Robert is the CEO of Quadrant 4 Systems Corp, an IT firm focused on social, mobile, analytic, and cloud technologies. When not on the road developing business relationships, Robert can often be found at the Steele Center for Professional Sales. Located at the University of North Alabama, the eponymous center’s mission is simple: to help students help themselves. Robert brings in advice from world-class sales professionals to teach sales techniques to eager students. Robert opens up about his own beginnings as the million-to-one longshot to join the 1978 Dallas Cowboys. With the perfect mix of talent and focus, Robert made the team and went all the way to Super Bowl XIII. He now uses this same formula, skill and focus, to excel in his own life and teach students how to excel in theirs.
Transcript
My name is Robert Steele. I'm CEO of a company Quadrant 4 System Corp in Schaumburg, Illinois. So we're an IT services company. We provide both solutions, staffing, staff augmentation, other design and support work. We also build products, both a health product and an education product. So we built an exchange product for healthcare. I actually, until I became CEO, I was President of the healthcare division, and if you think about the Affordable Care Act also known as Obama Care, was designed to do both a consumer market place as well as a small group shop exchange and we ended up building the only product of it's kind that truly served both the individual consumer market as well as the small group employer market. We also built the financial management components which managed all the financial components which is the consolidated billing, the billing and collection receipt of all the money. I'm on the phone from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed. And I am either in a meeting working with either our employees, our senior staff, our clients, vendors that want to partner with us or you know, truly anybody else that is looking for either a way to sell us something or have them sell them something or trying to find the right talent, trying to find additional resources to partner, kind of what I call the partner, package and perform model. We find partners that we work with we figure out how to package all the technologies together and then we realize that if both of the partners or all three or four or five of the partners perform revenue gets generated and clients get served so. I love digital communication, however, I have always, always, always believed that a face to face so that I can look in the eyes of the person that I am gonna do business with, that is the only way to have that connection so that that person knows and having been in sales my whole life when you try to sell a really, really big transaction my largest transaction is $90 million, so I haven't yet broken the $100 million barrier, but I'm working on it. The fun part of that is you're not gonna get someone to truly trust you for a big transaction like that just doing that over the phone. You can close a $50 transaction without ever meeting somebody, and you should because it's too expensive, but you can't close a $500,000 or a $5 million or $50 million transaction without having that personal touch.
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