Effective Sales Coaching and Customer Relationships

Rajiv Parikh: I have Steve Benson, CEO of Badger Maps, on the show today. How's it going, Steve?

Steve Benson: Fantastic. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Rajiv Parikh: Okay, awesome. So, Steve is also a podcast host on a show called outside sales talk, which you can find on badgermapping.com. So definitely check that out. And so see, let's just get right into it. Tell us a little bit about Badger Mapping and what it does. And most importantly, how did you come up with a name?

Steve Benson: Well, what Badger Mapping does is it's an application for field salespeople, we do a bunch of different things for this specific type of person, you know, an outside salesperson, field salesperson, someone who meets with their customer face to face, and often meet as many customers in a given day. We, I guess the reason I made the company in this company, about 10 years old now about 70 employees, my background was in field sales. And then I was working with as working at Google in my last role. I was working with a lot of the technologies that one would need to build something like this. So I understood, you know, like the Google Maps API, like a big part of what we do is we have a mapping solution that allows field salespeople to see all of their customers on a map, build routes, fill out their schedule, kind of build a day, make sure they're focusing on the right customers, given where they're going to be. And I had a lot of experiences that because I was, I had been a field salesperson. And then, I worked with mapping technology and mobile technology at Google. And so that kind of led me down the path of starting Badger. Which your question about the name, I went to the University of Wisconsin, so ah, Badger Maps.

Rajiv Parikh: Very nice. Well, so thank you for that. So let's get right into that then, which is really, you're talking about field reps and going out and meeting prospects face to face. Obviously, the last 18-20 months have been super challenging, given COVID. So let's just talk about how did you approach the new challenges that COVID brought to your company?

Steve Benson: I mean, there were definitely a ton there. You know, especially since we serve field salespeople who had were kind of hamstrung there, especially in the beginning of the I mean basically universally hamstrung in the middle of last year. You know, I think you run into a lot of challenges, though, at a time of this nature. One that jumps off the page is just desperate competitors doing desperate things. I think a lot of people experienced, you know, their competitors have been just in a really difficult time themselves. And therefore I'm responding by deeply discounting, liquidating inventory, just to you know, make ends meet, giving away free consulting other free things of value, that really kind of would could, all these things adding up to just they're your competitors, trying to steal your customers away from you. And in Win deals much more aggressively, and perhaps not in a sustainable way. If they're giving stuff away. And, and not behaving like they like, you know, in a way that would you can forever but just kind of short term debt. I think the second major area is just your interactions with your prospects and your customers, right, the people who are actually going to pay you? I think a lot of people during COVID, us included, just encountered a ton of resistance, resistance from customers that wasn't there before. You know, they people didn't want to spend money, they didn't want to engage, they didn't want to meet, they just there everyone was kind of frozen in place, which is, you know, the people's responses to bad things are actually damaged. And it can have longer-term impacts on an economy, right? Changing their attitudes, and if everybody freezes up, then no one can spend any money in the whole, you know, the whole, the gears of the economy can kind of seize up, and frankly, I mean, this was a great excuse for anyone that didn't really want to do it do something. This is the best excuse ever if they wanted to just like push things back or not do things for a while. And a lot of people just had spending freezes in place, right? So they didn't want to spend money or couldn't they weren't allowed to spend money. Their CFO had said, Hey, we're not making any money. So no one can spend anything. So all those projects you wanted to get done, all those new things that you thought would be a good idea. That's a great idea once we have money again, but you don't right now.

Rajiv Parikh: Yeah. So speaking of sort of cost reductions. Obviously, your business was affected a lot by COVID. Because your customers, they're outside sales reps, their field reps are going out and meeting customers face to face, which they couldn't do. So how did you manage to sort of your costs and maintain, you know, reductions as you needed to during these times? How did you approach that talk to us about that? Because I'm sure, a lot of companies are still sort of navigating how to figure that out?

