Ajay: Can you quickly tell us about the business model; how do you make money in that?

Steve: It’s pretty straightforward. Like most SaaS software, we charge on a monthly or annual basis with a per-user license. So, it scales pretty fairly. If it’s a three-person team, they buy three licenses and if it’s a big company that has 1,000 people on their team, they buy 1,000 licenses.

Ajay: That makes perfect sense. In total, approximately how many people are using it right now, do you think?

Steve: I’m not sure. About 4,000 companies; I’m not sure exactly how many end users that ends up to be. We kind of count by the company.

Ajay: That’s wonderful. I think we understand the business model. Now quickly, is it the biggest application? The routing, for example from CRM, it knows who to contact, knows the addresses and then routes it? Am I correct?

Steve: Exactly, yes. That’s one of the key things people use us for is helping them figure out how to best spend their time when they’re out in the field.

Ajay: I think we understand the business model so let’s go over to your questions that you have.

Steve: I have a couple questions that I thought would be really great to have the opportunity to ask you. One of the biggest challenges that we face is letting people all around the world, people who we know would benefit from our service, letting them know that it even exists. People have been doing sales and field sales for thousands of years but there’s now this thing we’ve created that makes it more efficient and work better. But what are some of the best ways to let people know that a solution like this exists, given that we have a limited marketing budget?

Ajay: Tell me what you’ve been doing now to get 4,000 people? How did you get those?

Steve: Well, a variety of things. People find us because they search the problem on Google; that’s one way they find us. They’ll search “routing application for field sales,” or “scheduling app for my territory;” things like that. They’ll find us and once they’ve found us, we have a free trial. They’ll try it out and if they find they enjoy it and it’s helpful, then they can buy it. We also have a referral program that’s really useful, and that brings us a lot of customers.

If anyone who’s using Badger tells someone else about it and that person signs up with Fairlink, then we give them $50.00. It’s very similar to Uber or Lyft’s strategy to tell your friends and we’ll give you some free rides. For us, it’s tell your friends and we’ll give you a $50.00 Amazon gift card. Because salespeople tend to have excellent communication skills, they are good at communicating the value of what we do to their friends and colleagues who they think it will be useful for. That’s been a great way that we’ve found a bunch of people.

What’s unique about we do, or what we don’t do, most people do a lot of cold calling to find customers. We’ve done very little of that. We’ve let people find us, and we’ve let the people who have found us tell other people about it, to a large degree. That’s been our strategy.

Ajay: If you had to guess how often people are using it and how they would rate your app; have you tried to find out how they are rating your app?

Steve: Yes, we can see how much they’re using it and logging in across the different platforms. People tend to use it several times a week. Not everyone goes into the field every day; some reps only go into the field one day in the week. But this is still viable for that one day a week, as well as the rest of the time when they’re planning that time in the field. I'd say the average rep using badger is in the field three days a week.

Ajay: In terms of geography right now, where are most of the people who are using the app? Is it any region or is it all over the world?

Steve: It’s America. Canada is real big, too. So, America and Canada, and Australia are really big. We’ve expanded into Europe, so now Badger works everywhere in Europe. It works in Asia; it works in Central and South America. Really the only place we don’t work is in China, but that’s not our fault; they block Google Maps intermittently. So, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, apparently.

We’re built on top of Google Maps and sometimes they choose to block it. But everywhere else in the world, except for North Korea which does the same thing, except all the time. Everywhere else in the world, at this point we work. And we have customers all over the world.

Ajay: So, you have customers all over the world right now. To your question, we always say that the first thing you want to do is build up on your success. So, obviously, on Google I’m pretty sure that you are getting found when people are looking for those solutions, and you already have a feral program. Have you looked into social media marketing?

Steve: Yes. We do some social medial marketing. I should also mention we get some leads, not of that nature and not a ton, but we do get some leads from advertising on actual Google, like the paid ads on Google that we pay for. We do some retargeting stuff, as well; that’s worth mentioning. What was the question?

Ajay: My question is what are you doing on social media? That is one way that when they are looking, you can let people know. You can do something interesting and that’s where you have a chance of going viral.

Steve: We have a social media presence. We make a lot of posts; we do build content and put it out on social media. It does get re-shared and we try to get people like thought leaders to re-share the stuff. That’s been one thing we do.

