123 Badger Maps for Field Sales Reps with Steve Benson
“Sales is less about being pushy and it’s more about being able to explain how valuable your product can be to your customer. That way, your customers will be able to empathize with you.”
Steve Benson is the CEO and Founder of Badger Maps, the number one app for route planning and scheduling to help outside sales reps save up to 10 hours every week in busy work. Prior to Badger Maps, Steve worked in sales at IBM and HP, and also worked as Regional Sales Manager at Google.
In this episode, we talk about:
How outside sales reps can use Badger Maps
Methods used to scaling the business
Growing the sales capacity of Badger Maps
Empathy in the Sales Industry
The importance of emotional intelligence as a salesperson
Green and red flags for hiring salespeople
Overcoming client objections
Leadership lessons
To learn more, listen to the full episode!
Finding Empathetic Salespeople
When I think about hiring sales people, I’m looking for high levels of communication skills – someone who is a great listener and could be empathetic to the customer. Just, emotional intelligence.
Do they have the ability to understand their own emotional states and the emotional states of their customers?
Because they will need that to connect and manage relationships. And so I think emotional intelligence is something that salespeople should really have.
Red Flags When Hiring Salespeople
People who are not action-oriented is a red flag for me when hiring sales people.
You want a salesperson who can roll up their sleeves and execute. I’m looking for people who leads from the front. It’s easy to pick someone who can pick things up really fast, but loyalty, commitment and grit to get things done is probably more important.
Being a Servant Leader
One of my biggest lessons is to be a servant leader.
I try to put myself in the mindframe that everyone doesn’t work for me at the company; I work for all of them.
It’s an upside down pyramid and I’m at the bottom, enabling them and supporting them. And I think in general, people overweight the hard skills and underweight the soft skills such as the emotional intelligence it takes to be a great leader.