Steve Benson: Yeah, I mean, I guess there's a couple of ways you can approach. I mean, a lot, some are obvious, you know, cut costs where you can don't do unnecessary things. But I also think, you know, a more challenging thing is what to do when you have your margins just tightening for all the reasons we talked about a second ago and others. A lot of people, a lot of companies, just experienced that tightening of margins across the board. And you have to defend your margins deal by deal in tough times like this. Right. And that's, that's kind of the approach we took to it was, you know, on every deal, how do we defend our margins and, you know, proof show the value and I think one thing you can do at a structural level, and we can talk about training and coaching and lots of other things, but what at a structural level, if your reps are comped on revenue, that can be a little problematic if they're compared to being comped on profit, and this is a little in the weeds of like how to manage your sales team, but like I would, if you have felt a tightening of your margins, it's worth taking a look at how your reps are being comped. And if you can better align your reps with the needs of the business, you'll generally get a better response is kind of you know, philosophically, but like it to make to put some real numbers with it if you if your margins are currently if your margins are historically 30%. And your rep gave away a 15% discount. In just do get the deal done like your margins are compressing you had to give a discount or they felt like they had to give a discount. Now, you needed to do two deals to get the same amount of money from a profit perspective as you did in good times, right. So all of a sudden, your profit, your revenue only went down by 15%. But your profit cut in half. And so if you align your comp your reps comp plan, with profits instead of revenue, then they're much less likely they're not going to, they're less likely to want to give up half their commission and 15% of their commission. So it's they. If you align them, you'll get a better defense of your margins.

Rajiv Parikh: So question on that though, if you sort of shift that mindset for-profit versus revenue, and you don't give as much in terms of the discounts on the margin isn't sort of the counter to that, it's going to be tougher to close deals because companies are cash strapped anyway. So it's sort of like six and a half dozen or the other in certain circumstances?

Steve Benson: Well, I guess it just it's putting your reps are kind of in the same boat as the company. And it's dangerous when whenever you have different demand, a different boat. So they know it, there are times of course, where you know it like what we were talking about a second ago with your competitors, just doing things that aren't sustainable, that really you just, you know, you have to deal with. But there are other times when your reps can focus more on showing the value proving out the ROI early in the sales process in general, that will get you a better result. And they'll be able to the if they focus on, if you if they want to focus on that blocking and tackling even more because they're aligned with profit, then they're more likely to do that. And you'll you're more likely to get better results. But there are times when you know you're just kind of you're gonna have to drop your price or you're gonna have to give up margin on things. And if your competitors are truly doing something that is unsustainable, it can last for so long and only cover so many deals. Right.

Rajiv Parikh: Right, absolutely. So let's talk about value selling value-based selling. There's a lot of talks right now on the importance of value-based selling. How do you sort of define value-based selling, putting your sales hat on? And why is that important? I mean, I know some of the answers are obvious, but just I'd love to hear you talk about it.

Steve Benson: Yeah, I think, you know, the key is to be to show the value and show in terms of dollars and cents. Make sure your reps are showing the customers what they're going to get out of making a decision to get your product, what's the benefit in boiling it down to actual cash, not, you know, dollars and cents value, that the company is going to get translating time savings for example into dollars and cents or turns translating efficiency gains into dollars and cents for them and helping them do that. Because you've done this with your product 100 times right and they've never done it before. So you should make sure you have ROI tools that can help communicate. You want your sponsor at a company to be able to, you know, go to their CFO or CIO and say hey, and have the tools to express why they think it's such a good idea to purchase your product, and to Indigo and go in that direction. I think the earlier you can do that in the sales process, what you don't want to do is you want to do that, at the end of the sales process when you're already negotiating on price because then it's transparent, what you're trying to do is you're trying to say, hey, our products worth $2,000 a month to you. And, you know, let's prove that out. And so it's worth 24 grand a year. So this is totally worth you spending five grand on, you know, like, you don't want to do that during the negotiation, you want to have established that before the deal goes to procurement, you want to establish that with your sponsor early in the sales process and sales cycle so that they've already been able to express that to the key people who hold the purse strings around the organization.

Rajiv Parikh: Great advice. You talked about coaching just a moment ago as well. So how did you approach coaching through this past year and a half?

Steve Benson: Well, I think coaching your team up-leveling your skills is really, this is so important, during tough times. And really in any time of change, good or bad, you have to focus on this, I think, you know, the economy is kind of going through this adjustment phase. And I think in a time such as this, I think a sales manager should spend probably about 50% of their time coaching their team, really any manager. You know, they got to get their hands dirty in times like this. So joining calls, joining strategy sessions, you know, pre-code from a sales perspective, pre-call strategizing or, you know, POST call debriefing, doing joint calls with customers. Any kind of opportunity specific coaching, I'd recommend, and this really goes across the board, but your managed people, you got to be much more involved in coaching in times like these because they're things are changing and things are dynamic, I think in terms of what needs to be coached in what I focused on coaching, and I guess this kind of depends on, you know, what industry, you're in what kind of team you're coaching, but and then from my perspective, coaching and sales team, I think negotiation training, how to defend margins, how to sell the value is this, there's no better time than now to teach that. And everyone can always freshen up on that. I think coaching on building the pipeline, I think, is really important in a difficult economy. It’s, you know, you often need to relearn how to prospect almost and rethink who you're selling to. And if the economy's changed, things have shifted. And that's certainly something we did we shifted our focus away from, you know, we had a lot of customers that were Field Sales, people selling beer to bars or gym equipment to gyms and hotels and stuff to hotels in general, we had to shift away from all those industries and towards things like med device sales, pharmaceutical sales, and construction was essential. So it always kept going, you know, even in April of 2020, the construction sites, we're still rolling. Right?