Ajay: Do you have some influencers, the thought leaders talking about you right now?

Steve: That’s an area where I'd really like to do more, is get thought leaders to talk about us more. There are a bunch of thought leaders in the space who follow us on Twitter, and they do sometimes retweet us, which is great when they do. When we put out an especially useful piece of content, they’ll push it to their followers. On the balance, social media has been a challenge.

Sometimes when I’m doing social media I feel like I’m in a stadium with 80,000 people and we’re all just yelling different things into the abyss, and no one hears anyone. But I know that’s not true. Things do find their way to the right people sometimes but it does feel like a very noisy environment.

Ajay: I have always said that the way you do marketing is obviously you need to know who your ideal customer is. In your case, it’s very straightforward; you already know who your customers are. Then you need to find out where they congregate, where they are getting together on social media, and then that’s where you want to show up. I have seen some successes now at Facebook just because your targeting can be fairly accurate.

But in your case, you should definitely look into Linked-In marketing because again, that is where you can literally go after the exact people you know are using it like case managers or the sales reps. You can probably fine tune it, and that way you know your ad or your post is ending up in front of them.

Steve: I like that idea and it feels like that should work, particularly Linked-In. Facebook is more B2C and it’s more about the demographic. We don’t have a particular demographic that uses this; it’s a particular job title being field sales or sales operations is interested in this because they often manage the technology. The VP of Sales obviously cares about the technology that his or her reps are using. But Facebook is tough. If it has the job title, which it often does, that can work pretty well. But in general, we don’t have a demographic. It’s not like I’m going after 18- to- 23-year-old women who live in affluent zip codes.

Ajay: I agree with that; it is much more suited to B2C. But because you can target it by profession, I think that Facebook may be worth trying. Because again, marketing is never a science; it’s an art. It is really trial and error because there is typically no short cut. But Linked-In seems like a very logical platform.

Steve: I totally agree; it’s all about testing and proving it out and getting it to work. Facebook and Linked-In we have tried and they worked but the acquisition cost was very high. I think the advice you are giving is absolutely correct; it may be that the challenge of our product is that it’s interesting to a lot of field salespeople. They’ll click through the ads when they see it, however we pitch it; routing for your territory. And a lot of times I think maybe they do circle back but in the immediate term, we get too many clicks off of Linked-In and Facebook and they’re too expensive to justify.

And it may be just that our price is pretty low. This isn’t expensive stuff. It’s $18.00 or $35.00 a month for a salesperson so it’s pretty cheap. That’s actually maybe the challenge. If this was Salesforce and we were selling it for $150.00 a pop per month, all of a sudden you can really pay for some ads like that. But with the Linked-In clicks we would burn through our budget and get no signups, or we’d GE one signup or something. It was like a funnel that we’d pour $100.00 in and $3.00 would come out the bottom and we were like, are we doing this wrong? What is the problem?

Ajay: That will not work.

Steve: Exactly. It was not sustainable. It’s something I'd like to experiment with again. It seems like especially Linked-In would be so perfect just because we can see all the people who are in sales training as their title, and we can approach them with a sales training message. But like I said, it hasn’t worked yet.

Ajay: Did you look at the metrics? My first question is say someone came to a landing page from Linked-In on your website. What is the conversion point for you? Is it they either buy it or leave, or do you also capture their information?

Steve: This is a great question. We can capture their information and get them into a [inaudible] campaign. I think we need some more collateral to do that. Right now, to get them on our mailing list, we offer: “Hey, do you like this content? Sign up here.” We might be better off to create some gated content that they’d want to put their actual emails into. Right now there’s not really a great incentive for them to do that. We consider a conversion, from a marketing perspective, to three gates.

There’s the click when they land on the website; that’s one. Two is signing up for a trial, and three is actually purchasing the product. That’s the way we think about the funnel pinching down from never heard of us to a paying customer. We lose a lot of the clicks from Linked-In at that first hurdle and Facebook was the same way. They would click through, they would land on the website, and then they wouldn't sign up for a trial. And it’s hard to say why that was.

I love where you went with that about can you capture their emails somehow. I’ve created a lot of content but I tend to not gate it, and maybe we’d be better off just gaining all the content and saying if you want this PDF of this, then you’ve got to give us your email.

