Here’s Why You Need to Measure Your Business Performance – Robert Hartline

Are you listening to what your data is telling you? Yes, your data is actively talking to you; it’s just a matter of listening to what it has to say. Your data is a goldmine, and our today’s guest is going to explain precisely why.

Robert is the CEO and Founder of Call Proof, a company that helps improve the sales performance of field sales teams. Robert is an experienced salesperson with impressive entrepreneurial skills. Not only did he go from selling cell phones to now running a tech start-up, but he also grew his company from $10 million to $100 million in just three years. Robert is a serial entrepreneur who built several multi-million dollar businesses and is passionate about helping sales teams get better results.

Robert is big on measuring things and believes that businesses should pay more attention to what their data is telling them.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we chat about the importance of being aware of your data, why you need to track your results to be successful, how to find the most effective sales strategy for your business and the benefits of selling with intent.

If you want to scale your business and create a bulletproof sales strategy, tune into this episode to hear what Robert has to say.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Robert Hartline

💡 What he does: He’s the CEO and Founder of Call Proof, a company helping B2B sales teams manage their customers in a sales activity reporting system.

💡 Noteworthy: Robert started selling phones in his car back in 1994. By 2019, he had built Absolute Wireless into a chain of 56 wireless stores and 350 employees.

💡 Key Quote: “Find something you’re good at being consistent with and sticking to some consistency. […] imagine if you had the same kind of tenacity over I’m going to sell for one hour a day, five days a week, I’m never relenting. You will get a tremendous amount of value by having that relenting tenacity on doing certain things.”

💡 Where to find Robert: LinkedIn | Twitter

Key Insights

Pay attention to what your data is telling you. Not being aware of your data is like walking around in the dark. To better understand how your business is doing, you need to pay more attention to your data. Robert is big on measuring things, and he believes data can tell you everything you need to know about your business. Whether you should change an internal process or seek a new business opportunity, data will always show you the way. “Just the act of putting your data on a spreadsheet, it’s going to make every number and proof. Just by putting it on a spreadsheet, because it’s the awareness of something that is either busted or has an opportunity to improve. And when you can put people in your mastermind group on a spreadsheet together, you’re going to start seeing patterns and opportunities for you to make changes.”

Business is like sports – you need to track your results. Robert makes an interesting remark. He compares business to sports. There’s teamwork, you’re all working towards a common goal together, and you either win or lose at the end of the day. Robert addresses the importance of measuring data and tracking results in both business and sports. How are you going to know if you’re winning if you’re not keeping score? “I kind of look at business as a sport. This is fun. The numbers are a sport. It’s much like athletics. If you went to a ballgame, and the scoreboard stopped working, you would literally see people go to their cars because we are such a number-driven society, and that’s what this gets, it feeds everyone some energy and business does that for me. We self-implemented EOS. It stands for entrepreneur operating system. And I will tell you, of all the things that we did good at, I think our best was the recognition of how important those core values were. And it was always part of the conversation. If I go visit a store, what’s ‘I care’ mean? And I’d have them recite it to me. Because it was such a big piece of the puzzle because all of it had a reason for existing. And I needed every employee to understand how important that philosophy was.”

There are many different ways to acquire a customer. Find the one that works the best for your business. Every business has its own culture, core shared values and unique needs. So why should we aim to have the same sales strategies then? Robert says that there are many different strategies to grow a business and close a sale. The trick is to discover what works for you. He suggests trying out different tactics before you make your final decision. You won’t know if it works until you try it yourself. “Going in and talking to strangers works. It absolutely works. So our app has 26 million businesses preloaded. You take the phone, you click a button, and it shows you all the insurance agents in the neighborhood. […] That’s what the app does. And so we help b2b organizations with field salespeople see more people.”

Sell with intent. According to Robert, you have a much better chance of selling a product if you know who you’re selling to. Knowing your target audience is one of the first steps in closing a sale. Unfortunately, most salespeople don’t understand the importance of selling with intent. It’s up to you as a business owner or a manager to teach them how to identify potential clients and approach them. Robert explains, “Most clients come to us with an existing prospect list, but it’s often a lot smaller than the actual prospect list because a lot of people don’t spend enough time with the salesperson to identify who to sell. They’ll spend the energy teaching them how to sell, but not who to sell to. And if you leave it to the creativity of the reps, you’re going to fail. […] But most salespeople do business that way. They’re just driving randomly. And when you do it with intent, you build a route, what we can show for our clients, they’re gonna see 30% more prospects in a day by just being a little bit more plan oriented about who they go see.”

Top Quotes

“It’s very difficult to be owner and then also sales manager.  And employees, especially salespeople, you don’t manage salespeople, you just don’t because they’re not the types of people you really manage. But you do manage their energy and you manage their energy through your energy. And so if I’m worried about payroll, and I’m doing a sales meeting, how effective can I be with a mindset of scarcity? And so once I really learned to get someone to handle the VP of sales so I could focus on the vision or a piece of the business that made scaling a lot faster.”

“One of the things that I loved about the wireless business is because I could tell how many people walked in my store, how many calls we had. The sheer volume of intel that we had as a retailer was amazing.”

“One of the things I tell people a lot about metrics is if you’re in heating and air, you need to be buddies with another heating and air company in another state. And you need to have the metrics on a scorecard with both organizations or four or five guys, get a mentor group together, share the data once a month, put it on a spreadsheet. Just the act of putting your data on a spreadsheet, it’s going to make every number and proof. Just by putting it on a spreadsheet, because it’s the awareness of something that is either busted or has an opportunity to improve. And when you can put people in your mastermind group on a spreadsheet together, you’re going to start seeing patterns and opportunities for you to make changes.”

“I kind of look at business as a sport. This is fun. The numbers are a sport. It’s much like athletics. If you went to a ballgame, and the scoreboard stopped working, you would literally see people go to their cars, because we are such a number-driven society and that’s what this gets, it feeds everyone some energy, and business does that for me. We self-implemented EOS. It stands for entrepreneur operating system. And I will tell you, of all the things that we did good at, I think our best was the recognition of how important those core values were. And it was always part of the conversation. If I go visit a store, what’s ‘I care’ mean? And I’d have them recite it to me. Because it was such a big piece of the puzzle because all of it had a reason for existing. And I needed every employee to understand how important that philosophy was.”

“Our biggest competitor, I’ll be honest with you, is a Google spreadsheet. It’s not Salesforce, it’s not all these other whiz-bang online products. It’s a spreadsheet that they’re doing a very terrible job and you know this as well as I do that if you hire someone, you could spend months and months training them, and then when they get to the field, and you don’t get a lot of sales, you’re like what the hell? What the heck is going on?”

“Most clients come to us with an existing prospect list, but it’s often a lot smaller than the actual prospect list because a lot of people don’t spend enough time with the salesperson to identify who to sell. They’ll spend the energy teaching them how to sell, but not who to sell to. And if you leave it to the creativity of the reps, you’re going to fail. Most salespeople are driving their car and they’re like, okay, let’s say I’m selling to an insurance agent, ‘Oh, there’s a State Farm’. He goes over the State Farm. Little does he know that behind that building on the second floor, it’s five other agents that he could be seeing. He just can’t see them. They don’t have big signs on the road. But most salespeople do business that way. They’re just driving randomly. And when you do it with intent, you build a route, what we can show for our clients, they’re gonna see 30% more prospects in a day by just being a little bit more plan oriented about who they go see.”

Links

Call Proof

Hyper Sales Growth by Jack Daly