Rajiv Parikh: Rolling, yeah. Right.

Steve Benson: So I think that's kind of those are in general, the things that I thought about and what we approached, you know, how we approach things.

Rajiv Parikh: Yeah. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. I think, a question around that. I think coaching is super important. As you just mentioned, from a scalability perspective, what do you recommend in terms of, you know, larger teams where it's not as easy to do one on one sales coaching, especially if you have distributed teams or you have, you know, hundreds of reps that you potentially need to coach any advice you can give from a scalability perspective on how to do the most effective coaching?

Steve Benson: Um, I mean, I think for starters, training the trainer's so teaching, teaching your, if you're a VP of sales, teaching the people who are managing individual sales teams how to do this sort of thing. But also, in general, empowering the people at the ground level is really important. Especially in times where you lack visibility, lack of understanding, things are changing. The sands are moving under your feet. I think it was General Stan McChrystal. He’s an American general who was serving in Afghanistan had. He wrote a great book on this basic premise of being to be successful in times of uncertainty. You need to push decision-making down to the frontlines. So you talked about boots on the ground and they know first hand what's working and what isn't working. So, in this case, your salespeople know the mindset of your customers in a given industry or given area. And it's different right now to sell to a customer in Florida than it is selling to a customer in California, right? As a field salesperson, California, like San Francisco, is still relatively shut down by COVID. It’s December of 2021. Florida was open this time last year. We were completely right. So it's different places experiencing this differently and behaving differently. And you can't use the same strategies everywhere. So pushing decision-making down to the frontlines is really important, I think, when you're talking about scaling and enabling those people to speak to the rest of the group allows you to scale. So if you find someone who really figured they figured out of play or is running a play, or is doing something in a certain way that really that's really working, empowering them to train the rest of their team can be a very powerful strategy. So you listen to the boots on the ground. And then you also empower the boots on the ground to train other groups and other people. So if you know if Sally and Kansas figured something out about you know how to negotiate or how to create a great ROI model that helps, you know, show people why they should act now rather than next year. Have Sally teach everybody and show that model around there? They're more likely to listen to her than they are to listen to me anyway. Right?

Rajiv Parikh: Yeah, for sure. Makes a lot of sense. So as a sales leader, how do you think about what do you think about in terms of KPIs? And how to measure your sales team in this sort of recession that we're sort of in right now?

Steve Benson: Well, I think the key to being in a difficult time or a session and thinking about KPIs is you want to change your focus towards forward-looking APIs and not just look at the lagging KPIs. So current revenue is a great example, right? Like, what do we measure more than current revenue? Nothing, right. But that's a lagging KPI. It reflects what's occurred over the past, depending on the length your sales cycle could be last year, right? You know, it's easy when cash kingdom, just like focusing on revenue. But as you evaluate your team, as you evaluate sales reps on an individual level, whatever, this is not just sales, but for everything, it's important to keep an eye on who's doing the things that are necessary to help you going forward like for sales teams, who are building their pipeline well, and make sure you're looking at those KPIs to who's going to be generating revenue q1 next year, and not just look at the, you know, it's depressing, if you only look at like, what's happening right now, I think this is probably, you know, to a large extent, in many industries, we're kind of popped out at this point, but certainly, if whenever times are difficult, you want to make sure you're not just looking at those lagging indicators, but you're able to look at okay, well, hey, here's what, let's measure what we think is going to be happening next year, and what are the KPIs that indicate, you know, what's gonna be going on next year? So like, if your challenges are, you know, pipeline building, and you just feel like your pipeline, then you can start counting, started focusing on and creating spiffs around like, counting lead gen numbers earlier. So meetings, scheduling qualified meetings, scheduling you how many qualified deals are there? If your challenges are more middle of the funnel? KPIs, like how many presentations are going out? How many proposals are we putting out there to quality decision-makers? If it's closing, you know, look at KPIs around negotiation skills and value selling the qualification activities, you know, how do you measure something like negotiation? Probably margin, right? That's probably, you know, what are the discounts being requested on deals is it going up and measuring things like that can really be helpful. But in the end, I mean, all these things, any KPI of that nature is secondary to something like revenue or profit. But if you over-focus on them, you can get some skewed results because you didn't, you know, you're just you, if you really comp your sales team hard on, you know, proposals made, you're going to get more proposals, but not necessarily more sales, right.

