Greetings, fans and friends. It's BZ here for another edition of the BZSOS podcast. Glad you're here. If you run on BZ SOS, we're so thankful. You know what you're in for. A little reinforcement for you for the tools. You're rolling through it, booking those meetings, getting everything clean on the calendar, business plan, prod pod, you're doing all the things. If you don't run on BZSOS, stop waiting. That's what we hear more than anything. Stop waiting. If you're a sales leader, we certify sales leaders in this in the system to bring into your org so you can customize and integrate with your group. You've got a group of sales leaders. Um, we've got uh hundreds of certified coaches now serving thousands of salespeople and growing fast. 122 at discount. We'll have 122 plus 25, 147 uh after the next three days here, uh live and in person. So just uh email me, BZSOS @blind-zebra.com. First step in our process is a Coin Toss. Isn't that nice? We have a little football theme there, coin toss. Um, so this is to serve both of you all who are listening. Little little reinforcement for my BZSOS peeps and um a little uh intro into what it is and some good value for you if you're not listening. Uh listen to my other podcast. Thanks so much, the Advanced Selling Podcast. Been doing that for 19 and a half years with Bill Caskey, Sales Unscripted uh with my good friend Margaret Henney. We've been doing it for about three years or so. And uh, this is a new one, solo. I'm gonna have guests on here down the road, people that run on BZ SOS, maybe some prospects. Who knows? I don't know what I'm gonna do yet, but we're starting it off uh and hope that you'll that you'll love it. Um, there's an app for that. We're gonna have a BZ SOS app. Isn't that fun? Isn't that fun? I love saying we're gonna do things before we do them because it makes my team really stressed out. I'm kidding, it does stress them out. But the plan is to have an app, which would be really cool down the road. So you all these things will be there. But in the meantime, it's gonna be in the learning management system. These podcast episodes will be there. So uh okay, today's episode, I am going to talk about CRM. CRM, CRM, CRM. And I'm gonna take a little different uh tact, I think, to maybe what you think. All right. I'm just gonna be clean with you. Okay, so sales leaders, CRM, you know it. You know it. You you try to live your life there. Your CFO, especially, sometimes you're C O O, C O that, but financial people are in there, they want to know the forecasting. If you work for PE, you're privately traded company, publicly traded company, you're using this as a as a point of truth, you're using uh your CRM data. Um, if you're a sales leader, you're constantly, constantly harping on your salespeople to get their shiz in the system, get it up to date and in the system. That's you, sales leaders, right? Come on, guys. Hey, I got a board meeting on Tuesday. Make sure all your Salesforce stuff's up to date. You know, I don't want to anybody get embarrassed at the board meeting. Oh, okay. Salespeople coming clean on you. There's a phrase in a book, there's an old book called Illusions by Richard Bach. It's kind of a you know out there book, illusions by Richard Bach. Um, kind of a 70s existential. I love it. It's great. Uh there's a phrase in there that uh the phrase says, We teach best what we most need to learn. We teach best what we most need to learn. And there are a couple of tools in the BZSOS in the operating system that strictly meant to help people like me who sucked and still kind of suck at CRM stuff. Okay. So, salespeople, I'm one of you. I'm one of you. I'm the guy who said, I said it last episode, I think. Well, I got all this admin to do it taken away from my selling time. That was an excuse. That wasn't true. It wasn't true. No, I I had a lot of selling time, I just didn't want to spend it any time uh in CRM. All right. So let's talk about just reframing our mind around CRM. Okay, can we stop? Here's what I love about this. I use this analogy a lot. It's not an analogy, it's the truth. So I started selling in the early 90s. Guess what we didn't have in the early 90s? We didn't have phones and we didn't have laptops. I got my first laptop in 1993, and we didn't have the internet. So I was selling, believe it or not, successfully selling with none of those things. Very archaic methodologies, but I had them. I had them back there. Okay. So just make sure when you think about this that you've thought about your past. Because there are some of you who are, you know, later in career who used to not have a cell phone. And you remember when your company said, hey, we're gonna give you guys sales cell phones. Some of you said, I don't want a cell phone. I don't want to be that accessible to my customers. I don't want my company to be that accessible to me. I don't want my company to know what I'm doing every five minutes. I'm a big boy. I can handle my stuff. I know what I'm doing. Don't give me a cell phone. I don't need a work cell phone. Some