We've never had new sales reps come in and hit the ground running like this. We have people who have only been here five months selling at the same volume as people who have been here for decades.
About BadgePass
BadgePass builds software for identity management and access control, helping hospitals, local governments, and universities keep their physical campuses safe and secure.
Gage King leads enablement for the sales team. His job is to help reps learn the workflows, product details, and hard-won tribal knowledge they need to sell confidently.
The challenge: new reps needed years of knowledge before they had years of experience
BadgePass is growing quickly. That growth created a training problem.
The product surface is huge and constantly changing. BadgePass sells cards, printers, RFID, NFC, and access-control software. Each category takes years to understand, and each one keeps expanding.
This is a very niche industry. It's a lot of tribal knowledge. I've been at BadgePass for almost eight years, and I hear something new every day.
BadgePass trained reps well, but no training program could cover every situation a rep would eventually face. Some details only became relevant months later, when a customer asked a specific question or a rep ran into an unfamiliar workflow.
We trained people really well. But some of the things they learned in training, they didn't actually face until seven or eight months down the road.
That made sales knowledge hard to scale. Experienced people knew the answers, but those answers were often stuck in someone's head, buried in an old document, or shared once during a call.
BadgePass had documentation, but it was hard to keep current. PDF cut sheets and partner resources were sometimes three or four years old. For a company with so many moving parts, the team could easily miss one of the scattered documents that needed an update.
BadgePass needed a better way to give reps the knowledge they needed when they needed it. Not another static library. A living resource reps could actually use in the field.
The solution: field-ready sales guides built with Trails
BadgePass first tried Scribe and saw the value in step-by-step documentation. But the team ran into limits.
Pricing was one issue. Scribe charged a significant amount per user, which did not fit BadgePass's plans to scale training across a growing sales team.
But the bigger difference was how reps actually work.
BadgePass reps are often between customer visits, away from their laptops, or trying to refresh themselves before a conversation. Sometimes they can read through a guide. Other times, they need to listen.
Trails gave them both formats from the same walkthrough.
A lot of our reps are on the road, so it's good to have a video they can listen to when they might not be able to scroll through something or pull their laptop out.
For BadgePass, that made Trails more than a documentation tool. It became a way to create sales training that matched the real rhythm of the job.
A rep can open a Trail before a customer conversation. They can watch the video, skim the written steps, or revisit the same walkthrough later when the question comes up again.
Why Trails fit BadgePass's sales workflow
Trails worked for BadgePass because it helped the team turn expert knowledge into reusable training without making documentation feel like another project.
- Guide and video together: Reps read the steps or watch the walkthrough, depending on where they are and how they work.
- Short answers in the moment: A bite-sized Trail gives a rep the answer they need without waiting for someone to schedule a call.
- Easy updates: When a process changes, the team updates the Trail instead of hunting down old PDFs.
- Flexible creation: Gage captures workflows in minutes by doing the work and talking through what needs to be understood.
- Hands-on support: Before buying, Gage joined several calls with the Trails team, tested the product, and got clear answers.
The level of support and service has been a big needle mover for me. Anytime I have an issue, I send it to you all and I don't feel like I'm being left hanging.
From one-off explanations to a reusable owner's manual
Before Trails, a simple CRM question could turn into a screen-share session. Gage would find time, walk the rep through the process live, answer follow-up questions, and then repeat the same explanation the next time someone asked.
Now, he can send a Trail.
A short Trail gives the rep the answer and turns that answer into a reusable asset for the next person who needs it. Instead of spending 20+ minutes on another walkthrough, Gage can point reps to a guide they can use on their own time.
Trails helps us put that information out there for newer reps and have it available when they need it, so it's not something they have to pull from their brain from training two years ago.
Those Trails are becoming part of BadgePass's broader owner's manual, a working playbook for sales reps and partners. The goal is to give reps one place to find the workflows, product details, and tribal knowledge they need to do the job well.
That owner's manual can cover the kinds of knowledge that are hardest to transfer in live training alone:
- CRM workflows reps need to repeat correctly
- Product details across cards, printers, RFID, NFC, and access-control software
- Common customer questions that come up months after onboarding
- Partner resources that need to stay current
- Niche process knowledge that experienced reps usually carry in their heads
The result: faster ramping, fewer repeat calls, and knowledge reps can trust
BadgePass is still early in its larger owner's manual project, but the team already sees the impact.
New sales reps are ramping faster than before. When Gage started, it took him nearly five months to close his first sale. Today's new reps are beating that pace by a wide margin.
We've never had new sales reps come in and hit the ground running like this. We have people who have only been here five months selling at the same volume as people who have been here for decades.
That matters because BadgePass sells in a complex category. Reps do not just need to know the pitch. They need to understand the products, the workflows, and the edge cases customers ask about in the field.
Trails gives reps a way to revisit that knowledge without waiting on someone else to explain it again.
Beyond sales: a tool the whole company can use
What started as a sales enablement project did not stay there. Once the team saw how well Trails worked for reps, the idea quickly outgrew the sales floor.
When we started looking at this, we thought, "Whoa, it's not just sales that could use this. Our whole company could." That was one of the first things my boss thought of. He said this could be useful for everybody.
BadgePass started with sales because that is where the knowledge gap was most visible. But the same problem exists across the company. Experienced people know how things work. Newer people need that knowledge before they get stuck. Old documents are hard to keep current.
Trails gives BadgePass a way to turn what lives in people's heads into guides the whole company can reuse.
