How Grad Solutions hit 50 meetings per rep per week
Four reps. The entire state of Arizona. A goal of 50 meetings per week. Here's how Steve Crook made it happen with Badger Maps.
About Grad Solutions
Grad Solutions is a state-funded and fully accredited Education Management Organization serving the entire state of Arizona. Their mission is to help students who have fallen through the cracks of the education system earn their high school diploma.
With just four field reps covering all of Arizona, visiting homes, apartment complexes, schools, government buildings, and everything in between, Grad Solutions’ geographic coverage demands exceptional efficiency. Every hour in the field counts. Every meeting matters.
The challenge
When Steve took stock of his team's operation, the problems were clear and compounding. There was no CRM, no routing system, and no process for capturing or sharing field data. Reps were starting their days without a plan, zig-zagging across cities, and driving past schools and district offices they would have to backtrack to later. Without any data coming back from the field, Steve had no way to know whether the strategy was working or where to make adjustments.
Most of his reps were new to outside sales and had little experience with time management in the field. Getting them organized, keeping them on track, and transferring territories when reps turned over was a constant source of friction.
The goal was 50 meetings per rep per week or 10 meetings per day. Without the right tools, it was impossible.
“We didn't want to pay for a lot of what the big CRMs have. We needed a way to save customer info — plus routing and scheduling.”
Steve Crook, Director of Business Development, Grad Solutions
Finding Badger Maps
After a quick search for a lightweight solution that combined CRM capabilities with routing, Steve found Badger Maps. The pricing was competitive, the feature set matched what the team needed, and the implementation was about as fast as it gets.
“We downloaded the app and we were up and running with Badger the next day. Implementation was seamless and cost-effective.”
Steve Crook, Director of Business Development, Grad Solutions
How Badger Maps helped
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50 meetings per rep per week
With optimized routes built around their full territory, reps stopped zig-zagging and started executing. Every school, district office, and student location visible on the map meant reps could plan a logical, efficient day before they left in the morning and stick to it. The goal of 10 meetings per day, 50 per week, became consistently achievable.
“Badger Maps contributed heavily to our bottom line. Reps consistently met our goal of 10 meetings a day, 50 per week. That wouldn't have been possible without Badger Maps.”
With less time lost to inefficient routing, reps were able to cover dramatically more of Arizona than before. The lasso tool became a particularly powerful feature. Reps would receive maps of dropout students across the state, draw around clusters of students with the lasso tool, and use proximity data to plan the most efficient way to reach them all. What had previously been an overwhelming geographic challenge became a manageable and strategic exercise.
“Just the time alone that Badger has saved us has allowed our reps to cover exponentially more territory.”
Better meetings with the right information in hand
With every student's history, notes, and previous interactions available in the app before each visit, reps walked into every meeting prepared and able to have a genuinely informed conversation. The quality of meetings improved alongside the quantity. Reps started sharing notes and tips with each other across districts, creating a culture of collaboration that made the whole team better.
One of Steve's most persistent headaches was rep turnover. Training a new rep on an unfamiliar territory took time that Grad Solutions didn't have. With Badger, the transition became nearly instant. Every account, every note, and every piece of territory history was already in the app, so a new rep could be assigned to a territory and feel comfortable in it almost immediately.
“Badger Maps made position turnover seamless and helped us remain on task through turmoil. It has allowed us to take a rep and put him into a new territory and make him feel comfortable.”
For the first time, Steve had a live view of what his team was doing in the field: which territories were being covered, which weren't, and where to redirect resources. He could allocate his team's time based on data rather than instinct, and make real-time adjustments when the situation called for it.
