Greetings, fans and friends. BZ here coming at you. The BZ SOS podcast. Thank you, you loyal listeners who've been oh, through all of the other two episodes. Hey, we're getting going. My other podcasts have a lot of episodes. This one's just getting going. Uh, this here for two reasons. BZSOS podcast, one to reinforce for our BZSOS friends and uh clients who are running on BZ SOS. You know how great your life gets when you run on BZ SOS. And those of you who are interested and just want to get some sales advice, and maybe down the road, want to send me an email and find out how to get certified, how to get your team using the Blind Zebra sales operating system. You just send us an email, BZSOS at blind-zebra.com. I'll have to take a make make a country version, maybe make a uh RB sole version, you know, maybe a wrap version of that down the road. So uh I'm gonna take uh tools uh from our operating system and talk about them uh a little bit inside baseball, a little Easter egg for my uh clients that run on BZ SOS, kind of generic for the rest of you. Um, but in the end, I want it to be valuable for you. Okay, today I'm gonna talk about planning. Today's episode is all about planning, and I'm gonna highlight a few things that we see um working with all of our BZ SOS clients who run on BZ SOS and and where they um make um mistakes, but light mistakes in planning and when how plans can fade. All right. So we have um uh over 44 tools in the operating system. Um and uh one of those tools is a personal business planning tool. And personal business planning tool at its core is a template. And it's interesting if you're listening to this. So if you're a sales leader, you're listening, and I asked you the question do your sales, does your sales team, does your entire sales team, do they have a business plan? Personal business plan written for themselves. Most times people say, Yeah, they do. Oh, my people, they got plans. Yeah, they all got plans. I go, cool. Can you show them to me? I'd like to see them. You got 10 salespeople, bring all 10 of them up at once. Now here's where the ums and uhs start. Well, I mean, we uh I mean, they all know what's expected of them. Oh, that's not a plan, that's an expectation. Well, yeah, uh, we I mean they all there have their goals. Okay, that's cool. That's one little element of a plan, but that's not a how to get the goal. There's you know, it's missing. Um, or they they say, Yeah, I had them all send them to me. Yeah, they're all doing business plans, they're putting them together right now. Well, can you show me a few? And they pull four of them up and they're all four in a different template, all four different framework. And then I say, How are you gonna make sure that they get these plans? It's like, well, they know. I mean, that you know, that's you know, they're they're big kids, and we don't babysit them around here. I'm like, okay. When I hear those things, and if you're listening, and this is you, if you're you know, that that's you, it's okay, you're not in trouble. But most people, most people, if I say, Can you show me your business plan? Can't show me their plan. They can't produce it in a document, they can't show it to me. Most people can. I'm not gonna go percentage because I don't know. Yeah, I throw this many percent, but but I'm asking you, you're listening to this, you know. Do you have one? And if you do, great, then you do. Okay, good for you. Most don't. So if you don't, the step number one to this is do from now on. When someone asks you, do you have a business plan written out, written down for this time period right now? Then do. Then you say yes, and I do it because you do one. Have something written down. That's a great step. All right. So that's the first thing that when I see people that that struggle with this whole planning thing is they just don't have anything written down. They have a goal written down, but what a plan is the how to get it. It's not the outcome part. So the plan is is way more about the process and the inputs than it is about the outcomes. Outcomes are part of it for sure, but you we've got to dig in and figure out how we're gonna get what we're after. That's the planning part, okay? And so our business plan is very thorough. It highlights two big uh it has 10 parts to it, but two of the parts are business objectives and controllable behaviors. And so I want you to think about in your own planning, your business objectives, and I want you to examine what you've got written down for your goals um two steps deeper than you already do. Here's what I mean by that. Most of you listening to this will have uh a goal written down. You say, okay, I want my um I want my uh sales to be uh I want my sales to average a million dollars a month. I'm like, great, that's a good goal. Okay. So two steps deep. I would say, okay, question a million dollars a month. Do I care if the million dollars a month all comes from existing clients? First step. You're like, no, I don't care. I don't care. Some of you like, uh, you know what? A sales leader's gonna look at that, go no, no, wait, wait, hang on a second. My I want my guy or gal, she's gonna do a million a month. I want at least 400,000 to come from new and 600 can come from existing growth and expansion, but 400 needs to come from new logos. Well, if she doesn't have that written down, you guys don't have the same goal. Her goal is a million bucks clean, your goal is a million bucks, but it has qualifiers. 400 needs to be new, 600 can be existing. It's a huge difference, huge difference. And when sales leaders come to me, like, you know, guys, we made our numbers last week, but we got no new logos. I'm like, that's because you didn't measure for new logos. Or if you did, there was no consequence to not getting a new logo. Okay. So that's the first thing. Go one level, then go a second level. Say, okay, um, I'm gonna do a million dollars in sales, but my average, some of you have markup or gross margin or GP. I'm gonna do a million dollars in sales, but my average GP is gonna be 3%. On all my revenues sold, we're gonna have 3% of gross margin or gross profit in there. Your CFO is gonna go, uh-uh, we can't live on that. That's risky. If we sign up for that deal and things go wrong, our costs get out of control in the project or whatever it is that you sell, that's no good. We can't do that either. So we've got to be, here's the lesson: you have to be specific in what you ask for in your goals. Be specific. And by specific, I don't mean just the number. I mean how you want the number to show up. In what form do you want the number to show up? So a much better written goal is I'm gonna do a million per month, and that million dollars is gonna combine to be a minimum of 400,000 in new and 600,000 or more in existing at an average GP at 11 points or above, 11 percentage points or above. Now I've got a really tight, very specific goal. Okay, so that's a takeaway from this. As you're thinking about your goal, I want you to think about going two levels deep on each of the numbers. Most