Heartland Payment Systems review: credit card payment processing 1

Telling the Truth about Heartland Payment Systems as an Employer; Processor
Keywords: payment processor, sales, sales professional, basis points, Heartland Payment Systems, Robert O. Carr, data breach, white collar criminals, vesting, scam, RM, credit card processing

As a former award winning RM sales rep with extensive experience of Heartland Payment Systems firsthand on the ground and secondhand at the corporate level and seeing this processing entity from both the customer's side and sales professional's side, I have a complaint against Heartland Payment Systems. And I present that complaint against Heartland Payment Systems LLC, here in the hopes that my experiences with Heartland Payment Systems can provide people who are unfamiliar with Heartland Payment Systems what they need to say no to Heartland recruiters, Heartland job ads, or Heartland credit card reps, thereby avoiding a complete nightmare that could last months or years. In addition, there is the hope that by telling of my experiences and what I know, sales professionals at Heartland might catch on sooner than I did.

My complaint is that Heartland Payment Systems has aspects that are a complete scam to merchants, but to sales employees, is a complete scam to the extent that were a court other than in New Jersey to be made aware of the true details of the Heartland scam, the company would be ended immediately. Although my complaint against Heartland Payment Systems is simple, the dark nature and details of Heartland Payment Systems as the scam that it is, is far more complex.

Heartland Payment Systems for merchant services: If you ever needed merchant services and happened to be so unlucky as to have hired Heartland Payment Systems, you will have most likely needed to have some keen experience or intelligence about pricing to avoid an exceedingly high rate (a processor markup over 200 basis points, i.e. 2% which can happen if you have Heartland Payment Systems). If your rep does not price you high, Heartland Payment Systems - as a matter of exception-less compensation policy - simply will not pay him or her more than pennies on the dollar if she's never vested. And moreover, unvested Heartland sales reps are under extreme pressure to satisfy Heartland Payment Systems' monthly sales quota because if they don't satisfy this, they automatically lose their entire Heartland portfolios, and that will mean that they spent months or years working extremely hard, paying for their own transportation, fuel, everything themselves on the hopes they would become vested. It is surprising not one of the several thousand sales reps they have done this to have not gone postal on them.

Most Heartland Payment Systems sales reps that are ever hired are in fact fired, losing their entire Heartland Payment Systems portfolios and the majority of their expected, indeed falsely promised compensation. Your unvested Heartland Payment Systems sales rep hopes not to lose all she worked for and strives to be one of the few who avoid this loss. The way for her to make that sales quota is for her to make you pay a lot more than you should. Your Heartland sales rep, therefore, will make the "margin" on your business as high as she needs, thus hitting you with a high rate you simply cannot afford. And regardless of your rate, you cannot count on your Heartland Payment Systems rep being there more than a few months - regardless of the quality of him or her as a person - because the central concept of Heartland Payment Systems' sales model is to terminate sales reps upon any instance of a relatively small sales slump.

The scam that is the sales model of Heartland Payment Systems is a ‘termination for profit' sales model. If Heartland Payment Systems terminates RMs before they vest, Heartland Payment Systems reduces its labor cost by more than 50%. In the process, Heartland Payment Systems of course destroys the hard working sales rep financially. In addition, Heartland Payment Systems terrifies the unvested sales professional during her employment, and Heartland Payment Systems' sales scam makes it possible for managers and vice presidents to manipulate and control sales professionals. This is the obvious upshot of Heartland Payment Systems having years' worth of financial compensation "up in the air". The official phrase that Heartland Payment Systems uses is "in the woods". If a sales rep is in the woods, that means she has years' worth of earned financial compensation that she may or may not receive! Due to the inherent flaw in basing continued employment in a tough industry on a pristine performance of always avoiding a slight sales slump, Heartland Payment Systems' managers "are able" to terminate most sales reps before they ever become vested, which means that Heartland's sales design scam allows Heartland Payment Systems to simply not pay the majority of sales reps the majority of their earned financial compensation, a.k.a. residuals. To explained what that would mean if Heartland Payment Systems were, say, a restaurant, a server would have a part where their tips were capp

The leverage that Heartland Payment Systems managers have over the sales professional increases exponentially as the sales rep gets closer to vesting.