Rajiv Parikh: Yeah. What's the conversion rate from proposals being sent out to actual deals bidding being one, for example?

Steve Benson: Yeah, yeah, exactly

Rajiv Parikh: Yeah. And so So Let's talk about that. So you know, you have a ton of focus on field sales where sales reps are under a lot of pressure, right to continue to perform and hit or exceed their quota. But, you know, many of these sales reps can't go out in the field still start to open up. But so how do you sort of bridge that gap of having no face-to-face visits? Especially when the sales pitch is based around that customer experience that in-person Product Demo when the product can't be demoed via video or other methods?

Steve Benson: Yeah, I mean, this is a huge challenge to a lot of companies right now. And I think if, for a lot of people, things have kind of gone back to normal. But for some industries, or you know, if you're, if you're selling a face to face product in San Francisco, you're probably still bumping your head on a lot of challenges that maybe, you know, you're the same person on your team who covers the Dallas regions not running into right. But, you know, and a lot of things, it's really hard to not sell them face to face, like something, you know, some things don’t matter, like, you don't sell software face to face, usually, at least not modern software. But you know, there are a lot of things that you just, if you're not in the room with somebody, it's you know, sales cycles are gonna take longer, it's harder to communicate the value. A lot of things relationships are important. It’s hard to build a relationship over zoom in the same way that you can if you're able to take somebody out for a steak dinner. You know, I think in these cases, it can just be really hard because you know, when things are shut down, and people aren't buying, you know, we had customers that sell beer to bars, and you can look at new creative things, new directions, you can go in with a team like this with a company like this. You know, like, some of our customers that were selling beer to bar started selling beer to like, lobbies of big buildings, like they just like, you know, because they've got mailing lists, they showed up, they said, Hey, we're the ones that drop off of six-packs of beer. And this isn't the depths that this is, you know, summer of last year, right? They were able to keep making beer and keep getting into the hands of the people that drink it in you some creative ways. Right?

Rajiv Parikh: Right. Yeah, absolutely. And so speaking of relationships, you know, with your customers, did your relationship with your customers change during these times? And what new steps did you take to support your reps to succeed?

Steve Benson: Yeah, I think, you know, going remote definitely changes your relationship with customers very different than if you can get in front of them. And I think empathy is really important. And you know, because a lot of our customers, their businesses are in trouble. They're going through tough times. So yeah, empathy is so important. And obviously, that's been the that was the word of the year. Last year, I'd say. I think, in general, when relationships suffer, you see less customer loyalty. You see, you find sales cycles lengthening. One key thing you can do that we did to kind of combat that is really focused on leveraging the sponsor at an account, because you really need now more than ever, in times like these, you need someone who's going to be your eyes and ears inside of a company. And that's, you've always needed this to be successful, right, especially in a complex sales cycle. But now, you really need it more than ever, and your sponsor is rarely the only decision-maker right now. Right? I think there are six decision-makers on average for a purchase of over 10 grand or something in the average American company, but especially with when purse strings tighten, more fingers kind of getting into the pie, right? So you can ask your sponsor before a meeting or for a presentation with their team to try to uncover what objections they think are out there with other decision-makers, other influencers, so you can make sure that you're addressing them in the meeting.

Rajiv Parikh: Right. Great once.

Steve Benson: You can suddenly prepare them almost with a pre-meeting call. I always recommend to our reps that to do this to get get your sponsor on the phone and bring up all the key questions that they have. You know, may it may like kind of coach them on Hey, we'll make sure you ask this question. During the meetings, we can present this to everybody who might not be as close to this stuff. Just because you know it doesn't mean everybody else knows it. You know, what key points can they make and make sure that you can't read the room and you don't and you're not able to build a relationship with everyone that you could the same way if you were showing up on our on-site, right? But you can't and, you know, you lose the chit-chatting and stuff, right? And you might not really do everything you could historically, but you can get your sponsors who already have those relationships with the other decision-maker to go to work for you. And their influence to influence the people and also to get genuine feedback on your behalf so that you know what needs to be shown and knows what needs to get. So you know, what needs to get done to move the deal towards closure?

