How Corporate Culture Affects Sales Effectiveness

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>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Hi my name is Gerhard Gschwandtner and welcome to Selling Power TV. Today we have the pleasure and privilege of speaking with Sanford Brown; he's the chief sales officer of Heartland Payment systems. Welcome Sanford.

>> Sanford Brown: Thank you for having me Gerhard.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: I'd be interested in hearing your views on how a corporate culture affects sales effectiveness.

>> Sanford Brown: I think corporate culture is tremendously important in today's day and age from my vantage point folks really want to belong to something greater than the individual cause of themselves and have a true passion or meaning in what it is that they contribute a large portion of their life to on a daily basis.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: So what's your corporate culture at Heartland Payment Systems look like?

>> Sanford Brown: Certainly it's evolved but it's always been one of complete transparency and full disclosure with our employees with our customers and with constituent stock holders and investors. It makes for a very, very freeing experience when you don't have to worry about the information that's being shared with any of those constituencies because it's consistent across the board.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Sanford, every culture goes through transformations and in your case you're now a $1.4 billion company and you're a public company. What was the difference before going public versus after?

>> Sanford Brown: It's a great question. I will tell you there's not a whole lot of difference between the 2 surprisingly. We started to prepare ourselves to become a publically traded company long before we actually did and actually ran ourselves with tight financial controls, tight operational controls and analytic controls that would be required of a public company. So outside of some of the complications that come with being public and some of the regulation with it in terms of the impact on the culture there's virtually none at all. In fact it was somewhat liberating because it provided for Heartland an opportunity to give liquidity to over 800 employee owners in the organization. They've been working for something they were tremendously proud of and now have the opportunity to take advantage of the financial success that created for them.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: When you talk about financial success what did that look like?

>> Sanford Brown: Pretty inspiring. Heartland has had the privilege of achieving 84 million Arizona organizations since we've gone public. It's something that we've aspired to do for many, many years since the beginning founding of the organization. Our CEO Bob Car assumed spelling actually had a personal goal and a mission to achieve 100 millionaires in our company. We are working very diligently to achieve that goal as we speak. Our view of the world is very simple that the organization and the top leaders at the organization should not be the individuals that solely benefit in the actual success, that the success should be given to help you create it.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: So how do you define a millionaire? Somebody who has an equity stake that's worth a million or somebody who makes a million dollars a year?

>> Sanford Brown: We could define it either way. But we do define it as someone that has an equity stake in Heartland of a million dollars based on their contributions. We exclude their personal investments and holdings outside of the organization.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Has that created some envy on part of other people or has that created a sort of fear factor where people say it's not longer possible to do that?

>> Sanford Brown: No I think if anything people are more inspired to try and achieve that goal.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: So what are the 3 guiding principles that sort of characterizes your corporate culture?

>> Sanford Brown: Absolutely everything we do has to be above board. If you're ashamed of it you shouldn't do it. If you think a customer is paying too much money for the services they provide then you shouldn't charge them that much. So we disclose everything that we do down to the margin that we actual make on an account to our clients so that they know exactly how much skin we have in the game.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: So open book?

>> Sanford Brown: Open book. Second is ultimately in our organization never use the hierarchy of the organization to control the flow of information. Along that open book philosophy managers of Heartland Payment Systems that want to use their position to influence power or personal agenda find themselves at the exit door very, very quickly. That's one of the things that make Heartland, makes Heartland very successful because we allow the information to come straight from the street level, straight from the entry level all the way to the top of the house and then last but not least do the right thing. At the end of the day you can talk about full disclosure. You can talk about transparency. You can talk about not using management hierarchy to ultimately control the flow of information. But if you don't do the right thing and enforce it, lift up those that do all the time, make examples of the ones that don't, to discourage that behavior from ever happening again, then it's really all for nothing.

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: You walk the talk.

>> Sanford Brown: You walk the talk

>> Gerhard Gschwandtner: Makes a lot of sense. Thank you. We are going to continue our conversation with Sanford Brown tomorrow where we talk about how to run a more effective sales organization. Tune in tomorrow.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====