Steve Benson

Founder and CEO Badger Maps Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Steve Benson is the founder and chief executive of Badger Maps, a route-planning and territory-management application for outside salespeople that layers mapping, routing and scheduling on top of a company’s existing CRM. It is a product built from the inside of the problem: Benson spent his entire pre-founding career in field sales, at IBM, HP and Autonomy and then at Google, where he sold the Google Maps API to businesses and was named Google Enterprise’s top-performing salesperson in the world. Badger Maps became the top-ranked Sales app in the Apple App Store and grew to roughly 6,000 customers and around 75 staff without taking venture capital — a deliberate choice that shaped the company into a profitable, distributed, founder-led business rather than a growth-at-any-cost one.

Career Highlights

• Founded Badger Maps in 2011-2012 and has led it as chief executive throughout.
• Named Google Enterprise’s top-performing salesperson in the world during his tenure selling the Google Maps API.
• Took Badger Maps to the number one ranking among Sales apps in the Apple App Store.
• Bootstrapped the business to roughly 75 employees and around $4 million in annual revenue with no outside venture funding.
• Built distributed teams across the Bay Area, Utah, Spain, India and the Philippines.
• Signed a first major customer contract worth more than $300,000 when the company had four employees.
• Hosts the Outside Sales Talk podcast and speaks widely on field sales management.

Professional Journey

Benson is a Chicago native who studied geography at the University of Wisconsin — a degree he has joked few people ever get to use — before moving to California and taking an MBA at Stanford. Rather than following the conventional post-MBA routes into consulting or finance, he went into sales, which he has described as the deliberate and unusual choice of his career. He spent time living in Brazil during college, picking up Portuguese alongside Spanish.

His field sales career ran through IBM, HP and Autonomy before he joined Google, where as a regional sales manager in the enterprise organisation he sold the Google Maps API and worked around Maps and Earth from roughly 2008 to 2012. It was the immediately relevant apprenticeship: he was simultaneously a working field salesperson, managing his own territory and travel, and a seller of mapping technology to businesses. He was recognised as Google Enterprise’s top sales performer worldwide.

By 2011 he had concluded that three things had matured far enough at the same time — smartphones, cloud computing and commercially available mapping APIs — to solve a problem he had lived with personally: outside salespeople planning their days and routes badly, with customer data trapped in CRMs that offered no spatial view of a territory. He left Google and founded Badger Maps to put customers and leads on a map, optimise the day’s route and integrate with the rep’s calendar.

He built it without venture capital. An early enterprise deal worth over $300,000, closed when the company had four people, funded much of what followed. The app reached the top of the Apple App Store’s Sales category within roughly five years of launch, and the business grew to around 6,000 customers and about 75 staff distributed across the Bay Area, Utah, Spain, India and the Philippines, with revenue around $4 million annually as of a 2020 interview. Benson has been candid that consistently underestimating how long projects take has been his most persistent failing as a founder, and that rapid experimentation and constant customer conversation are what compensate for it.

Alongside running the company he has become a prolific voice in the field sales community, hosting the Outside Sales Talk podcast and appearing regularly on sales and SaaS shows including SaaS Club, Sales Reinvented and Salesflare. He also puts unusual weight on hiring and developing interns, mentoring them through an exercise mapping the overlap between what they enjoy, what they are good at and what someone will pay for.

Education

University of Wisconsin

Bachelor of Arts, Geography

Stanford University Graduate School of Business

Master of Business Administration