Increased Diversity Creates A More Inclusive, Welcoming And Generally Better Work Environment And Company Culture.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Steve Benson, CEO and founder of Badger Maps, the #1 route planner for field salespeople in the Apple App store. Steve was Google Enterprise’s Top Performing Salesperson in the World and has been selected as one of the Top 40 Most Inspiring Leaders in Sales Lead Management. He is a passionate career coach and has built a successful internship and employee training program where he helps people at Badger develop fulfilling careers and thrive in their role.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! What is your “backstory”?

It’s my pleasure! I started Badger Maps in 2012 because I was frustrated by having a problem no one was solving when I was working in field sales. I knew a lot of other people had the same problem, and I believed it could be solved with software. The way I got into that position was that my career has been spent in field sales, and so I understood the challenges faced by field sales people first hand. When working on the Google Maps team, I got to know how powerful mobile mapping could be, and had experience with the types of solutions and apps that mobile was capable of enabling.

I knew I could improve my performance at my job as a field sales rep if I could combine my customer data with a mobile mapping system, and I could envision a solution that could schedule and plan my time selling in the field more efficiently.

The problem of combining a map, a routing algorithm, a calendar, and a salesperson’s customer data had been a problem that salespeople have had for hundreds of years. But the reason it hadn’t been solved before was because you needed computer based mapping, computer based calendar capabilities, internet connectivity on a mobile device, the ability for a computer to interact with the salesperson’s customer database, and a mobile device that could serve as the platform to do this in real time.

In 2011, all these things were coming together, and I was uniquely positioned to solve this problem of field salespeople, given my background in sales and working on the Google Maps team.

When I started Badger Maps, there were only 2 people at the company, and we were trying to decide whether we should work from the kitchen table or get some office space. We got some shared office space so that we could have a distraction free environment to work in. Eventually we got our own space, which was a backroom of a dentist office. In terms of the good bad and the ugly, this was the ugly.

We brought more and more people on board and have been growing a lot in the last years, opening offices in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Spain and the Philippines. There has been so much professional and personal growth within our team and I’m very thankful to be a part of it and witness the great development and growth of my employees and the business.

Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

Before we could afford our own place, we got a sublet in an office where the landlord also worked in. He’d be best described as ‘super creepy’ and ‘vampire-like’, and would hang out and kind of slink around leering at people. We shared a bathroom with him and late at night if someone was in the bathroom, he’d just stand outside the door, silently listening. You could see the shadows of his shoes under the door. The team was pretty creeped out, and we eventually instituted a policy that no one would work at the office alone. We got out of there as fast as we could — it was great motivation to get revenue up!

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

At Badger, we have a very unique mindset and company culture. Half of the company’s purpose is to be a software company, the other half is to be an educational organization, that trains and develops our team and helps each individual reach their full career potential.

Our internal coaching and career development program has helped us increase employee satisfaction, motivation and productivity. It has enabled us to create a great culture where people can thrive in their roles, feel appreciated and enjoy coming to work.

What’s unique about the program is that employees are encouraged to take on different responsibilities than they were expected to when starting at the company. They can work on projects in different departments or even switch roles entirely if they identify another area of the business that is a better fit for them. People constantly change, grow in their position and are thus intrinsically motivated to give it their all.

We often see people switching roles early in their time at Badger. For example, they come in as a salesperson and then end up in marketing or HR. Another way we’ve seen people switch roles is that they start off in a more general role and focus into a specific area over time. Someone would come in as a general marketing person and then end up in content marketing or PR. They might join in sales and end up focusing in customer success after a while.

Sometimes people are even working in two departments at the same time, doing projects in sales and marketing for example, and then it transitions over that way. We’ve seen lots of different ways of how people switch between roles and projects and it’s always been a smooth transition.

This mindset of always learning and innovating really helps everyone grow together as a team, having the same vision of the company’s future and work together towards a common goal.

Are you working on any new or exciting projects now?

I’m working on some fun video projects right now! We just launched our own podcast called Outside Sales Talk, which you can find on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/outside-sales-talk/id1378407033?mt=2), our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1KxsTejjYM&list=PLYAFWkWnQLHnfmaQ6mTqM7VVHUcSeUyfi), or anywhere podcasts can be found. I’m interviewing great people in Sales and really enjoy the talks and learning from them. I also publish weekly ‘Training Tuesday’ videos on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/BadgerMapping/) where I talk about various Sales topics and give actionable advice on how to improve specific skills needed for the job.

Another exciting project on the Recruiting and HR side is that we’re hiring Account Executives and Customer Success Associates in our Salt Lake City office. I spend a lot of time interviewing and training those new employees and it’s great to see the team grow.

We also just started doing ‘360 feedback reviews’ with everyone at the company which is a pretty big project. I think this will help us improve and grow together as a team.

What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?

Encouraging autonomy is crucial to helping your employees grow and thrive in their role. At Badger, everyone, down to interns, is encouraged to join whatever projects they’re most interested at, or even lead projects. We have a lot of things that we have to get done, and I basically let people gravitate towards the areas they’re passionate about and want to contribute.

Every Monday we have a full team meeting for 15 minutes, and everyone who is running a project updates the group on where things are at and ask people for help where needed. People then join the projects they want to join, even if it’s outside their job description. If an engineer or an engineering intern wants to get involved in a marketing project, they’re encouraged to do so. If a salesperson or sales intern wants to get involved in a QA project, same thing.

Getting people to work in and understand different parts of the organization is not only good for their development but also good for the company. This type of autonomy gives people the experiences that build their empathy for other departments, and helps the whole company function better.

