Heartland Payment Systems, Inc., of Princeton, New Jersey, was recognized as Best Run Sales Organization in The 2007 Stevies for Sales & Customer Service.  Here we look at how the Heartland's sales force has directly contributed to the company’s meteoric growth.

Heartland Payment Systems, Inc., provides payment-processing services to more than 250,000 merchants throughout the United States. Its first card transaction was processed on July 15, 1997 with an investment of $1 million.

After the most successful IPO in the payments industry history in 2004, Heartland has now become the fifth largest payment transaction processor in the U.S., with $80 billion of annual processing volume and a workforce of more than 2,900 people.  Of these, over 1,700 work in sales, and in 2007 they generated an income of $1.26 billion dollars.  During that year, the number of employee millionaires reached 83 as a direct result of their work at Heartland, while the company maintained its position as the largest W-2 sales force in the U.S. payments industry.

"The value proposition we offer business owners and our employees is a win-win," said Sanford Brown, chief sales officer at Heartland. "We provide business owners with fair pricing, full disclosure, and a consultative service that takes the worry of payments processing away from them, enabling them to focus on operating their businesses. At the same time, we handsomely reward the hard-working members of our sales organization and allow them to directly share in the success of our enterprise. After all, our success is a result of their direct efforts in support of our cause."

On being awarded the Stevie, Brown concluded: "It's an honor for all employees at Heartland to be recognized with this prestigious award. The efforts of our sales team have been equally supported by our outstanding service team. This award is for them, too. It is proof positive of the tremendous knowledge and talent of our sales and service team … and that our efforts to advance the profession of sales as an advocate to small and mid-sized businesses have been appreciated."

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Rackspace® Hosting of San Antonio, Texas, collected its second Stevie Award for Best Customer Service Organization at the 2007 American Business Awards. Rackspace was previously named Best Customer Service Organization in 2005, and was recognized again in 2006 in the Computer Services category for the company’s continued commitment to becoming one of the world’s greatest service companies.

Fanatical Support
Rackspace is an IT hosting provider for customers of all sizes. Founded in 1998, Rackspace built a world-class service organization based on its philosophy of Fanatical Support®.

“We consider ourselves first and foremost a service company, and this recognition is validation that we’re getting it right,” said Lanham Napier, president and CEO, Rackspace Hosting.  “We’re committed to continually raising the bar on customer service and look forward to Fanatical Support changing the landscape of the technology industry.”

At the end of 2006, Rackspace made a decision to try to slow down its growth rate, which was expected to exceed 60 percent , in an effort to protect Fanatical Support, the core of the company. In the fall of that year, the company could not hire quickly enough to keep up with the influx of new business . Napier made the tough decision to strategically attempt to control its growth level in order to catch up on hiring, training new hires, and ultimately improving the quality of Fanatical Support to meet the growing business demand.

It was a bold decision that ultimately chose the long-term value of customer loyalty over immediate results—a statement that the company’s commitment to Fanatical Support was real, and put their customers before profit.

During this time, Rackspace focused hard on hiring, and Rackspace University, its internal training department, ensured that the new employees were equipped with the knowledge and skills to deliver Fanatical Support to customers. “Rack U” entrenches every new “Racker” in one week of rookie orientation where the employees learn about Fanatical Support, the Rackspace business model, and the company history from top executives including the CEO, the executive chairman, various high-level department VPs, and two of the Rackspace.

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With a 125-year history of serving Canadian consumers and businesses, Canada Post is the country’s leading delivery organization, serving 32 million consumers through 6,700 post offices across the country. Every day, Canada Post delivers 40 million messages to over 14 million addresses – a number that increases by 240,000 every year.

Canada Post was recognized with a Stevie Award for Best Customer Service Department in The 2008 International Business Awards. We recently spoke with Janet LeBlanc, Director of Customer Value Management with Canada Post, about the program that earned Canada Post the Stevie. Learn how and why their customer value management program was initiated, and the lessons Janet learned in shepherding this program to success.

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Blogs, or web logs, are all the rage these days. Each month in this space we'll point you to several blogs that we think might be of interest to you.

The Living Room Candidate : The Living Room Candidate contains more than 300 commercials, from every presidential election since 1952, compiled by the American Museum of the Moving Image.
FiveThirtyEight : Electoral statistics, polls, and projections based on facts.
Tonx.org : A coffee professional's blog to help you find the perfect cup of joe to keep you awake during late-night election coverage.
Blog Business Summit : A conference and seminar series on business blogging that has been touring the country since 2004. Proving the power of the blog, it uses its own blog to create a buzz via online word-of-mouth, search engine traffic and cross-linking.