Heartland, a global payment processing company, released a one-stop shop for its services about a year ago, which is primarily focused on helping retail clients conduct all payment business in one space. And, the company also utilizes its Entrepreneur Studio to connect, train and support budding entrepreneurs.
Interview with Chris Allen, Heartland senior vice president of marketing.
What’s been the reception to this new product?
The amount of feedback that we’ve gotten has been really, really strong as it relates to, “I can do everything now in one place.” We’ve gotten really good feedback from our dealers. We’ve been able to put things in market and test them and then sort of improve them. I think we’ve got a lot more learning left to do, especially because the market and the demands have changed slightly since COVID. And there are restaurants and retail shops wanting to do new things, and we are trying to stay ahead of that and what that takes, but the reception has been very strong.
What do you perceive happening in the next 12 months?
I would say largely hardening the software to really work for our most core customers. I think instead of doing a peanut butter-spread approach, I would say over the next
12 months we’ll dive a little deeper into table service and counter service restaurants. And then definitely online ordering. Also e-commerce, that is one of the biggest demands in retail. So we’ll be going deeper into clothing, apparel, shoes, things like that.
What is Heartland’s Entrepreneur Studio?
From an enterprise perspective, something we’ve done is create this thing called the Entrepreneur Studio. We realized that not only should we provide products and services to our customers to help them run and grow a better business, but also we said, “You know what, we’re going to get a podcast with really the best and the brightest minds that would really resonate with our core customers and attract new customers.” Then at the same time, we provide coursework and training from those experts that can help new and emerging entrepreneurs and small business owners run and grow a better business. We actually try to give back by providing that type of content.
We realized we haven’t really told anybody just how connected to the entrepreneur community we really are. We’re going to build programs to help everyone grow better businesses and get them not only to see more of the products that we have, but at the same time see the information, the expertise that we bring and why they should stick around.