If you have interviewed for a sales rep position with Heartland Payment Systems, you need to be aware that Heartland Payment Systems will terminate you as a sales rep regardless of how productive you've been in the past prior to that sales slump. Anyone in sales knows that every sales professional will have a sales slump now and again. In fact, that is about the only certainty in sales. Heartland Payment Systems implemented Bob Carr's termination of unvested professionals for profit sales model. And not only did Heartland Payment Systems implement that model, but Heartland Payment Systems placed that as its core employment evaluation principle for all unvested sales professionals - as stated in the Heartland Payment Systems‘ Handbook. Heartland Payment Systems core concept of the termination of unvested professionals trumps literally everything else at play within Heartland Payment Systems, which tells us everything that we need to know to conclude one of two things: Either, those who designed Heartland Payment Systems's sales policy know nothing about sales, as it's difficult to conceive of a worse, more idiotic and harmful model for sales persons, or Heartland Payment Systems designed Heartland Payment Systems' sales policy this way on purpose for financial gain.

Why would Heartland Payment Systems design Heartland Payment Systems‘ sales policy this way on purpose? The answer is because, although those making top level decisions for Heartland Payment Systems portray themselves as the guys who "do the right thing when no one is looking", nothing could be farther from the truth and if you look more clearly and carefully at the facts, those behind the creation and perpetuation of Heartland Payment Systems are mostly egoistic and selfish, satisfying most of the empirical criteria for psychopathy, while being experts at creating the appearance of being "do-gooders" but in fact getting away with criminality.

For an eye-opening example, the former CEO and primary designer of Heartland Payment Systems sales policies, Bob Carr is an expert at this. By many, Robert O. Carr is championed as a great man with incredible integrity. He came out of the massive breach of 2009 appearing to be a hero. Let's look more closely. In fact, as few are aware, as Bob Carr states in his recent autobiography, Carr knowingly sold 20% of his Heartland Payment Systems' HPY stock a mere couple days before announcing the breach in a press release, which then caused the Heartland Payment Systems' HPY stock to plummet to a tiny fraction of its original price. Why didn't he sell all of his stock? Because THAT would be wrong?! Manipulating public perception, Bob Carr was considered by some to be honest with good intentions, even a hero, and Carr escaped criminal investigation. How would those who purchased Heartland Payment Systems HPY stock at an extraordinarily inflated price on the same day that Bob Carr sold one-fifth of his stock to these duped investors? Did Bob Carr care what he was doing to these investors, financially? How would those HPY buyers perceive Carr if they had access to Carr's privileged information? The answer is similar to the answer to another question, that of how the majority of Heartland Payment Systems sales professional feel about being wrongfully terminated prior to vesting? Bob Carr recently sold everyone out who helped build his company. Heartland Payment Systems is now owned and operated by Global Payment. That means that Heartland Payment Systems customers can now expect more direct grief with Global Payment's regular increases in fees, changing policies, etc., all of which is already happening.

It all fits with many hundreds of complaints readily available on the Internet for example at URLs such as Indeed and Glassdoor's Heartland Payment Systems' page reserved for Heartland Payment Systems employee reviews. Read it all there, as well, where former and current Heartland Payment Systems employees are mostly all saying in their own words that those few who control, compose, and carry on the "essence of Heartland Payment Systems" do not care about you a bit. Most of them are manipulators of perception who care about - and only about - what they can get out of you, what they can receive from your hard work and your naïve willingness to trust them. I affirm those reported experiences as what the experience of being an employee of Heartland Payment Systems is like.

By terminating you before you vest, Heartland Payment Systems reduces your expected compensation - for the sales you already made (never forget that part) - to less than half of that you would have received if they did not prevent you from vesting. Now that badly violates any basic principle of decency. And that also violates basic principles of law. So far, Heartland Payment Systems has gotten away with this with thousands of employees. In addition, by terminating you early on, they break any promises that you made to your clients to always be there for them. You now no longer have the capacity, despite what you want, to help them. Heartland Payment Systems is a scam for both sales reps and customers. Heartland Payment Systems is a scam in many other ways that won't be presented here, as there are so many that undertaking an explanation of them would be a Herculean task.

But the way that Heartland Payment Systems is a scam for sales professionals is especially true when Heartland Payment Systems terminates you just prior to when you would otherwise vest. When Heartland Payment Systems does that, Heartland Payment Systems avoids paying you what Heartland Payment Systems owes you, often more than $100, 000 that the unvested sales rep earned just as legitimately as the vested rep and will never be paid or it. Heartland Payment Systems in fact has done this to more than 5, 000 sales professionals and perhaps 10, 000 (of course only Heartland Payment Systems knows the true number), which mathematically speaking, makes for a class action suit in the amount of one billion dollars. And such a class action suit would go part of the way toward proper recompense, since without all those sales professionals that Heartland Payment Systems has abused with this oh so smooth scam, thereby failing to compensate, Heartland Payment Systems would literally be nothing. That is one way to understand how Heartland Payment Systems is pure scam.