Ajay: Because a couple of things happen. If you have captured email, you can use analytics to see is this exactly the right audience. Looking at metrics is nice but you have to start doing a more in-depth analysis of who is coming and what is going on. That’s where you would see what is working. If you were able to capture the email, and that’s why I think you need to have something gated; something very attractive that is gated so that you know who came on the site and who had interest.

If someone came and did not see any value in even getting the free one, you know that that was the wrong person anyway. So, then it’s a matter of again retargeting better. Then once you put people through the funnel so you know that if 100 people came in for whatever the free stuff you’re giving – three to four dot tips or whatever, then out of 100, fewer than 100 will go for the free trial.

And then a percentage of those who went on free trial will become paid. That is a typical funnel. So, the challenge becomes how do I increase the number on top so that anyone you are driving through either an email campaign or through Linked-In marketing, or even someone coming on the website; you want to capture as many of those people as possible to come in. That way, you have a drip campaign and you can see what happens after that.

And like I said, the more information you have of the people who got the free report, you can start to do the analytics and start to do even further fine tuning to say I don’t care for these people. It may be a certain title doesn’t help because you are getting a lot of those people coming in and making a free report but they never go to the next level.

Marketing is always an ongoing challenge. It happens in the sales pitch of some marketing people that don’t worry; you just sit on the beach and count the money because [inaudible] [00:23:36] is happening. It is just a matter of you have to keep on improving, looking at the metrics, looking at the analytics and keep on tweaking and making small improvements. You’ll seldom hit home runs in marketing. Most of the victories you’ll get are singles and doubles. That’s why I would focus on can you make incremental improvements.

If your click-through rate is 3 percent, can you make it 3.2, 3.3 and ultimately 4 and 5 percent? If the conversion is whatever, 10 percent, can you make it 11? Again, when it comes to conversion, I would definitely count the people as conversions the ones who have taken your gated product. Now you can have a [inaudible] with them.

Steve: I think that’s really good advice, honestly. You said something that struck home with me right there; that marketing is about incremental wins. It’s all singles and doubles. I'll tell you, that’s been so true for us. Every time I think I’ve got a homerun on my hands for marketing, it turns out to be a double. But at the same time, the challenge with marketing is if you’ve got ten leads a week, 10 percent increase is to get it to 11 percent.

Once you’ve got 100 leads a week, now a 10 percent increase is to get ten new leads a week, so up from one to ten. And then all of a sudden you’re at 1,000 leads a week, and now to get a 10 percent increase, you’ve got to get 100 new leads a week. And that’s really the challenge of marketing. You have to constantly be making all these incremental wins and changes across your entire platform, or else you just can’t keep the growth up on the lead generation side to keep the sales team fed and healthy with leads, which in turn keeps the revenue of the business growing at an attractive rate.

It really all starts with marketing and it’s about getting incremental wins across your whole stack of lead sourcing and lead conversions to make sure you don’t slip off.

Ajay: Also remember, as you become more effective in terms of marketing, which means now the new leads are coming at a lower and lower cost, and as the number increases then you also have more resources to do more intensive marketing. You look very young but do you remember in the late 90s when there was the dot com boom, I remember I had the fortune or misfortune to go and be a CEO for a dot com company in the Bay Area.

I remember the investor in that company telling me when they were recruiting me, because I would have never gone there; their question to me was we want to get to $100 million in one year and you come up with a plan to do that. I just looked at him and I said, “I don't think it’s possible.” I just told them maybe if you spend a billion dollars we can hit that number, but my simple question to them was can you give me some example? I guess I’m allowed to go and do some [inaudible] [00:27:29] because I don’t know of anyone who has gone from zero to $100 million in one year.

Steve: I think the fastest company to $100 million is Slack, and I think it took them two years. They’re the best SaaS story of that nature in terms of speed and growth, but that didn’t happen until recently. That wasn’t 20 years ago when you’re talking about.

Ajay: Exactly. But also remember what I was saying, that as you start to become more successful, which means you have more customers, which means you have more sales; then you have more resources to go and put into it. Because anyone, if you look at Stack and you look at the level of investment that their [inaudible] made for them to get to the point where they are, then you start to realize that again, when you look at your own business, you have to plan based on the resources that you have access to. One of the best books I would suggest, unless you have already read it, is Zero to One. Have you read that?