of us are good at the big number. I'm gonna do a million bucks a month. Where we get way better is if we say, here's how we want that million bucks to show up. In what form do we want that million bucks to show up? We want it to come 400 new, 600 existing, and we want it to be at or above 11 points of GP. Now you got something. Now everyone's covered. So that's the first thing I see is people just putting like a raw number and they don't think past it. And I want you to think past it when you're doing this. That's the first thing. The second thing uh that I'm gonna talk about in this episode are the controllable behaviors. And I'm gonna highlight the word controllable. So this is a super common thing that we see when people are trying to do business plans on their own with no guidance or template like we have in BZSOS. They're just sort of winging it on their own, is they'll say they want to have a certain number of meetings or deliver a certain number of quotes or respond to a certain number of RFPs. And the problem with that is none of those things are solely in your control. I can't have a meeting with you without you saying yes. So that's not a controllable behavior. If you agreed to have a coffee with me, something happened before you agreed to it. What was it? I asked you. That is controllable. And when you think about what is controllable, it's a very limited subset of behaviors. Things like what we can control. I can email you, I can call you, I can text you if I have your mobile phone number, um, I can direct message you on LinkedIn, I can stop by your office, see if you're there. Excuse me, hit a cough button. Um I can um go to an event. There are very few things that are just in my control. So when you're thinking about your actions, try not to think about, oh, I want to have this many meetings or I want to do this many proposals, those all require someone else. Think upstream of what has to happen to get there, what has to happen to get there. And what usually has to happen is scaled over how many you want. So if I want to have five meetings in a week, I need to ask 10 people to meet with me. I'll speak for myself. I'm not that good. If I ask 10 people to meet with me, not all 10 are saying yes. I guarantee it. Guarantee it. If I ask 10 people, four or five might say yes, but all 10 aren't. So if I want to have four or five meetings, I got to be inviting 10. That's the controllable behavior. And most of you listening, if you run on BC SOS, you know exactly what I'm talking about. All you're doing from my message today is you're just getting more locked in and detailed on it and making sure that you're in the controllable setting. If you don't run on BZ SOS and you're listening, this should be like a hit in the head to you. You got to understand, I've got to only focus on things I can control behaviorally before I think about my goals. Okay. Controllable behaviors. So that's the second kind of element that we see people miss is they don't have a behavior plan. And then the third thing I want to talk about, just kind of wrap this thing up, is you have to have some accountability mechanism to your plan, or it will fade away on you, I promise. As great and wonderful as all of the BZ SOS tools are, and I think they're all great and wonderful. And kind of like, you know, you talk to songwriters, I'm a big music guy. You talk to Elton John, Billy Joel, or not talk to him like your buddies with them, but listen to him interviewed, they'll talk about this. Billy Joe talks about um sometimes some of his songs are like they're all kids to him, and they all have certain personalities and aspects, and then some of them annoy him, and some of his songs he loves and he changed, you know, they evolve over time. I have that relationship with all the tools in BZ SOS. It's a little nerdy, but I'll own it. And I've got some faves. This is one of my faves that fades. One of my faves that fades. And I always scratch my head. And as the head coach or one of the head coaches, I'm always like, how can I not let this fade? And I think the reason it fades is because it takes a tiny little bit of extra effort. And by tiny little bit, I mean it takes seven minutes on the last Friday of every month. That's what it takes. Seven minutes on the last Friday of every month. Remember last episode? GoPro camera. I don't want to follow you around. It's all it takes. And for some reason, I think maybe because that's not a lot. Um, the trick to this thing is to have some accountability mechanism. Whether you meet with peers, you get a couple friends together, but you've got to calendar that accountability meeting to eternity, or this business plan will fade on you. It will. And in that accountability meeting, you got to be very real with yourself. Very real. And if you run on BZSOS, you know when you when you read a mechanism for your accountability triad, you've only got one of one of three areas. Uh, six total responses is all you can say. If you're not running on BZSOS and you're you're rolling down a list of of uh um business objectives with your accountability person, you say my goal is a million. If you did 999, 999 and your goal is a million, you know what you say? Miss. You just say miss. Learn to own with certainty where your goal is and where your result is. Just own it. Don't make it up. Well, I got pretty close. I was right there. I mean, basically hit. Don't say basically hit. You know, my other job, I worked in the National Football League. One of the greatest things about that, it's a hard, hard world in the football. I mean, you know, bigger problems in life, but it's a it's a tough business. What I love about it, there's no opinions, man. In the end of the thing, one team wins a Super Bowl. End of story. There's no voting, there's no what conference you're in, like college. It's one. So just be real. If you got beat 23 to 22, you lost. You didn't get close, you didn't almost win. You didn't like go if a couple things would have gone our way. You lost. You lost. Just own it. And then you know what? Sometimes you're gonna win. And you're gonna win. And you won because you scored more points. If you're doing your goals, you're in accountability meeting. Do not do not flower up the language around where you are to your goal. If the goal was 10,000 and you did 15,000, you say hit. You don't say, I killed it, man. I'm awesome. You have two thirds. Don't say that. My goal's 10,000. I did 11,000. Hit my goal's 10,000. I did 9998. Miss. Just do that. And if you learn to do that, your brain's going to start to rewire itself away from subjective, hopeful salesperson into very objective, clear business person who happens to do sales for a living. That will be a gift, I promise you, over your uh sales life. Okay, that's it. Uh, friends uh that are running on BCSOS, thank you so much. You know, you've always got 911 service. You can always call, talk to a head coach, and I'll see you on the live calls. If you don't run a BCSOS, come see what you're missing. Just email me BZSOS at blind dash zebra.com. See ya.