Full Throttle Leaders Podcast -Steve Benson

All right everybody, we got Steve Benson from Badger Maps today, and this is Full Throttle Leaders, the podcast that you've been listening to. And obviously my name is Michael Falato, Full Throttle Falato Leads, that's my company. I started this podcast, I'm on probably my 15th episode, the last 8 weeks, so it's going really well. Steve, tell me what you do a little bit at Badger Maps and what kind of got you to this point to start your own company.

Sure, yeah. So Badger Maps is a piece of software for field salespeople, so it snaps on to their CRM and brings maps and routes, uh, to their CRM. We do territory alignment, we do lead routing, we do— we have a gamification, about 5 pieces of software, 5 different things that do stuff for field sales teams.

Um, what, what were you doing before starting Badger Maps and how long has Badger Maps been around?

Badger Maps has been around since 2012. And, uh, so about 16 years now for, no, 14 years now. And, uh, and before this, I worked at Google. I was, uh, in sales at, at Google, and I was working on the, the enterprise teams, like the Google software team.

Okay. Um, how big is your team now, and tell me how you kind of go to market right now, and what's your ICP?

Team is, uh, I guess about 100 people total with, you know, with contractors and everything around the world. Um, And we have our main office in America is in Salt Lake City. We've got a bunch of employees in California and we've got a, our European offices in southern Spain.

Okay.

Um, we, uh, I guess our ICP is field sales teams. So, you know, uh, I guess the person that we target from a lead generation perspective is a, uh, is a VP of sales or other leader in the, of a, of a, in industries where people have a lot of, uh, field sales as a part of their motions. Things like, you know, you don't sell software with a field sales team usually, but you would sell construction stuff in construction, uh, med device, ADT, that type of thing.

Or they have a territory, you know, like figuring out where to go and what's the best route and the time of day, all that stuff, right?

Exactly. Yeah, that's, that's the, the core thing we started, started out doing was show all the data that you have about your customers on a map and, and that can, and then help you with the decision-making process around who do I want to focus on tomorrow, which, which customers, who I owe a visit to, or who I owe a phone call to, or who do I What do I have to do and when? And then think through, you know, from an optimization perspective, what order should I do those things in so that I don't zigzag all around town?

Salespeople? I mean, I'm thinking like, I, I have technicians that go out and do AC, right? Why, why would this be about sales? Why wouldn't it be just about service too?

About 40% of our customer base is in services.

Okay.

So, It, but it's a special type of service person. If, if you had 30, uh, HVAC guys and, and you were dispatching them out from a centralized location, they wouldn't need a routing decision-making tool. If they were, if you had a team of— because they're not, they're not making routing decisions, so you're, you're dispatching them from a centralized location. It's like a lot of like, like air conditioning guys probably don't, they don't go to a whole bunch of places in a day in general. Some, some if they're like in maintenance or something might, but if they're going to go install a new HVAC unit, that takes all day. So, um, they, they don't have a routing problem. They have a dispatch problem. And so they're, they're getting sent out from, you've got 30 installers and you're dispatching them out from a centralized location. That's not a routing problem. So you, that's a, that's, and that's often what you see in a lot of like, you know, those types of industries. But sometimes you do see, and you do see field service people who behave like field salespeople. And when I, when I say behave, it's like they have to just, I have, they're covering a territory. Like I'm covering Western Pittsburgh and I need to cover all the, all these copy machines and do the maintenance on them, or all these whatever kind of machine, or I need to swing by. I'm doing services, but I'm behaving like a salesperson in, in that I have to determine where I'm gonna go and in what order and where my priorities are. Like, I know this guy's copier is broken, so I have to go see this guy tomorrow.

Well, if you're, if you're, uh, doing maintenance and you're the dispatcher, I mean, you got to think about like, who would I want to go out? I have 35 jobs I have, and then maybe 30 minutes apiece. I would think it's the same problem, like, where do I send this person so they're not driving?

If it's a— yeah, if it's a short— if it's a short job like that, then yeah, you can end up with a very similar problem. You need to—

you need a certain amount of meetings or appointments a day for it to make sense, obviously.

That's, that's what it is. Yeah. You, you need to have a routing problem. If you have less, if you're doing less than 3 things in the field, you don't really have a routing problem. Some people still use this cuz they're like, well, I still wanna know. I don't have, I don't, it's less for me. It's less about like what order to do things in, but I still wanna know if I drive out to this suburb, um, who should I stop by on the way out and who should I stop by on the way back? Oh yeah. You know? Yeah.

