Saving Sales Time with Smarter Routes ft. Steve Benson

What It Covers

Steve Benson, founder of Badger Maps, explains how outside sales teams waste time with inefficient territory design and route planning. He demonstrates how software can optimize territories to generate 20% more meetings weekly and 3-7% sales lift, while reducing drive time and enabling salespeople to plan strategically two weeks ahead instead of day-to-day.

Key Questions Answered

• •Territory Design Automation: Sales leaders typically use spreadsheets and educated guessing to design territories, balancing revenue, geography, and account counts manually. Software can optimize across multiple variables instantly, creating fair territories that take minutes to adjust for changes like employee leave or new hires, enabling monthly or quarterly rebalancing instead of annual redesigns that become outdated quickly.
• •Route Optimization Value: The primary challenge for field salespeople is not determining the optimal order to visit eight stops, but identifying which eight accounts to visit from 400 total customers based on priority, location, and timing. Visualizing all customers on a map with color coding and filters enables salespeople to identify high-value prospects along planned routes to priority meetings.
• •Planning Horizon Extension: Most salespeople plan their day the morning of or day before, leading to inefficient patterns like branch-to-customer-to-branch trips or visiting only friendly accounts. Planning two weeks ahead using mapping software allows scheduling strategic meetings with high-priority prospects and maximizing stops along necessary trips, transforming reactive daily planning into proactive weekly strategy.
• •CRM Mobile Integration: Field salespeople avoid updating CRMs because mobile apps require 45 minutes of hunting through multiple screens to input data across contact, account, and opportunity fields. Badger Maps presents five dropdown questions with speech-to-text capability that automatically populate correct CRM fields in minutes, eliminating the excuse of cumbersome data entry while driving.
• •Lead Routing Automation: Most organizations manually assign incoming leads through operations or sales management review. Automated lead routing applies preset rules based on territory, deal size, and account type to instantly assign leads from phone calls, web forms, or conference uploads to appropriate reps, eliminating manual sorting delays and ensuring immediate rep notification for faster follow-up.