you love it. We know you love it because we know it works and it's super simple and great to implement. So this is to reinforce things for you. And as you're driving around town and listen to the podcast, you can say, hey, I see that guy in the videos. I see him live in his in the coaching sessions and uh listen to the podcast. It's another way for you to consume and get familiar with all the BZSOS uh material and all the BZ SOS tools. And for those of you who don't run on BZ SOS, what are you waiting for? Uh BZSOS at blind-zebra.com. Glad you're here. You're going to get value. Today I'm going to talk about one of the my favorite elements. And I'm going to talk about a little generic way. And I'm going to put in, like I said last episode, some Easter eggs for those of you who run on BZSOS. We're going to talk about today's all things calendar, all things calendar. Again, under the uh heading of sales is 90% process and 10% magic. And then one of my favorite humans on the earth, David Meltzer, the guy who's been on my podcast, a guy who um is a great business thought leader, uh, great coach, super great giving human being. Uh, if you've seen the movie Jerry Maguire, um, that movie is uh based on a uh sports agent, um uh kind of loosely based on a sports agent's life, a guy named Lee Steinberg, and Lee Steinberg's really famous in sports agencies. And uh David was the president of Lee Steinberg sports agency. And then uh he says this very publicly he lost a whole bunch of money and uh found a different way to do life, is the way I would put it. That's my word, not his. But he is a great human and um uh he coached me for a long time, one of the most influential people I've been around. And he is the um, for lack of a better term, the the um inspiration for today's episode. We're gonna talk about all things calendar, all things calendar. And Dave would tell you if you ask him the question, only piece of advice, if you could give one piece of advice to anyone ever for business, for work, for life, what would it be? He would say this be a student of your calendar. Be a student of your calendar. Now, let's just break down that little phrase for you. Now, if you're a practitioner of BZ SOS, you know that we have specific BZSOS tools, mutual timeline agreement, calendar first, all those things, CFD, we have stall continuum, all these tools that you use and you know about that are all geared around calendar precision. We also have leadership tools. We have a leader tool in the operating system, calendar inspection, it's a thing. So if you aren't running on BZSOS, you can do this generically too. Not as well, but you can still do it. Be a student of your calendar. So let's just think about the that phrase for a minute. Let's think about the word student first. Student. Uh, what does a student do? Student goes to class, a student learns, but more than anything, what does a student do before they take a test? They study. Now, I know what you're thinking. I wasn't a good student, I didn't study. Same here, bro. Me too. Uh, so we have our friends and our colleagues and ourselves who weren't good studiers. We weren't really studious, we didn't dig into our material. We sort of did the the you know least amount of stuff we could do. No problem. Here we are, we're professional sellers now, and we're professional leaders, we're leaders, uh, sales leaders, whatever our role is, and we lead a group of people who are sellers. It doesn't matter. It does not matter what you do. All of us can learn to be a student of our calendar and study our calendar. So let's talk about what that looks like for you as a salesperson. Uh, then I'm gonna talk to the sales leaders too. Sales leaders, what does this look for you? Uh, so the first is um, most people listening to this podcast will um review your day and your week regularly. So you'll look at your week and see what's coming up, and you'll look at your day and see what's coming up. And most of you are reactive to what's there. So you're looking at it thinking, what do I have going on this week? And usually the week is relatively full. If you're a Sunday nighter, you peek Sunday night, you're like, Oh, I got a pretty full week. If you're Monday morning, maybe you do it Friday before, but you're looking like I got a pretty full week. And the first mistake you make is that's as far out as you look. You only look a week in advance. Now, I heard a speaker one time, can't remember the guy's name. I wish I could, I give him credit for this. He talked about um what predicts um how high someone will rise to in any organization is geared mostly on how far in the future they look. And he gave some cool examples. And I I worked in a factory, I drove a forklift for two years. Okay. Well, when you drive a forklift, there's a time machine, old school, man, like, you know, and you pull the thing and it stamps your time, your time card. Um, I know that's all digital now, but old school used to like literally physically stamp something. Okay. When I was driving that forklift and that that horn went off at 6:50 a.m. You know about all I was thinking? All I was thinking about was the 940 break, man. I couldn't wait till the 940 break. I was thinking two and a half, three hours ahead. And then we went, boo, we got the break, and now it's 9.55. Horn goes again. We're back on production, rolling around the warehouse. All I was thinking about was the 1150 lunch horn. I thought hourly. That's it. And I got through the day and then I went to bed, did it again. Okay. Some people think daily. What does my day look like? I got a busy day and he worked the day, and then that's it. Okay. Some of us think weekly.

