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September/October 2016 // PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL //
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September/October 2016 // PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL // XX
Sam learned the lottery business from the ground up. At 21,
he got caught up in the excitement of Washington’s Lottery
start-up—one of the coolest happenings in the state of
Washington at the time. He applied for a sales rep job, and
remembers being slightly surprised when the Lottery hired
him. The next thing he knew, he was moving to Walla Walla
to sell scratch games, and spending up to eight hours a day
driving his car from one end of his large territory to the other.
Sam explains that back then, everything was done manually.
In a pre-UPS era, logistics meant picking up the scratch tickets
at the Lottery’s regional office and delivering them in person
to 100+ retailers every week. He would hand-write an invoice,
the retailer would give him a check, and at the end of each
day he would go to the bank and deposit the funds.
Quickly promoted to the Lottery’s regional manager, then
director of sales for the entire state, Sam moved to Olympia,
where he found himself learning how to motivate a team of
35 more senior, and much more seasoned sales professionals
who had been hired from the private sector for the Lottery’s
start-up.
“This experience in my 20s prepared me for what lay ahead
because the state government did a really great job training
employees who wanted to be managers. A good deal of my
operational skills today are a direct result of what I learned
back then. I was traveling to six very different regions all
around the state, directing a sales staff and helping train
retailers. I never expected this to happen,” he shares as he
explains how it all unfolded.
Also, key to Sam’s success has been his dedication to
customers: understanding their needs, providing a service
and earning their trust—lessons learned early on. In high
school, he worked at his father’s farm implement store every
day during the summer, watching farmers come and go
while his father built his business standing next to the coffee
machine as customers came into the store. Business always
took place at the coffee machine.
“His customers would come in the store to buy tractors and
fencing, and my father sold them everything they needed—
not what he wanted to sell them. They always came with
a need,” Sam says. “This is why customer service has always
been important to me. Half of the success is the relationship,
and the other half is just the desire to help your customers.
I learned at an early age that you have to establish that
relationship so your customers trust you.”
Intuitive people skills continued to serve him well. Sam’s
simple approach to customer service, coupled with extensive
lottery experience, propelled him to director roles with the
Arizona Lottery, and eventually to Scientific Games where he
began Scientific Games launch of the
CSP
operations for the
Florida Lottery in 1997.
Sam is definitely someone who can sit at the table and
do business with a lottery because he’s also been on the
government side of the table. It was through
CSP
for the
Florida Lottery where his knowledge of the instant product
deepened.
“I had been a sales rep, a regional manager, a sales and
marketing director and a state director, but I still remember
standing there in a pile of dirt in Orlando thinking how are
we going to do this in 90 days?” he says. “We built a fully
operational
CSP
facility in 77 days.”
With the
SciTrak™
supply chain solution deployed at Scientific
Games’ new
CSP
facility, the Lottery embarked upon a
great instant game partnership. The
SciTrak
system securely
manages game inventory with more accuracy and efficiency
than other supply chain solutions, and it allows lotteries to
be much more responsive to retail sales volume and player
demand. In Florida, automated sorting was added in 2009
with
OrderSorter™
and predictive ordering technology was
added with
OrderCast™
in 2011.
“Customer service has always
been important to me. Half of the
success is the relationship, and the
other half is just the desire to help
your customers...”
-SamWakasugi
VP, Global
CSP
Services
Scientific Games