Like that's, Just to say, is it also giving heads up? Like, say you don't have your fleet with trackers of where your people are, can it be used as a way to— Steve's over here, Tom's over there, and I could see, kind of see on a map of where they're at if I'm like an overseer of the strategy or the—

Yeah, so it does have capabilities kind of in that, uh, tracking and keeping track of what's going on in the field type of area. We don't show here is where John is right now this very minute. What we, what we do show is we— when John checks in at the site, um, or and like takes his notes and stuff, the lat, the lat-long is captured. And so the where they were when they took their notes is captured effectively. So when notes are saved, and so after every meeting, you know, they're prompted to take notes and gather data about what occurred in the sales meeting. And so then you can run a report and say, hey, show me, show me in the last month which notes were taken not on site. That were like not, not close to where the meeting was supposed to happen. And if, if, you know, on Friday afternoon all the, all the notes were taken from a golf course, then, then you, then you would know that they were at that golf course and not out doing sales calls. But that we don't do the minute by minute where are people because that kind of already exists just for free in phones anyway. So we didn't. We didn't feel like, uh, that kind of sharing was necessary. We might build it in because there are some, some reasons to use that sort of thing, but we kind of feel like we're going to piss off as many people as we're going to make happy with a feature like that. So we've always been— we've always felt we had a nice balance of like people didn't feel like they were being intruded on if it's just capturing lat-long when they take notes, whereas they feel intruded on if they're, um, if, if you're being tracked every, every second of every day.

And you work with solar companies?

Uh, sometimes, yeah, although not— so there's a different kind of software that is for walking down the street going door to door, which is often what solar companies are doing. They're often walking down the street in this suburb going to every house in Phoenix and being like, this is going to save you money because the sun's real hot here and the power is real expensive. So they have a nice pitch there to individual houses. And that's a slightly different kind of software. There's a few players in that space. Spatio, Sales Rabbit. And there's a few of the big companies like WorkWave that do, and ServiceTitan that have stuff like that. The best one, the best one is Sales Rabbit.

Sales Rabbit. Okay. And what's the, what's the average cost for a company to use your software? So like, say they have 20 reps, do you do a per rep fee or how's your licensing set up?

Yeah, like, like most software, it's per, per rep. So, um, we have two products. We have a business product and we have an enterprise product. Uh, the enterprise has like more enterprisey features like SSO and advanced this and advanced that. Uh, the biggest thing is it'll— when we connect to the CRM with the it doesn't just connect to one object. The Enterprise version can connect to multiple objects, meaning leads and I've got opportunities and I want all of those things to be connected to and shown on the map. And I want to see the relationships between those things. Like I want to see what opportunity goes to what account or what contact. And so that's all in the Enterprise product. The business product, um, is just, we just connect to one object in the CRM and then the activities or the tasks, um, which is a different object. So I guess two, we, I guess we do two objects with that one, but it's like one's the, the customer type, like accounts or contacts or leads. And the other is the activities that you're, that you're doing with those leads or those customers.

CRM that you work better with? Like HubSpot and Salesforce, or, or what?

Yeah, um, so we have a, uh, uh, good question. And we, we, we actually also are— so I'm also the CEO of GridSquid, which is, um, a connector product that connects pieces of software to CRM systems, and the way that all happened was Badger needed a really good connector into all these CRMs, and, and we had originally built our own connectors, and then we used like a connector platform.

And most companies kind of do that, or—

yeah, there's a bunch of connector platforms. And, and so we eventually then— we, we've— there were a bunch of problems that we experienced, like not having like a, a connector system that was really built for CRMs. And so we built a hub and spoke connector system into CRM systems, and that's called GridSquid, and we sell that to software companies. So we're, we're, we've got a bi-directional real-time integration at Badger through GridSquid into Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics, Soho, Insightly, NetSuite, Pipedrive, Monday and Sugar.

But do you have Tuesday?

We don't have Tuesday. Oh, and we have Viva too. Viva and Viva Vault and a few others, but those are the, those are the main ones. But we just kind of keep adding new CRMs as, as either customers of GridSquid need more or, or Badger runs into customers that have, you know, there, there are so many, it's such a long tail in the CRM market. And so, you know, whenever there's a deal and want to kind of makes sense to add it to our platform.

Awesome. Well, um, this last question: how do people get a hold of you?

Best place to get a hold of me is probably LinkedIn. Um, you know, you just look up Steve Benson Badger Maps or Steve Benson Grid Squid, and I'll, I'll come up here.

It's actually under Steven. It's linkedin.com/n/stevenbenson is your username.

That, that sounds right. Yeah, uh, Stephen Benson. Yeah, but I think if you search Steve Benson, I come up too. So if you, if you add— I bet if you just put Steve and Badger in, I would come up.

Yeah, they just look up Michael and idiot and I come up for some reason. But yeah, thanks for making time. Um, as you guys know, I'm Michael Falato. Reach out to me if you need me for LinkedIn automation, email automation, roundtables, masterminds, podcasts. We'd love to work with anybody listening. And I just want to thank Steve. Really cool company. Great Google, ex-Google worker here that turned his company into like his own, his own deal, which is the best thing to do in life. Do your own job, do your own business and work for yourself. Thanks, Steve.

Thank you.