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So we look at the week. Most of you listening to this sellers first, you'll think weekly. I want you to think about expanding that past this. Okay. Now, leaders that are listening to this, and there are many of you that are listening, you likely think monthly and quarterly. You think monthly and quarterly. All of you know you're chasing a quarter. If you work for a publicly traded company, you chase a quarter. If you work for private equity, you're chasing a quarter. If you work for a private owner, you probably chase a quarter. And you're filtering that chasing down to the sales team. Hey, quarter, quarter, quarter, gonna get in into the quarter, into the I love my favorite thing to hear from people when we try to do something with people, like if we do an event or something, like, well, it's the last day of the month. I'm like, so? Well, last day of the month, you know? I'm like, why does that have to do with anything? Last day of the quarter. I can't, March 30th. That's okay, last day of the quarter. You know what we never worry about a blind zebra because we run on the blind zebra sales operating system? We never worry about ever the end of the month or the end of the quarter. Do you know why? We don't worry about it because we use these tools to make precise calendar entries on all of our open sales deals that are accepted and calendared with our clients. That's why we never worry about it. Everything is calendared in real time, including looking forward and measuring the number of sales activity meetings and things we have two and four weeks out, not one week out. So if you're listening here and you're like, how can I change my game a little bit? I don't run on BZ SOS, but I'd like to. You're a sales leader, sales leader. The first thing you can start to think about is what do my sales people's calendars, calendars look like two weeks out? And then you can modify. We said we have a saying, don't we? BZ SOS friends, don't we have a saying? Our saying is we customize and integrate, don't we? It's a saying, it's a thing. It's a BZ thing. We customize and integrate. So you can look four weeks out. Some of you are in like really long sales cycles. You could look a month out. But what you're doing when you look out is you're studying the calendar. You're studying the calendar. Then past that, past the studying part is looking at what I'll call calendar precision. And what is calendar precision? Calendar precision is when I can look at anything out in the future that's customer based, and I can look and audit that that interaction there and say that I have a scheduled meeting that's been accepted by the person I'm meeting with, usually a customer or prospective customer, and I can count that, and that's one. So when you what will happen if you're listening to me now and you do this, if you've not done anything around this in the past, if you're a sales leader, you will do, you will look out two weeks. So if today is January 26th, then you look out two weeks and look at your entire sales team, you're gonna start to see next to nothing on the calendar when you get to the two-week mark. I promise you, next to nothing. If you go to the four-week mark, you will literally see nothing. Occasionally, and I'm not talking about like internal meetings. That's the problem. All the internal stuff and this, the marketing, all that. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about customer things that sellers should be doing, which is interacting and meeting with customers. When you hit that two to four week window, you will see the number of appointments just absolutely fall off a cliff. Okay. Occasionally you'll see one pop up. You will likely see no connector meetings, regularly scheduled meetings with our some people call them circle of influence. You know, if you run a BZ SOS, we call them connectors. You'll see nothing of the sort. You'll see nothing in terms of connector meetings scheduled on your calendar. So when we talk precision, we're looking for what is there, what is real. And it's very easy to see. When you first look, they'll be next to nothing. Then when you start to add things, the easiest step, and this to me, and if you read all the Harvard Business Review stuff, you're gonna see the number one efficiency tool for any business executive is called time blocking. You're gonna see that time blocking. And there's a big missing piece of time blocking that we have fixed in BZSOS. My friends know what I'm talking about here. You know the triads, you know, the triads, yep. B B plan triads. Um, but left alone, um, my other podcast I do with Bill Kaske this morning. Bill was talking about one of his clients who was not a prospector, a guy's an engineer. And he said his big goal there this year is to start prospecting, and he's gonna do an hour a day. Bill asked him, How many did you do? How much time did you spend last year a day? He like the guy goes, zero. So we're going from zero hours to 365 hours because we're doing it once a day, even if you only did the weekdays, 220. No, it's too much. Okay. So you got time