SaaS Origin Stories From Startup to Success: Learn the Essential Strategies for SaaS Growth with Steve Benson of Badger Maps
In this episode of SaaS Origin Stories, Phil speaks with Steve Benson, CEO of Badger Maps, a San Francisco based software company that enables field sales teams to manage their territory by combining Google Maps, data from their CRM, route optimization, schedule planning, and lead generation.
Steve is also the Founder and CEO of Badger Sales University, the Host of the ‘Outside Sales’ podcast, the President of Sales Hall of Fame, a LinkedIn Learning Instructor at LinkedIn, and a Field Sales Efficiency Expert at Sales Experts Channel.
They take a deep dive into the financial implications of starting a SaaS business and what to look for when searching for investors. They also delve into how to do research for your product, how to put the odds in your favor as a business, and what kind of game you want to play as a founder.
Guest at a Glance:
Name: Steve Benson
About Steve: Steve Benson is the CEO of Badger Maps, a San Francisco based software company that enables field sales teams to manage their territory by combining Google Maps, data from their CRM, route optimization, schedule planning, and lead generation.
Steve is also the Founder and CEO of Badger Sales University, the Host of the ‘Outside Sales’ podcast, the President of Sales Hall of Fame, a LinkedIn Learning Instructor at LinkedIn, and a Field Sales Efficiency Expert at Sales Experts Channel.
Topics we cover:
- The purpose of Badger Maps
- Why field salespeople’s results are tracked
- Get to know your user base
- The process of SaaS product funding
- Should you use debt?
- Putting the odds in your favor
- What investors are looking for in a successful SaaS product
- Should you sell when your company grows larger?
- What game do you want to play as a founder?
Key Takeaways:
Get to Know Your User Base
Badger maps was designed to make salespeople’s lives easier by planning their routes and figuring out the best ways to get somewhere in the most efficient way possible. Steve achieved this by speaking with multiple salespeople, figuring out what they needed and what the most common issues in their jobs were. By doing this, he wasn’t just trying to find out if his product was a good fit for the market, but was also creating his first generation of customers. You can find them on LinkedIn and ask specific questions without sounding salesy, and once they understand who you are and what you’re doing, you can start to ask if they’d be interested.
“I spoke with hundreds of people who were either the end user of the product, the manager of the end user of the product, the trainer, VP of sales - I spoke to a ton of them. That’s a really important thing to do I think, because you’re not just figuring out if this is a good fit for the market, but that becomes your lead generation for your first deals.”
Funding the Business
Steve was very lucky in the beginning of his career - he used to work at Google and had saved up quite a bit of money, so he had that side of the company sorted! But he needed to find three employees: an engineer, a product/general technologist, and a general business strategist. At first, he was paying only for those three but not himself, and after three years he eventually managed to get there. Starting a business is a risky game, but it worked out.
“Most people aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the risk of these things. If you were to ask someone what’s riskier: investing in a bank that’s in the news for being shaky or this startup. They’re probably going to say the bank because they’re in the news for being risky. It’s like, no no, the startup is way riskier.”
Be Careful About Getting Into Debt
A lot of startups will take out loans from bigger companies, and although Steve did this, he recommends that most people don’t, because at the end of the day you still have to pay it back. If your company doesn’t go the way you thought it would, then you’ll find yourself in a lot of trouble. He’s been quite clever about dipping in and out of debt, he’s made sure that he’s been earning enough to justify it and going to places that really understand SaaS. You can’t just go to the bank and ask for a loan as they won’t fully understand it.
“When you’re a startup, a lot of the debt products you can get are very expensive, and expensive debt products are very risky. Because the problem with debt is you have to pay it back and you’ve gotta pay it back on time or literally you lose your company.”
What Game Do You Want to Play as a Founder?
There are a lot of problems you could fix with the help of SaaS due to the abundance and acceleration of technology in the twenty-first century, but you have to ask yourself the following questions: what game are you going to play? How are you going to look for investors and make sure your business stays healthy, alive and well, and profitable? Some investors may want you to go in a different direction than what you planned, so you need to think about who you’re investing from and how much control you get over your business.