Rajiv Parikh: Yeah, it makes more sense. So you mentioned sort of, you know, purse strings, tightening budgets being, you know, non-existent or being limited. So how have you trained your team to handle the negotiation where the prospect is pushing back on price?

Steve Benson: Yeah, well, I mean, that's something I think everyone's been seeing, right. I mean, it's just when the market tightens everyone. Customers, pushback on price, and salespeople find themselves in tougher negotiations in general. So how do I coach this? I guess the number one objection that comes up when you're in these pricing negotiations within B2B, and probably a lot of times in B2B as well, is, your price is too high, but, you know, when you hear this, you want to freak out because you're actually in a pretty good place. Because, you know, you've built the value through the sales process. And, you know, your prospect wants your product, right? They just want it to be cheaper, but they want it right. And that's why they're negotiating with you. So you're, so I guess how I approach this, the technique that I use is you can say to a prospect. So when you say you when you say that we're too expensive. That's compared to who is compared to what? And they'll be like, oh, you know, company A company, XYZ, whatever. And then I'll respond. Well, if our price was identical to Company A, which product would you choose? And they'll always say you, right? Because if they didn't say you, they'd be negotiating with company A right now. They wouldn't be negotiating with you. Right? Because they're cheaper, and they prefer them. So but that's not the case they prefer you. So they say, you and I say, fantastic. I'm curious, why would you choose our product? Why would you choose us? And then you just sit back and check your mouth, and listen, and let them sell your product back to you. And when they're done, you just say, Well, that makes a lot of sense. And I honestly hear that coming from a lot of customers. Given that, does it make sense to you why we cost a little bit more? It's really hard for them not to just nod their head in agreement. And that's great. And right then is a great time for a concession, like making an offer that isn't a price reduction but is another way to create value for the customer. You know, whether it's, you know, giving, helping them with their, you know, deployment in our case, or helping with.

Rajiv Parikh: Professional services.

Steve Benson: Yeah, some kind of thing.All one of the tools in your bag, something that you can offer them other than just kind of a price concession. Yeah, that's a great time. I really like excellent from saying, you know, it's too expensive. This is a problem. This is having that objection to getting the deal done—you just kind of can walk right, that talk path.

Rajiv Parikh: That is great advice, Steve, great advice. Let's talk about recruiting really quickly. So how are you approaching recruiting right now? What does a solid recruiting process look like? Given, you know, the fact that it's so difficult to hire, there are so many opportunities out there? What have you seen work for you?

Steve Benson: Um, yeah, I mean, it's a tough time to hire right now. I think, you know, there's just a lot of people left the working market and don't want to come back, you know, they retired I think a lot of them retired or just decided, hey, we don't need two incomes and one of the parents is gonna stay at home and raise the kids. They started homeschooling and just gonna keep doing it for whatever reason. There are a lot of reasons out there. You know, maybe they're afraid of COVID news don't want to come back yet. There's a lot of reasons why there's just been a bunch of people exiting the market and the labor market and that's just tightened everything up for everyone else. So I think it's a debt, you know, because, you know, you still need to grow. So you recruit and hire people. I think having a great process around that is really important. It's an important time to invest in your process and you know, how you're recruiting, how you're gonna make that work better? I think, you know, I guess it kind of depends on what type of role you're talking about, but it's definitely a good time to revisit what you're paying people. And maybe, you know, the market has shifted a bit, we did that we revisited what we were paying people and, you know, the HR team relooked at, well, what's the market for all these roles now, compared to what it was, you know, and make sure that we had everybody in the right spot and plus them up if we didn't? You know, so we could talk about a hiring process and what that looks like, that's probably a deeper conversation for another time, but that, you know, that, I think, you do want to look at that and make sure you're making sure your processes, right, if you put, you know, places that people could do better, you know, often job postings aren't specific enough. I think that people aren't specific in their job postings, they don't attract the right people to the role and you don't eliminate the right people from even applying. And so you end up spinning your wheels on the HR side and then do more interviews and aren't going to go anywhere across the board. So make sure you're really very specific about what you need and what you don't need. And putting that in the job posts, I think are really important. Active recruiting and networking, having your employees recruit, and sit down with, you know, who they know when you have an open when there's no, an open roll can be a really powerful tool. We've done some of that, especially on the engineering side. I think also people ask for things you don't necessarily need in the recruiting process sometimes, like, if you don't need an MBA from an Ivy League school to be successful in a role, then don't ask for one in your job interview, right? That's, you see that all the time, especially in the valley, right? Like, you don't need seven years of experience to be successful in this role. Don't ask for it. Because you can scare I think a lot of people their gut instinct is off, we really, you know, set the bar high, we'll get great candidates but what I think what often happens is you scare off good candidates that you could have been successful with if you didn't create all these false requirements.