of you said that. Now, if you're younger, you don't get, but listen to this. So here's what I'll do now. I'll take your cell phone away from you then. I'll take it back. You're like, you're not getting my cell phone. I mean, how am I supposed to communicate with my customers if I don't have my cell phone? Okay. It's the same thing with your laptop. There was a time like, I don't need a laptop. I don't need no laptops to sell. I've been selling just fine out of the book. Carry the bag and the book. That's what we had back in the old days. Bag in the book, get a big leather bag and a big leather bag at a big leather-bound book inside. Carry the book. If you're my age or older, you know what I'm talking about. If you're young, don't worry about it. I'm not a boomer, I'm a Gen Xer. Don't ever say that. I'm a Gen Xer. Don't call me a boomer. Right? But now you have a laptop. Okay, I'll take your laptop and your phone. You're not taking my laptop and my phone. Here's the point. And okay, I'll talk to the kids for a minute. Any hey, kids, you ever help help your grandparents set up their cell phones? Any of you? Right? If you're a Gen Z or Gen Alpha, you ever help your millennial even maybe? You help your parents with their with their phones? You do, don't you? You're a native. You like you have it, and so it's all there. You can learn. Everyone can learn. You can learn things. I promise you can learn things. And so here's the deal with CRM, you can learn to like it and maybe learn to love it, even if you flip your mindset. So you got to first do that. You got to get out this mentality that it's some sort of big brother thing that's there to punish you. It's not. It's there to make you an efficient, effective seller. There's no other reason to do any sort of CRM other than make you efficient and effective. Think of the common sense of this. Why would a company, I own a company, why would I want my sellers bogged down with something that's not going to help them sell? I wouldn't. I want to help them sell. One of the ways and tools that I have to help them sell is data that's in CRM. So I can see things and they can see things like what am I doing next on this open opportunity? Do I have a date scheduled with them? Who all was involved? What were the notes? What did I say last time? Oh, if I'm going to bring Brian or Stephanie into the sales process, how can I update that on what happened? I don't have to find my notebook somewhere in the back of my trunk. It's all there. That's why we do it. So you got to flip your mentality and just wave the flag, white flag on it. Using CRM at its core is really easy. Think of other technologies you use that in your past life you didn't use that you can't live without yet now. Okay. It's funny, you know, Facebook. Facebook was invented so that dudes at Harvard could find girls. That's why it was invented. It was called the Facebook. So everyone could see the face, and they that was for dating. And now it's 68-year-old grandmas, you know, griping about their um, you know, their uh sister-in-law on there or whatever. It's all old people now. Okay. But when it first came out, all the old people like that's stupid, that's for kids. Now they can't get rid of it. And now no kids are on there. You know what I mean? It's crazy. My point is, you can evolve your mentality around these technologies. It's time to evolve your mentality around CRM and see it for what it is. It is a tool to help you sell more efficiently and effectively. End of story. Okay. There is a degree of adoption. There's not adoption binary, like you either use it or you don't. There's a degree. And so some of you are gonna be, once you flip your mentality to see it for what it is, it's here to make me more effective, efficient seller. Once you flip that, then you can get into a degree adoption. You can say, okay, I'm gonna put my core stuff. Past episodes, we talked about being a student of your calendar. All of your calendar events should be live and real in the CRM. They should all be there. The other easy flip for you that you can do right this second, and when we first meet companies and we're talking to them about BCSOS, one of the first things we do, and we don't need to rub this in anybody's face. That's not the point. But I just ask the CRO or C whoever I'm talking to. I'm like, hey, let's pull up your uh your pull up your hub spot, pull up your CRM, your Salesforce, whatever you use, don't care which one. Um, pull up your uh pending close, your forecast, pull it up, and let's look at calendars and let's see if any of those, let's do the top 20, if any of the top 20 have closed dates in the past. And they do. And the last I checked, and I love like subatomic physics, so we know time travel is kind of possible, but I can't close a deal in December 25 because it's January 26. It's impossible that date is passed. So what's happening is I'm not selling in a precise way if I'm the seller and that's my open opportunity. And then what the seller will say, and don't say this, but you'll say this, you'll