Steve: I have not read it, no. I’ve heard it’s fantastic but I haven’t read it.

Ajay: The author is Peter Thiel of PayPal, and more important he was a very early investor in Facebook. It’s an eye-opener for someone who is a multi billionaire when he talks about how he did that and how he sees companies happening. The idea is again, he always talks about you have to do incremental; you have to get the proof of concept. Then you go after a small market, then you expand your market and he gives a bunch of examples. So, that is what my suggestion will be.

Other than to say I wish I had done this, I look at others and say okay, can I learn some lessons? And again, I apply the same thing to my business. My sense is that if you focus on making the funnel bigger, you focus on the conversion; how do you get higher and higher conversion, and again make it incremental. It doesn’t make sense if suppose your conversion is 1 percent, to say geez, 1 percent is nothing; what do I have to do to get to 10 percent?

Because that will just throw you off. It’s just a matter of from 1 percent, can I do 2 percent and then it becomes a whole different challenge; a much easier challenge to do.

Steve: I think that’s really good advice.

Ajay: Okay, do you have other questions?

Steve: Yes. Actually, you have so much experience with advising businesses on improving their performance metrics and really just giving advice in general. I've listened to the stuff you’ve said and read so much of it. If you had to zoom out and say what are some of the most important things that you find yourself telling business owners over and over again, what are some of your key takeaways to your career at this point?

Ajay: One thing I tell businesses over and over again, the one key factor that I’ve seen and in every successful business I’ve dealt with, and frankly many unsuccessful ones that came to me and they ended up closing, is the persistence. That’s one thing you have to have. You have to have persistence. And the next thing I would say is focus. The more the narrow targeting becomes a really important thing, and that’s one of the things actually, the zero to one, is what Peter Thiel talks about.

For example in your case, it could be the field sales for everyone you are talking about. But if you narrow targeted and suppose you are looking at the IT department, what do you start to see as the challenge that someone who is selling an IT product is very different from the challenge of someone who is selling, I don’t know, like a TV product or the [inaudible] [00:32:39]. The more narrow targeted your customers are, so just go find a niche and you want to just dominate it. What you’ll start to find is everyone's needs are different, even if it’s the same product.

And very often it’s not like you have to do anything special for them; your product is a typical SaaS product. As long as you’re a field sales person, it works. But the messaging will start to make a difference. If you’re targeting a very specific segment and now with your 4,000 customers you can do an analysis and you can figure out where is the bulk of your customers and what industries. Start looking at the pain points of those particular industries where you have success right now, and start to tweak messages.

And maybe now instead of one marketing campaign that is for everyone in sales and marketing, you have ten marketing campaigns that are geared towards the field sales for those specific marketing segments.

Steve: What would you say are the best ways to target an industry? Let’s just say the medical device industry, which has a ton of field salespeople. I want to really dominate that industry and pharmaceutical, let’s just assume that’s a little different and I’m not going to try to sell those guys right now; I’m going to try to go for the med device guys. How would you suggest I go about that?

Ajay: I’m sure you will find you have the med device salespeople already in your system, right?

Steve: Right.

Ajay: I will identify them, and the best thing I know of is talk to them. How are they using your app? Where is it helping, where is it not helping, and is there something you can do so it will be more useful to them? It’s a matter of talking to your customer and really understanding their pain point. By the way, once you know the pain point of the customer, that’s how the future marketing messages will also become more targeted and much better. 4,000 is a good number; you have a good base.

See if you can segment your customers and see where they belong; what are the areas and what industries? And at that point I would definitely talk to them directly to find out how your product is helping them. As you understand their needs, you will be better able to first tweak your product if it’s needed to make it more relevant; and also now you will know what is the appeal and then your marketing message will become more effective.

Steve: That does make a ton of sense. That’s spot on. How do you go about picking? Let’s just say you have ten industries that you seem to see a lot of people in; how would you think about focusing on this one as opposed to this one? How do you like to do that?