Rajiv Parikh: Good point.

Steve Benson: Another tool I like to use when thinking about recruiting is a sniff test. So I would really get a ton of applicants and like be relatively open and get them on the phone for like a five-minute sniff test. You know, kind of like to preset the real interview almost. So you get him on the phone, have somebody teach him someone HR chat with them for five minutes and kind of weed out the applicants that won't work but be more open to some that that might squeak through is, especially for roles like sales, where it can be hard like someone could have been a waiter for the last five years, but they have all the skills and tools to be a successful salesperson in your organization. And if you just find their resume be like no, not a fit and toss it in the garbage. But if you talk to him for five minutes, you might be like, Oh, actually, wow, they're really good at this, they seem organized and articulate and write and have a great personality, like, you know, we could totally give them a shot here. This could totally work out. So those are a few of my thoughts on recruiting right now.

Rajiv Parikh: Awesome. Thank you so much. I'm going to change gears and ask you a few random questions. Do you have any daily habits or rituals that keep you productive during the day?

Steve Benson: Um, daily habits? Yeah, I try to, I do a lot of work out of my inbox, which is not, you know, the, one of the skills of highly productive people, but I don't think in general, but by Me, I kind of use it as my task list. And I work it from the bottom up a lot of the time. So, you know, as new things come in, I'm often like the choke point in the organization, like people are like, well, let's ask Steve about this. And like, it's a quick answer. And so I try to respond to some things really quickly and then kind of work my way through projects as I go. I don't know. I mean, I think so. I think splitting up things that can be done quickly and easily versus projects that need, like, you know, quiet focus time for two hours to accomplish are two different things.

Rajiv Parikh: If you have a superpower, what would your superpower be?

Steve Benson: Well, I don't think I have a superpower. But if I had one, it'd be really cool to be able to fly around at like Superman speeds. I don't know if that's something I don't think that's really on the table, though.

Rajiv Parikh: Nice. I like the way you think. But you know, is there anything that you feel like you bring to the table as a CEO that makes you great at what you do?

Steve Benson: Um, let's see, what do I bring to the table? I mean, I think listening to people on the team and having a relationship with people on the team is really important. I think being a good listener and empathizing. And that's the way you can really know what's going on and make good decisions. I think that's the that's one of my tricks of the trade is I just try to keep my fingers on the pulse. I try to I even at our size, I talked to every salesperson and every CSA every month because that's kind of where the rubber meets the road. Yeah. And so you know, you can get a pulse on what's going on with the product with the customers through those groups. So I guess those are a couple of my tricks of the trade.

Rajiv Parikh: Okay. The current book that you're reading that you recommend to. Ithe audience.

Steve Benson: Tools of Titans. It's a book about just like all the bunch of little random things that like successful people use or do or get involved with.

Rajiv Parikh: Tools of Titans, right. We'll put that in the show notes. Favorite podcast?

Steve Benson: Favorite podcast? Um, You mean besides my own?

Rajiv Parikh: Yeah.

Steve Benson: I've actually never listened to my own. But if you are a field salesperson, outside sales talk is a great podcast, but it's mine talks about how to be an outside sales. But in terms of what I listened to, I really like the Sastre podcast, you know, it's

Rajiv Parikh: Jason Lemkin.

Steve Benson: Yeah, Jason Lemkin. Well, it's he's not the guy doing it. But it's, you know, he runs the organization. But that's a really good podcast. They have great given their reach. They just have great, great people that come on. Great. They talk about great topics super relevant for me.

Rajiv Parikh: Nice. And final question what's on your playlist currently?

Steve Benson: Right now, I think there's a mix. I made a classical rock mix that I have. I like to make mixes on Spotify. But I have a hobby.

Rajiv Parikh: Awesome. Well, that is all the questions I have. Steve, is there anything else you'd like to share with us before we sign off?

Steve Benson: No, it's if anyone needs to get ahold of me. You can find me on LinkedIn. Just look up Steve Benson Badger Maps and I’m around.

Rajiv Parikh: Awesome. Thanks so much for your time, Steve. I really appreciate it.

Steve Benson: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Rajiv Parikh: Have a good one.

Steve Benson: You too.