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."

Handling Sales Department Growth
Having increased the size of its sales force by 20 percent in 2006, Heartland saw its sales grow by 24 percent in 2007 compared to 20 percent the previous year, increasing the average gross margin per sale by 11 percent. 

As a result of this rapid growth, a standardized and scheduled training methodology was implemented to keep up with the pace. A model was applied that required an initial four-phase,120-day process engaging all levels of management with the hire.

Heartland’s entrepreneurial management team introduced a standardized interview process that is now an essential part of the hiring process—and is the first step in candidate selection and recruitment.  The team also found that success at Heartland depended more on behaviors than sales skills, which expanded the candidate pool by at least considerably beyond traditional sales professionals.

Factors for Success
Factors that have contributed to making Heartland Payment System’s sales force so successful are:

• A fair-deal approach, emphasizing full disclosure of pricing and terms in an industry filled with deceptive pricing tactics.
• A culture that combines tremendous entrepreneurial spirit and corporate structure: Heartland’s entire sales force is made up of commission-only W-2 employees (including senior managers and the CSO), compared to the contractor models of its competitors.

• A principles-centered sales/service culture united behind a common cause.
• A modern platform: Heartland has released the only 21st Century-technology platform in payments over the last decade.
• A choice of payment products: Heartland remains one of the few companies that has proven it can sell multiple products in the payments industry with the same sales channel, while at the same time successfully selling three distinct payment product lines.

Heartland’s proven entrepreneurial model of rewards to motivate its sales force–including signing bonuses and long-term portfolio ownership with residual income–includes every member of Heartland's growing team of sales professionals­. This has contributed greatly to the company's rapid growth.

A recent report by an analyst at the independent investment research provider Morningstar analyst seemed to corroborate all this by reporting that Heartland Payment Systems was “a narrow-moat company that has expanded by following one simple rule: the customer comes first. Heartland services its customers in a transparent and merchant-focused way, in stark contrast to an industry riddled with hidden billing fees and monolithic processing firms. Merchants have responded well to Heartland's customer-centric business model and improved technology over the past few years, and we don't see this changing any time soon.”

About Sanford C. Brown
Sanford C. Brown has been with Heartland since it began in 1997, serving in almost every sales-management role, moving from street-level sales to chief sales officer in ten short years.  Brown was selected to further lead and improve the sales-centric environment critical to Heartland. Prior to becoming chief sales officer, Brown served as senior vice president of sales management, where he was responsible for sales infrastructure, policy, and the formulation of business development strategies.  Mr. Brown attended Northern Arizona University where he studied marketing.  He was awarded the Stevie Award for National VP of Sales at the inaugural 2006 Selling Power Sales Excellence Awards.

About Heartland Payment Systems
Heartland Payment Systems, Inc., a NYSE company trading under the symbol HPY, delivers credit/debit/prepaid card processing, payroll, check management, and payments solutions to more than 250,000 business locations nationwide. Heartland is the founding supporter of The Merchant Bill of Rights, a public advocacy initiative that educates merchants about fair credit and debit card processing practices. For more information, visit www.heartlandpaymentsystems.com and www.MerchantBillOfRights.com.

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 founders.

During 2006 , Rack U teamed up with Rackspace recruiting to introduce a Technical Boot Camp.  The boot camp paid thirty candidates, with minimal IT experience but a great customer-service manner, to undergo ten weeks of intense technical training. At the end of the ten weeks, Rackspace welcomed twenty-three new valuable employees who were now qualified to help customers with complex technical issues—and who understood the most important part of their new jobs: providing Fanatical Support.

Employee Perks
Rackspace executives try to ensure that employees, both new and old, have a work culture that enhances their motivation to deliver Fanatical Support. Employee perks include the use of the Racker BMW, monthly bonuses based around customer loyalty, quarterly celebrations for successful quarters, and more. (In recognition of this, Rackspace was recognized as one of Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For”, ranking number 32 on the 2008 list.)

Recognition
So what is the result of choosing long-term value of customer loyalty over immediate results ?  Rackspace was listed in the Leader’s Quadrant of the Gartner Research Magic Quadrant for North American Web Hosting, with the analysts commending Rackspace for its service focus.  The bottom line: Rackspace’s customers retain full control of their operating systems and applications while experiencing levels of security, scalability, and uptime that far exceed other hosting options.

About Lanham Napier
Lanham Napier joined Rackspace as chief financial officer in April 2000, just a few short months before the technology industry hit rock bottom during the 2000 downturn. He is largely credited by Rackspace's own management team for keeping the company steady and setting it on its current path to profitability and success.  In January of 2001, Lanham was named president of the company, working side-by-side with then CEO Graham Weston as they pulled the company out of a cash-burning mode and established an operational discipline that set Rackspace on a positive revenue track. In 2006, Napier was named chief executive officer, further underscoring his key role at the company.

Immediately after joining Rackspace, Napier recognized that customer service was the very core of Rackspace's business and helped introduce the “fanatical customer support” culture for which Rackspace is known today. His efforts went into instilling a deep concern for and interest in the customer at every level of the company, rewarding positive behavior and quarterly growth as well as customer acquisition and retention. Despite the discipline, Rackspace is regularly cited locally and nationally as one of “the best places to work.” During his tenure, Lanham has seen the company grow from fewer than 100 employees to more than 2,000, and from a single data center to 8 facilities located in Texas, Washington, D.C., London, England and Hong Kong.

Lanham has a B.A. in Economics from Rice University and an M.B.A. from Harvard University.

About Rackspace Hosting
As the world’s leader and specialist in hosting, Rackspace® Hosting is changing the way businesses worldwide buy IT. Rackspace delivers computing-as-a-service, integrating the industry’s best technologies into a flexible service offering, making computing more reliable and affordable. A trusted partner to companies of all sizes, Rackspace enables IT departments to be more effective. Rackspace is distinguished by its award-winning Fanatical Support®, furthering the company’s mission to be one of the world’s greatest service companies. Rackspace is recognized as one of FORTUNE Magazine’s 100 Best companies to work for in the US, ranking number 32 on the 2008 list.  Rackspace's portfolio of hosted IT services includes managed hosting (www.rackspace.com), email hosting (www.mailtrust.com) and cloud hosting (www.mosso.com). For more information on Rackspace Hosting please visit www.rackspace.com.

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.
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