e008- "The Art of Storytelling is the Art of Communicating"| Ed Bilat with Steve Benson, CEO of Badger Maps
Steven Benson is the Founder and CEO of Badger Maps, the #1 route planner for field salespeople. After receiving his MBA from Stanford, Steve’s career has been in field sales with companies like IBM, Autonomy, and Google – becoming Google Enterprise’s Top Performing Salesperson in the World in 2009. In 2012 Steve founded Badger Maps to help field salespeople be more successful. He has also been named one of the Top 40 Most Inspiring Leaders in Sales Lead Management. WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE: Inspiration story of Jason Lemkin -"The Godfather of SaaS" model All-In-One: Steve's biggest success and failure How to use Storytelling techniques to overcome Sales objections SHOW NOTES [00:11] Intro [01:09] Welcome Steve [01:31] Business success stories that inspire him [01:40] Jason Lemkin : creating SaaStr [04:00] GPS analogy [04:50] Sales experience [05:20] How Steve got into sales [06:45] IBM training program [07:20] Sales roles at Google [08:10] Challenges faced while switching career path [09:01] Failures [09:20] Badger maps [09:50] Lacking vision [10:07] Choice of Technology industry [10:45] Dynamic nature of the technology industry [12:34] Competing in software/app world [13:37] Stories that excite his customers [13:44] Application of Badger maps in sales [14:38] Field sales [18:05] Being efficient with time [19:00] Having success stories with statistical details [20:05] Leadership circle [21:25] Identify a problem and find a solution [22:00] Objection handling [23:20] Challenges facing today’s sales leaders [25:21] The art of storytelling [26:17] Contact info [27:40] Outro SHOW TRANSCRIPT There's so much information and so much to do and so little time today in a way that there hasn't been before, and I think it takes people's focus off things. It makes it harder to accomplish things.Speaker 2: 00:14 This is the storytelling for sales podcast, a show about leveraging the power of storytelling to ignite your sales performance and grow your business.Ed Bilat: 00:25 Hello, this is Ed Bilat, we have a very cool guest for you today. Steve Benson, the founder, and CEO of Badger maps, the number one route planner for field salespeople joining us today after receiving his MBA from Stanford. Steve's career has been in the field sales with companies like IBM, our autonomy, and Google. And actually, he became Google's enterprise top performing salesperson in the world in 2009. In 2012 Steve founded Badger maps to help field salespeople to be more successful. Steve has been named one of the top 40 most inspiring leaders in sales lead management. Steve Benson, welcome to the show.Steve Benson: 01:11 Hey Ed, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.Ed Bilat: 01:13 Oh, absolutely. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have you on the show! I listen to your podcast and I watch your videos all the time, so I can't wait to hear your story all the way from San Francisco. But before we do this, let me ask you a traditional question, which is “what business success story inspires you and why?”Steve Benson: 01:35 Well, um, you know, I guess one of my big inspirations, uh, running Badger is Jason Lemkin. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but he's the guy that started EchoSign, which is kind of very select DocuSign if you're familiar with that company.Ed Bilat: 01:50 Oh yeah. Yeah. We use DocuSign all the time.Steve Benson: 01:53 Okay. He started EchoSign, which, uh, is a very similar product I guess, but they sold it. They didn't take it public as DocuSign did. They sold earlier too. Adobe, he was one of the early people that made a SAAS business and built it up from scratch and took it all the way to a very nice exit. That's what he's first known for. But then after that he started just writing blogs and kind of communicating with the world of people that start software businesses and just writing down and created some really great thoughts and content around how to do every element of running a software company like his challenges that he faced, ways he'd overcome things, and he talked to other people about how they were overcoming things in very clear, simple explanations. Yeah, two-page articles would create vast value if, from my perspective, they taught me a ton of things, and that content strategy then grew into now a huge business that's called SaaStr. Yeah, when it was just all started, he wasn't even monetizing in the beginning. He was just kind of writing about his experiences and be like, Hey, I know a lot about this and I'm just going to share my thoughts. He's a really