I'm Jeroen from Salesflare and this is Founder Coffee.
Every two weeks, I have coffee with a different founder. We discuss our lives, our passions, what we've learned, ... in an intimate interview, to get to know the person behind the company.
For this forty-sixth episode, I spoke with Steven Benson, founder and CEO of Badger Maps, a mapping platform and route planning app for field salespeople.
After studying geography and earning an MBA, Steven spent his entire career in field sales for companies such as IBM and HP, before selling the Google Maps API to businesses.
Having faced many mapping challenges, he realized there jiangsu cell phone number list was a gap in the market for a mapping product for field salespeople. That’s how Badger Maps was born. Nearly nine years later, Steven now runs a self-funded business with a team of 75 people.
We talk about the power of podcasting, language study, three-hour bike rides on an exercise bike, and why he might move his business out of the Valley.
Badger Maps is a CRM add-on that helps field sales teams effectively. What we do for field sales teams is take data from their CRM system about their customers and put it on a map for their field salespeople, giving them the ability to plan their day, build a route, focus on the right customers. There's a whole suite of tools for the outside salesperson or the field salesperson.
Jeroen:
So is the program focused on mapping, as its name suggests?
Steven:
Well, it's on a map. So basically, it's taking data and putting it on a map. It looks like a map that does a bunch of things, but it's a different way of looking at your data that's extremely useful for people who are out in the field. You wouldn't use it to interact with your customers on the phone. It's for people like medical device salespeople, beer salespeople at bars, or pharmaceutical salespeople. These types of salespeople are out in the field and meeting their customers every day.