How Drinkwater Products cut route planning time by 90% and grew 40% in a year.
When you're running week-long sales trips across 11 states with Word and MapQuest, something has to change. Here's how Craig Brentlinger modernized Drinkwater's field sales operation and what happened next.
20–25%more sales calls per rep
50%faster new rep training time
About Drinkwater Products
Drinkwater Products is a family-owned business serving the oil and gas industry across the Southern United States for over 30 years. The company distributes pipeline pigging solutions which are specialized tools that clean and maintain pipelines. Oil and gas operators depend on them to keep critical infrastructure running.
When Craig Brentlinger and his brother-in-law took over the business, they inherited a capable company with a lot of room to grow and a sales operation that needed a significant upgrade. Craig's mandate was simple: grow the company as big as possible, as efficiently as possible.
“My main goal was to save time and be more efficient.”
Craig Brentlinger, Director of Operations, Drinkwater Products
The challenge
With four reps covering massive territories across 11 states, Drinkwater's field sales operation was running on tools that weren't built for the job and paying for it in time, efficiency, and missed opportunity.
Reps didn't use a CRM. Instead, they tracked customers in color-coded Microsoft Word documents, relying on memory to recall meeting history and account details before visits. Planning a route meant manually copying 20+ addresses into QuickBooks, then importing them into MapQuest, which regularly got addresses wrong, causing reps to miss pre-scheduling meetings. For week-long sales trips across large territories, reps were spending multiple days on planning before ever getting in the car.
New rep onboarding was equally painful. Training meant walking every new hire through each customer's history manually. It was a slow, labor-intensive process that delayed productivity for weeks.
Finding Badger Maps
Craig knew the team was losing too much time to planning and wanted something simple, efficient, and easy enough that it wouldn't require a training program of its own. After researching his options, he came across Badger Maps and decided to run a free team pilot before committing.
The pilot answered every question. Within a month of full implementation, the entire team was up and running, including 5,000 customer records imported in one go, with no manual data entry required.
“The simplicity of Badger is incredible. I could train a 10-year-old how to use the app.”
Craig Brentlinger, Director of Operations, Drinkwater Products
“If you know how to use an iPhone, you can use Badger.”
Craig Brentlinger, Director of Operations, Drinkwater Products
How Badger Maps helped
01
Route planning time cut by 90%
What had previously taken multiple days of manual work now takes a fraction of the time. Reps plan their routes in Badger before every trip. Each route is optimized, organized, and ready to execute without copying addresses between systems. The days of arriving late, missing meetings, or leaving the area before seeing every account are gone.
“There aren't any days that I don't get to everyone I need to.”
With less time lost to planning and driving inefficiently between accounts, reps fit more customer visits into every day. And with every prospect visible on the map alongside existing customers, reps started making cold calls they would have previously missed. With clusters of offices that shared pipelines, a rep could mention that neighboring companies were already using their solution, dramatically increasing credibility and accelerating trust.
Before every meeting, reps pull up the account's notes and check-in history in Badger, so they walk in knowing exactly what was discussed last time, what the customer needs, and what the next step should be. Sales cycles shortened because reps were prepared, credible, and focused and not trying to remember conversations from weeks ago.
Onboarding a new rep used to mean walking them through every customer's history by hand. With every account visible on the map and full notes attached, new reps can get up to speed on their territory independently and start selling faster. What used to take weeks now takes half the time.
“Training overall has been a night and day difference.”
Automated weekly reports replaced the hours reps used to spend writing up activity summaries by hand. Craig now has a live view of what's happening across every rep and territory without chasing down updates, which freed him to spend less time micromanaging and more time coaching. Reps can see where they need to improve. Managers can see where to help. And the whole team performs at a higher level.
With the exact status of every deal visible in the field, Drinkwater's team started closing more enterprise-level accounts. Reps arrive at every meeting with full deal history and account context at their fingertips. As a result, every conversation moves forward and no deal stalls for lack of information.
The results
Craig estimates that 10% of Drinkwater’s total increase in sales volume can be directly credited to Badger, with much of that growth coming from previously untapped territories that the team can now reach and cover efficiently.