Ajay: Since you already have certain industries, the first thing I want to see is 1) the size of the industry, and 2) what kind of competition you are dealing with within that industry. You always go after what I call the low hanging fruit. So, it’s not necessarily that one group has 1 million and another has 10,000; I may decide to go after the 10,000 because if I see that no one is targeting those people because it’s a very small group and you may have 50 people trying to get to that 1 million number. There is no magic formula, Steven. It’s just a matter of looking at the situation to see what the industry is and how usefully our product is.

Remember, with your 4,000 people, you can literally send out a survey and ask them what they are interested in, and you should be able to know by industry how many people have responded and how they are using your product. Once you know that industry, I would say dig into that industry. Try to understand what is going on, how big it is, who is the competition, how big of a pain it is in that particular industry.

Who is more likely to pay or not? For example in your business, if you are finding most of the paying customers you have are the businesses, the corporations paying, then it may not make sense to go after independent contractor salespeople because maybe the price point is too much. Or maybe that is the best target customer for that industry because they seem to be the ones who are using it most and paying.

Again, digging into what is happening in a business and trying to understand and analyze the data, it will start to open the venues; things will start to get more and more transparent. You’ll see what’s happening.

Steve: That makes a ton of sense. I guess a follow up question to that is it’s such a complex and noisy world today across all of these industries. Decision makers have a tremendous number of projects and distractions that they’re dealing with every day. What are some of the best ways that you think an organization can stay high enough on their prospects to-do list that a deal actually gets done, and doesn’t just sit in purgatory forever?

Ajay: This is the toughest thing. Obviously, having some kind of drip campaign always helps because it’s a constant reminder that you exist.

Steve: The power of email.

Ajay: Exactly right. So, that is there. The other thing is again, the better you understand the pain point of your customers, and that’s where again I don’t know but I suspect the pain point is going to be different for the particular markets. But the more you understand the pain point, the easier it will be for them to quickly see what is happening and what value you are bringing. What happens, for example, say the sales efficiency and the message is you make your sales process more efficient. You know they are bombarded with literally hundreds of products like that ever week.

It’s not that they are competing with you but because they are using the same language, it’s the same platitude. So, as a result, it does not make them sit up and take notice. That’s where you need to understand the pain point and then your messaging needs to really be targeting that pain point and essentially saying that you have a solution for them. It’s one thing to say it will make your sales process more effective.

Another thing is to say get 10 percent more visits from your salespeople in the field. If your message was like that, heck, all of a sudden for a sales manager it’s very difficult to not pay attention to that. If you do the survey, if you do the other things that you can find out for your salespeople, I know I was dealing with a product and they said one of the key metrics that was nowhere to be found in the marketing was that this product was saving 80 percent of the customers who otherwise left. I said, where is that in the message?

All of a sudden it became: oh, okay because they were so focused on the core functionality of the product that they forgot to talk about the benefit.

Steve: I see that happening all the time with businesses that I’m involved with or that I advise. Or even at our company, on the marketing side it’s so easy to get wrapped around the feature or the technology and not focus on the benefit to the customer.

Ajay: Exactly. You and I know that no one gives a darn about the technology of the product or the features. Everyone wants to know what’s in it for me? That’s the message that has to come out and I think you start to see a better response from the prospect because they will know exactly what pain you have aspirin for.

Steve: This reminds me of a great manager and sales leader who I had when I was at Google. I worked at Google years ago on the business development sales side. I would be discussing a deal with this leader and we would go back and forth and talk and talk about it, and he would always close the discussion on a given deal by asking why are they going to buy Google; why are they going to buy it now? And just keep bringing the focus back to those two things. That’s an important lesson for a lot of businesses.

Ajay: Again, there are so many things that you know. When I tell you, you’re like “that makes sense,” and it’s not like you didn’t know that. I have the same problem when we are running our own businesses ever day; there are things that start to slip and you just focus on one thing. This is the reason there are few business books that I make it a rule to read once a year.

Steve: Oh, really? What are those books? That sounds fascinating.

Ajay: There’s a book by Stephen Collins called Good to Great. It’s basically a research book. It looks at the companies that were, say, 20 years back at the same level and then one segment had just gone through the roof, and another had either stagnated, declined, or died. It does the research to say what was the successful company doing versus what was the not successful or [inaudible] [00:45:30] company doing.