This approach has worked very well for us and helped us increase motivation, productivity and improve communication across different areas of the business. I would highly recommend it to other CEO’s and founders.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are?

This is very true, success is a team sport and there is more than just one person that helped me get to where I am today with my business. This might sound a bit cliche, but I’m really grateful for the amazing team and community we’ve been able to build over the years at Badger. I’m not sure what the silver bullet was, but we’ve managed to bring together a group of people who do a great job and work very well as a team. We’ve avoided a lot of the drama that you often see in the tech industry. People put the good of the team before their individual benefit, and when everyone in a group is doing that, everyone ends up doing better and is happier.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I’ve used my success with Badger to help other people in several ways. First, we help outside salespeople do their jobs better. People in sales are very important, because they’re the ones who bring money into an organization. With that money, companies are able to pay people’s salaries, make investments, pay their taxes and innovate. By helping salespeople perform better and close more deals, we aim to help thousands of companies create more value.

Besides making our customers lives better, I also want to give my employees and interns a great experience at the company and help them develop fulfilling careers. I spend my time split between two roles — sometimes I’m the leader of a software company, and sometimes I’m the principal of a career training school. I teach my employees two things: the strategy and direction of the business and the set of skills they need to be successful. It’s very important to me that I give them the information and knowledge they need to thrive in their role and help them develop through regular training, feedback, and one-on-one meetings.

My goal is to help each individual on the team reach their full career potential. Therefore I make sure they’re being adequately challenged in their role and satisfied with their growth and career development. By investing heavily in our team, it makes us a better software company because it makes people better at their jobs and prepares them for the next job they’ll be doing for us. This mindset is not something that I’ve seen other business leaders take, but this unique way of looking at the company is working very well for us, and has helped us build a great team and company culture.

Can you share the top five ways that increased diversity can help a company’s bottom line.

Having a diverse team attracts a larger talent pool to your company and helps you recruit top talent by being a more welcoming place for people of all kinds of backgrounds to be employed. I have interviewed at several companies over my career where I did 5 or more interviews and every single one was with a white male with similar educational backgrounds. This sends a message to people who are interviewing for the role as to what the norm at the company is.

Compare that to Badger Maps for example, where you are interviewed by a diverse range of folks from different backgrounds and cultures. This is an area where success breeds success, and having neglected diversity in the past will make it harder going forward. If you are a company where you are already greater than 20 people and you look around and everyone looks the same, you already have something to overcome.

Companies that don’t have a diverse team block themselves off from the ability to make diverse hires, and therefore are losing access to a huge part of the talent pool.

Increased diversity also means more diverse perspectives on your team which will allow you to be more creative, innovative and ultimately more successful as a business. There are a ton of stories talking about how an all male boardroom made a terrible decision on the direction of the business because a large percentage of their customers were women and women’s perspectives weren’t represented.

But it’s not only that — I believe that you actually make small mistakes all the time when you don’t have diverse perspectives on the team. Your customer base is almost always diverse and if you don’t have a diverse team, you will often lack the ability to truly empathize with your customers. When we are interacting with a prospect from another country, I will generally try to have someone from that country on the deal team. The number of times that has kept us from making some mistake or given us insight into the customer or the deal that we otherwise would not have gotten is countless.

Another way that our diversity makes us more productive and more profitable is that as a team, we speak a lot of the most common languages in the world. Since our customers and prospects are often from these places that don’t speak English as their first language, our diversity allows us to serve our customers better and engage with leads in their own language. We are able to provide customer service and support in 8 languages and therefore are more attractive to potential customers from all over the world.

Having team members that really understand our diverse target audience allows us to understand our customers’ and prospects’ needs better. We understand their culture and buying practices better, and at times have come across differences in the way we need to go to market in different places that are really not intuitive. We sell to field sales teams, and the way they function is very different in France or Italy or Australia than it is in America. We were able to expand and grow faster, and market our product more successfully across the globe than we would have been able to with a less diverse team.

Lastly, increased diversity creates a more inclusive, welcoming and generally better work environment and company culture. A company that becomes dominated by a particular personality type, like many startups in the Silicon Valley, is not a great place for people to thrive in and develop satisfying careers so they enjoy coming to work every day.

Thanks to our diverse team, Badger has become a special spot with a mix of people from all over the world and different walks of life. Diversity allowed us to build a cultured work environment where people enjoy each others company, are learning from each other, coaching each other to be better, are supportive, have candid conversations, are genuine, open-minded, trust their teammates, recognizing others for their accomplishments, and are truly welcoming to people from different backgrounds.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”?

“The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of will.” — Vince Lombardi

This is my favorite quote because I think that you need to have ‘grit’ and perseverance to be an entrepreneur and that you can achieve great success if you work hard. People less often fail because they weren’t smart enough, and more often fail from not trying hard enough. There are a million challenges you have to face and you just have to pound your way through them. When I run into a problem, I wrap my head around it and find a strategy for attacking it. Then I grab one or two people on my team to attack it with me.

Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this :-)

I’d really like to have breakfast with Richard Branson. He’s founded so many businesses in vastly different areas that it’s hard for me to wrap my head around. His mastery of marketing and how he’s been able to get his messages and value propositions out to the public is wildly impressive. But most of all, I believe that the positive and productive relationship that he has with the team members who work at his businesses is the secret to his success. I believe that he’s made the world a better place through innovation and taking bold steps. Branson also speaks his mind and thinks that a business leader should also be a leader in society and use his or her talents for philanthropic reasons. I’d love to have the opportunity to get his insights into business and life.

Jilea Hemmings CEO & Co-Founder of Best Tyme. She is running a series on how diversity can increase a company’s bottom line