blocking is okay. You got to amp that up, though. You're better off doing your time blocking stuff with other people. The best thing you can do is start to set a goal for yourself two to four weeks out at any look point in time to say, I, if you look at my calendar at any point, two to four weeks ahead, here's what I hope that you see. And if you don't see that, I'm not doing my job. And that is for the sales leader and for the sales teams. Sales leaders, you're not immune to this. Okay, you got a thing too. I got to get out, spend more time with my my sellers. I got to get out, be in the field more, right? You said be in the field more. Okay. Well, look at your calendar. Does your calendar say that you're gonna be in the field, you know, one time for a half a day with every rep in the quarter? Does it say that? And not just it say that in your goals, but is that scheduled? And if it's scheduled, is it scheduled on the day and the time and has your seller accepted it? We're looking for calendar precision, calendar precision there. All right. So that's the first step to this whole study your calendar, student of the calendar thing. Is you you've got to be, and I like the idea, you know, sometimes obsessions don't serve us very well. I don't think it's a bad thing to start to edge on being obsessed with your calendar. I think it's a really good thing to do. It's super cliche, super cliche. We hear all the time, I don't have time for this. Here is one of my favorites. I love this. Sales leaders, you're gonna get me here. Uh hey guys, you got to get your stuff updated in CRM. Hey, get your HubSpot stuff up. Hey guys, make sure your Salesforce stuff. Hey, end of the quarter, make sure we got everything in there. Get it, get up to date. Okay, okay, boss. Okay. That's your methodology for accountability to put stuff in CRM. I love it. It's great. Then you know what the sellers say, dude. I'm doing all this admin. You're taking away from my ready selling time. You're taking away from my selling time. Okay. Sellers, listen, listen, promise. None of you, none of you want me to follow you around with a GoPro camera for a week and look at all your selling time. Because I guarantee you, and you know it, you're laughing. I'll find a little space. I promise I'll find a space. Okay. So we're not doing that. It's just efficiency of action, is all we're looking at. And the only way I can do that is to be a student of my calendar and study it and be really precise with my time. Because it's cliche, everyone's like, I don't have time, I don't have time. That's such a dumb thing to say because it's fixed. I got the same 24 that you got, bro. It's the same thing. So let's not get into this deal. Like, I don't have time. Like, well, I have to do all these other things. Then you need to find better efficiency in your calendar to get them done better and quicker. That's what this is. BZSOS, we have multiple tools for this, four of them specifically, that help with this. Um, probably six, if I had a couple more, but for directly related to your calendar. Okay. And um, this is not this, I we have a saying in the BZ SOS world that discipline creates freedom. Discipline creates freedom. If you're like me, you're like a uh, you know, a little bit of a free spirit. If you're if any of you are challenger people, um, I would be a the quintessential lone wolf. High performer, leave me alone, man. That's my DNA. It just is. And so what I've learned to do is to say that serves me to a point. But what serves me better, what serves me better is being really precise with my calendar. And when I'm precise with my calendar, I create, I create more free flex time for me to do whatever I want because I know I've got calendar spots held with very efficient um processes and agendas and to-dos within those calendar blocks that help me get stuff done. And it's fantastic. Okay. So today's lesson, if you're not already, most of you are not, I know you're not. Be a student of your calendar, be a student of your calendar, which means you study it, look past the day and the week, look past the day in the week, go out to a two to four week window. You don't need to chase quarters and months if you start to get precise with all of your sales open opportunities calendars. If you get everything calendared and inked, even down to a go-no-go, it's another BZ SOS term, you will find that your need to chase the months and the quarters goes away. And sales leaders, you know what's good, good for you if you do it the way we do it in BZSOS. The predictability and the accuracy of your forecast goes through the roof. And I know this because all of our sales leaders, 122 of them at this point, tell me that. We've never had more clarity. Clarity's not always fun to see, uh, but it's better than uh educated guessing and hoping. Okay. And you'll look better going into the CFO with a real answer versus making one up. So, okay, that's it. Go be a student of your calendar. I love you all. Uh BZSOS at blind zebra.com. Not gonna sing it. And uh call me BZ. Would you hook up on LinkedIn if we're not hooked up? I'll see you next time. Cheers.