And I’m telling you, every time I read it I’m like okay, I can try this thing because you pick up so many nuggets. Same thing I would say about Peter Thiel’s book, Zero to One. Very often you won’t get a new idea but you’ll say geez, again I slipped here; I need to go back to the basics on this point. There’s another by Horowitz, the guy who is with Henderson Horowitz, the venture fund. His book is The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Steve: That’s one of my favorites, honestly.

Ajay: Again, when you read that, it’s like one time we did it and oh, it’s nice. Then you did it again, and it seems like every time I read these books I pick up something, or I realize again I’ve gone back into the bad habit of making this error that I had fixed. But it’s just human nature; you start to drift back into day-to-day life and it’s very hard to stay focused. There’s another book actually that I bought at least 20 years back. It was a Folls book. It said Great Minds of Business. And it’s these four people from the olden era. There’s [inaudible] [00:47:07] Volcker who was I guess the Fed guy with Carter and Regan, and he’s the one who really tamed inflation.

There’s Andy Grover from Intel. There’s the Magellan Fund founder, I am forgetting his name. But these are three or four people and again, I read that once a year and every time I’m reading it’s like geez, whether it’s investment, or whatever you are doing. So, having some foundation books will definitely help.

I will just say the more you focus a narrow target of your prospect, the better the probability of the target sitting up and taking notice.

Steve: I feel like I’ve learned a tremendous amount today. Maybe it’s a good idea to summarize a few of the things that I’m taking away from this just for the listeners here. The first thing that really jumped out at me: build upon your success. In a marketing pros, where things are going well, double down. Second thing is persistence. Is the thing that is the characteristic that you see leading to success and you find yourself wanting business owners to do more of is be more persistence. That tenacity and persistence is a key characteristic of success.

The third is focus; so stay narrow in your focus and potentially have verticals that you focus on even further. So, the narrower you can be, and sometimes it means winning a 10000-person market instead of a million-person market because by having focused there, you can win big because there was no one going after that market.

Target the pain point of those focused customers. So, zoom in, listen to them, talk to them, find out what their pain points are and solve them, target them.

And then marketing is about incremental wins. There are a lot of singles and doubles. That’s a really heartening piece of advice for me because sometimes it feels like you’re just spinning your wheels in marketing, but it’s like oh, actually I guess that was a 1 percent bump in that segment, and that’s the win that we’ve got to look for. On the sales side, it’s easy to fish for whales in sales but in marketing, this is more of a net and you’re looking to catch a whole lot of minnows, a lot of singles and doubles, a lot of 1 percent bumps.

Ajay: And you know, it’s not just the marketing. Even in sales, like in Good to Great it’s kind of interesting. It looks at the successful companies and the unsuccessful ones would have a 100 percent sales increase one year and then would have nothing, so up and down. But the great companies would grow on the average of 20 percent per year, that’s all. But what happens is that very soon, if you can continue like you were talking in the beginning, if you are increasing your sales by 10 percent, then pretty soon now you are adding 1,000 per month.

In the increment, you are able to plan it better; you can handle everything better in that kind of growth. I think you have such a solid base already with 4,000 users that you should be able to build upon them. Just dig into it and good luck, and keep us posted because this seems like a great product to me.

Steve: Thanks.

Ajay: And if you have the worldwide use, this is fantastic; it’s just a matter of how do you build and take it to the next level.

Steve: That’s right. It’s all about growth for us right now. With that in mind, I'd be happy to offer any of your listeners who it’s helpful for, who have a field sales team or have friends in field sales, I'd be happy to offer two months free of our product. When they call and interact with the people who get them set up, just have them mention the Founders Corner and we’ll change the account to be two months free and let them really take the thing out for a test drive and play with it.

It’s really helpful for field salespeople. Anyone who’s going out into the field needs to route and plan and schedule their day and have focus. That’s what we’re trying to facilitate here.

Ajay: How do they reach you?

Steve: The best way to reach us is to go to our website. Just Google “Badger Map,” so like the animal, B-A-D-G-E-R, the Badger Map and they’ll find our website and they can sign up there. BadgerMapping.com is the website.

Ajay: Definitely I encourage all the listeners of Founders Corner to contact Steve and get an additional month of free trial, and then we’ll just go from there. It’s wonderful, Steve. It was very nice talking to you. Do you have any other questions?

Steve: No, this has been so helpful, Ajay. I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out, here.