go, Oh, I just haven't updated it yet. I'm like, okay, right in front of me, update it. And you know what they'll do? They'll pick the 31st of the month that they're in. And if it's too tight and they're going, ooh, it's a little quick, then they'll put the 30th of the next month. That's what they'll do. That is not precise, that is guessing. That is just putting a bunch of baloney in there and guessing. That's what that is. If you go down the path that I talked about last episode of being a precise calendar person, study your calendar, then these things become real data points. If they're real data points, they become very useful for you to be effective and efficient as a seller because it's how you do things. It's really, really awesome if you flip your mentality and start to behave this way. So the easiest cleanup you can do early on is to get all of your closed dates out of the past and into the future. Step one. Step two, isn't it funny? All the closed dates for next month, I'm recording this in January. If I looked at all your closed dates for February, if they don't close in January, you know what's gonna happen? They're all gonna flip to 228. 228. Why do they flip to 228? Because salespeople are just guessing and hoping. Guessing and hoping. That's all they're doing. Okay. And by the way, the 28th's a Saturday. Okay, some of us get deals close on Saturday, but not many of us. We just don't. It's the weekend. So let's start to be precise with what we're doing. When you run on BZSOS, this over time, it takes about three months, will fade away to the point where you don't do this anymore. You have you everything in your CRM is up to date, the important stuff. Now, some of you in your CRM are hyper users and you'll write a book of notes. Good for you. Some of us are more bullet point oriented, and we'll just take little snippets. Some of us use Zoom. Zoom recordings can be transcribed instantly by Zoom's AI and instantly imported into a CRM or cut and pasted. So the the idea of have to sit there and type a bunch of crap is gone. It's over. You can those little tile things, I don't know what they're called. You walk around with them, they record your your meetings and stuff. You put one of those on the on the floor, you know, that's just it's just so easy these days to just take notes, have them highlighted and summarized by AI and put them into Salesforce. I don't know what the issue is here. And I I do know what the issue is. It's an old mentality. We have an old mentality that we're using CRM to big brother us, and that is not what it's for. That is not what it's for. You're getting big brothered because your leader, now we'll go back to the leaders. You're getting big brothered or you feel that way because your your leader is big brothering you into getting your data in there, and you feel like a kid. Get your stuff in there, get your room cleaned up, get your stuff in CRM, gotta have it in there. And of course, you feel like big brother because that's it, because you don't see it for useful for you. And you think I could live just fine without Salesforce, okay? And you could, but would you be good? That's the question. Some of you, I'll be good, I'll be good, and it's fine. I just say, could you be better at this other thing? You could be better, and that's what this is about, okay. So, first is changing your mentality and seeing it for what it is. No logical business person on earth would put a tool in place that would cause a seller to sell less. Nobody, nobody, and you can laugh at that, think I was blown. I'm just telling you, it's not the point. Okay, and if you flip your mindset and deal in reality and just be truthful with yourself and learn to be precise in the dates, like I talked a couple episodes ago, and then learn just to regularly, regularly get everything in your Salesforce that's easy, logically up to date. So no dates in the past, closed dates should spatter throughout the month. They shouldn't all close in the 30th. They don't, that's baloney. You will be a much more efficient, effective seller. I promise you will. And you will make your leader so happy. And there's no reason not to do this. Okay. What's great about that? There's a little saying, the BZ SOS world, there's a tool for that. Well, guess what, kids? There's a tool for this. My friends that run on BZ SOS, their Salesforce, perfect, close, close, not perfect, but gosh, it's clean. Those of you who do not run on these tools and use these tools, you will continue to have a junk drawer in your CRM until you do something different. So you want to see what that's all about, you know what to do. Email me BZSOS at blind dash zebra.com. Hope that was helpful. Okay, change your mentality about CRM and see it for what it is, and then just do the easy stuff. Do the easy stuff. No closed dates in the past. Not every closed date happens on the 30th of the month. That's just like makes no sense. So don't do it. Things that don't make sense, we don't do. That's how we do it. That's it. BZ out. See you next time. Cheers.