This may be obvious to everyone but me but I just discovered this trick and I think it's the greatest, as I hate how there is no way to change the way the contact list is sorted. One solution I've seen is to add a comma to the end of the name, (ex John Smith,) but I didn't like how it looked.

If you are editing a contact, in the 'Name' field there is a little upside-down triangle that, when tapped, opens a dialog that allows you to enter a title, middle name, suffix etc. My solution? Enter the entire name for the first name, and voila!