humble guy, a really inspirational guy for me. The company that I run is based on ideas that I learned from him, Ed Bilat: 03:11 So this was a blueprint for SAAS companies with no expectations to monetize this whatsoever and it turned out into something really, really big.Steve Benson: 03:19 Right, which works out sometimes. I don't actually know if he had the plan to build the whole SaaStr Fund staying on top of what he was starting off with. I actually suspect he just had a blog and was creating content and then so many people were following it. He was like, oh, I should have a conference. I should. All of them. They do it now. But really it just started out creating great content for what ultimately came to his user software executives.Ed Bilat: 03:49 We're gonna circle back to that. Let's turn the spotlight on you. Now our podcast listeners know, and I think today this will be particularly relevant. I like to use the GPS analogy. Then I'm, you know, you and my guests, right? You are in this world. I know Badger maps is for sure using GPS and, as you know, in order for the application to locate you, you need at least three towers. So each tower makes a circle, triangulation technique, and it'd been able to pinpoint yourself or precisely. So then I looked at your awesome experience. I see those three circles, right? I see the sales circle, right? I see the true passion for technology in this tree, which is your circle two. And I also see your leadership drive, which is circle number three. So let's talk about all three of them. Shall We?Steve Benson: 04:48 Sounds great.Ed Bilat: 04:49 All right, excellent. Circle one is sales experience. I look in, you've been in sales roles for many, many years. IBM, HP, Google, and currently you are founder and CEO of Badger maps and which is very unusual for a CEO. You actually host your own podcast outside of sales talk, which I think is awesome, but not many CEOs are actually doing this. And look, not many CEOs actually record sales training videos for their reps. And you do. So how did you even get into the sales world?Steve Benson: 05:22 Well, you know, originally it was because of a friend slash mentor of mine. I was in business school at Stanford looking at a bunch of more traditional roles for students coming out of business school types of things that most of them do, you know, consulting and finance, jobs like that. And I was looking at them and interviewing with them and kind of exploring the different roles that are there's, you know, tried two years away from graduation, still figuring out, you know what? Early in my time there and trying to figure out what path I would take, this guy I know it was a friend and a mentor was like, you know, you could be a consultant and he had been a consultant before. He was like, you should be a consultant in finance. We can do any of these things, but ask yourself, “are you going to be the best guy in the room? Best guy or girl in the room at this job?” And because I don't think you'll be the best finance person, I don't think you'd be the best consultant. You might go into sales and you might be the best salesperson in the room and that's kind of a natural fit for you. And everyone always focuses on showing up their weaknesses. But really in a career, you kind of want to play to your strengths.Steve Benson: 06:32 I think your strength might be the interpersonal side, the leadership side, the sales side of the business. I was like, oh, that really makes a ton of sense to me.Ed Bilat: 06:43 Okay.Steve Benson: 06:44 So I started looking at the jobs of that nature and I ended up entering IBM that has this program where they, uh, which is like a year-long training program.Ed Bilat: 06:54 Yes. Steve Benson: 06:55 Pretty cool. It was like, so right after business school I went into a year-long sales training program and they're kind of grooming people to be at their company for the long term, I think is what they're looking for. And they stay, invest a ton up front trying to make you a great salesperson. I didn't end up staying there after the year was over. I ended up, uh, with a software company called Autonomy, which subsequently was purchased by HP. And then I ended up, uh, moving into a sales role at Google because they're kind of on the cutting edge of SAAS. I'd seen some SAAS that, so software as a service to shift to doing software on the cloud as opposed to traditional software. It's downloaded or solo CD, it changes the whole business model and stuff. And I, and I saw that at Autonomy a bit. We were dabbling in that model. Okay. One of the companies leading the space, Salesforce, Workday, a few others, but a Salesforce is where Google is in a really