What Heartland Payment Systems does to the majority of sales professionals is a level of machiavellian manipulation that enters into the realm of the sociopathic. Heartland Payment Systems' decision makers created a callous egoistic design to enrich the unjust profits of those who designed this scam. Bob Carr is in fact a self-proclaimed Ayn Randite. The vast majority of sales professionals are terminated because of the inevitable, indeed predictable, "sales slump". And this is by Bob Carr self-conscious design. And the vast majority of sales professionals terminated are terminated before they are vested. Vesting takes most sales professionals between 15 and 30 months. And prior to vesting, the majority of your expected compensation will occur if and only if you vest. If you are terminated before you vest, your compensation for the sales *you have already made* will be cut by more than half.

Therefore, by terminating the majority of sales professionals, Heartland Payment Systems is able to drop its compensation costs to sales professionals, overall, to much less than half of that expected.

Heartland Payment Systems, that is, is running a scam for many years where they are getting away with not paying the majority of due compensation that Heartland Payment Systems leads their sales reps to reasonably expect to receive. And the difference between receiving and not receiving that compensation depends more on the managers' needs and wants than on a rep's actual sales performance. It is very easy for an experienced manager to keep you from your goals, and they do that to reps close to vesting. I've seen it several times. The veteran managers know how to play this game and having been there a long time indicates they have the stomach for it. But it destroys most reps they do it to.

If you care about money more than you care about people, if you care more about enriching your financial standing more than you care about your moral soul, or if you are happily unaware that you are acting to carry out a sales model devised by white collar criminals, then you will see Heartland Payment Systems LLC as a very brilliant sales scheme indeed.

If this corporate sales strategy can ever be exposed and presented to the lawfully and properly situated arbiters of law and decency, it would be seen for the inimical, fraudulent, scam that it is - way out of keeping with the better principles of a society founded in any way at all on fairness, equity, or decency.

Heartland Payment Systems employment… the upshot: Unless you happen to be in a period of your life where you can afford to learn very deep, trying lessons the hard way about corporate greed, the nature of inherently selfish people, and the experiences of what it's like to become a victim of these vices and misfortunes, then you should run from Heartland Payment Systems just like it's the plague. Because it is, and in some ways Heartless Payment Systems is far worse than the plague.

In my informed view, Heartland Payment Systems is a scam. It is a scam through and through for the sales professionals that it abuses and manipulates for profit without a care, thought, or concern, and also for the customers who lose their reps so quickly because of this scam called ‘Heartland Payment Systems'. And don't hold your breath waiting for Heartland Payment Systems to replace your terminated rep. Heartland Payment Systems will never replace her.

If you're still unsure, just have a look at the employee reviews on Glassdoor from the first to the last. You will see a striking pattern. Those with a glowing positive view are almost always employees who have been employed by Heartland Payment Systems for less than a year, while those with a negative view are those who've been there much longer. Likewise, the pattern also holds negatively and in the reverse. Although you will find Heartland Payment Systems employees that caught on early and leave negative reviews who were there less than a year, you will find disproportionately few employees that are very positive who were there a long time. Those there a long time learn the truth about Heartland Payment Systems, that it is not a nice or ethical place.

It's hard to imagine anyone still tempted by Heartland Payment Systems after learning about its true nature, but just in case you are, at least do the following. Say you're going to decide, but that you would really need to see their ‘RM Agreement' so you can look it over. There they require you to sign away several basic constitutional rights.

Heartland Payment Systems LLC is, in my experience, a highly unethical company in how it treats its employees. Heartland Payment Systems is worse than even a notorious mega-corporation such as Walmart. With Walmart, the employees know straight up from the first paycheck that they will be poorly compensated. But with Heartland Payment Systems, you are misled to believe that you are being and will continue to be compensated very well.

For the majority of sales professionals ever employed by Heartland Payment Systems on whose work the company's growth, if not existence, depends more than anything or anyone else, the experience of realizing that the "Heartland zeitgeist" is a sham - an ingenious corporate scam - is like an experience of realizing that what you thought was merely a horror film is actually real.

Those employees who say "well from day one, the RM knows the rules for vesting at Heartland Payment Systems" only reveal that they suffer from a vast and inexcusable ignorance of the facts because sales professionals are, for obvious reasons, purposefully kept from knowing the disturbing statistics of vesting or what the rules for vesting actually mean or even how they might play out - since managerial caprice and whim often decide when termination occurs. In addition, as some painfully learn, some managers will purposely prevent a sales rep from vesting. Heartland Payment Systems managers have more power than most ever realize.

Have a Heartland Payment Systems sales slump termination story? Help other job seekers by leaving a summary of in the comments below.

Considering selling for Heartland Payment Systems? Best advice for you… run just like Alien, Predator, and the Plague are all simultaneously after you