Q


the years, but we’ve only augmented it – we never traded off.


A &


Selling Power (SP): You’ve been at TNP for 14 years. Why did you choose to work there – and what drives you to stay? Haas: Out of college, I gained a lot of experience in sales and I kept seeing that salespeople were often slighted in their compensation. Compensation structures changed frequently and, if you had a great year, leaders applied more pressure the next year – sometimes setting unachievable goals. When a company was trying to cut costs, sales was where leaders cut.


Having absorbed all that in a couple places, what drew me to TransNational Payments was that I could help build a sales culture that addressed those problems. We never put something forward to our sales force that we would have to take away. For example, if we instituted a sales commission element to push sales goals forward for a year, we never retracted that. Certainly, there have been changes to the plan over


SP: How would you describe the company’s culture? Haas: We respect it deeply. Our culture is interesting. It hasn’t been deliberately forged but has developed naturally over the years. It wasn’t a matter of saying, “We’re going to make a culture that’s this.” It’s been: “We are going to do this” and the culture comes out of that. We are a “family-first” organization. We believe you only have a short amount of time on the planet and what matters is not your time at work; it’s your family. We also strive to dazzle people with honesty. We are very candid – and you can feel that here. Guests come here and say to us, “This place feels great. People are happy. They are working hard and they’re having fun.”


SP: Honesty and transparency are mentioned a lot in connection with TNP. How do those manifest themselves? Haas: They show up in everything we do, but I’ll give you two examples – one internal, one external. Internally, we are very comfortable setting expectations that are true. When we bring sales folks into the organization, we set really clear expectations on workload and compensation. I’ve seen where some companies tell a new rep, “You can make X” but then you get inside and realize nearly everyone is making less than X – and you’d have to do some really amazing things to make X. We like to set very realistic expectations and have reps be thrilled to exceed them. Externally, you see our honesty in our pricing. This industry tends to over-promise and under-deliver, and there’s no regulation around that. We won’t do that. We are passionate about winning business, but we’re not afraid to lose business – so we won’t ever give customers pricing that isn’t absolutely realistic. Even if someone chooses not to do business with us, we want them to feel served


and know we have been completely honest with them.


SP: How do you achieve a healthy work-life balance at TNP? Haas: We try to incorporate family into things we do. We have an amazing picnic with no limit on head count – bring your family, friends and neighbors! The bigger that party becomes every summer, the better. We do a lot of healthy philanthropic giving. We encourage every employee to take a paid volunteer day to help in their community and bring their family with them. We always make decisions with a family-first mentality, knowing that everything we ask from our folks detracts from time with their families.


SP: From a sales perspective, what separates TNP from other companies in your industry? Haas: We treat our sales staff as our first customer. This comes from the CEO down. We know that the more we empower our sales staff and invest in them, the more they’ll take really good care of the next customer: our paying clients. For example, if we need reps to sell a lower-margin product, we’ll dip into our pockets, not theirs, to make sure they are compensated for it. Or, when we look at deploying a new product, we make sure our sales staff is fully resourced. Some companies have their reps bring clients to a certain point, then flip them over to another department – taking the sale to a certain point and then handing it off. We don’t think that feels good. When you have too many people involved in a sale, it can get confusing and the rep loses some control of the sale. We make sure our reps have the resources they need to take a sale from start to finish. SP: What does compensation look like for sales reps at TNP? Haas: There are several elements we think are differentiated in our space. First, we pay all our sales staff a salary. The salary is not set at a level that creates any comfort, but it gives


reps a flow of something for those SELLING POWER SPECIAL EDITION 2018


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