Grad Solutions is a state-funded and fully accredited Education Management Organization (EMO) serving the entire state of Arizona. Their main goal is to help students who’ve fallen through the cracks of the education system earn their High School diploma. With over 800 graduates since 2012, Grad Solutions and Director of Business Development Steve Crook’s efforts to help these kids is truly making the world a better place.

Grad Solution’s sales team consists of eight employees with just four field reps covering all of Arizona. All in the course of one day, Grad Solutions reps may find themselves visiting houses, apartment complexes, schools, smoke shops, government buildings, and many other places.. Steve and his team had an enormous task on their hands, and in order to even come close to his goal of 50 meetings a week, he was going to need some help

With such a daunting assignment ahead of him and his team, Steve faced the facts. He knew he needed some way to allocate his sales team’s time better. His team had no CRM in place prior to Badger Maps, as well as no routing system or process for sales data feedback. He needed a little bit of everything: a streamlined loop of communication between him and his team, a simple way to track customer data, and a way for his team to create routes. Without this, Steve realized that he had no way to make informed decisions on his team's sales activities regarding their effectiveness.

Essentially, the success of the program was contingent on Steve’s ability to distribute limited sales resources over a vast territory. Needless to say, they had no time to spare and needed a solution to quickly maximize sales efficiency. Additionally, Grad Solutions was looking for a way to instantly transfer territories between reps.

Sales reps would too often unknowingly drive by a school or district office while on their way to a meeting. They would have to turn back around because the school they passed was chronologically next on their list for that day. Zig-zagging around town was killing their numbers and wasting their time.

Most Grad Solutions reps were green and had little experience with outside sales. Sometimes Grad Solution reps would start their day without a plan in place. This completely neutralized any sales strategy and hindered vital sales data feedback. They weren’t gathering data from the field, so even if their reps had a plan, there would be no way to see if it was working or not.

With the success of Grad Solutions hanging in the balance, Steve knew he needed to make a change. The sum of his problems roughly equated to the solution being some form of lightweight CRM with routing capabilities, but he knew he needed more.

After a quick google search, Steve found Badger, and when he saw competitive pricing compared to other solutions, he dug a little deeper.

With such a huge market and only a handful of resources available, getting his sales team on board as quickly as possible was top priority:

Badger Maps became an integral part of the Grad Solutions sales toolbelt, the team relies on Badger to update and maintain crucial customer information.

Grad Solutions reps also used Badger as a note-taking and information sharing tool. If one rep was having success in a certain school district, another rep could reach out and ask for any tips or tricks for their particular district. This created a culture of teamwork and constant improvement among reps. This flow of communication paved a pathway to some very desirable ROI.

Steve’s reps were able to have more informed conversations with each client because they had the necessary information right at their fingertips to create an engaging pitch.

In addition to achieving sales meeting goals, Badger also helped them overcome some of their company’s biggest hurdles, such as small windows of business opportunity with limited resources. According to Steve,

Steve continued, “We would get maps of houses with drop out students all over Arizona, and used the Lasso tool to pocket the clusters of students to set up testing within the closest proximity to all the students.”

When Steve first introduced his team to Badger, he anticipated an increase in both the quality and quantity of meetings his team had. Both of these metrics increased, however, Steve saw Badger helping in ways beyond just meetings. Badger gave him the ability to assign a rep a new territory, and have them trained on their new territory immediately

Grad Solutions can now seamlessly transition rep from territory to territory. This made management’s job easier and allowed for greater business flexibility. Steve also had much more visibility in the field, which he used to better allocate his team’s time.