Sales Impact Academy Secures $22M in Funding to Accelerate Learning Solution for Go-To-Market Sales Professionals
Investors include Stage 2 Capital, HubSpot Ventures, MIT Investment Management Company, Emerge Education and GTM specialists
Sales Impact Academy (SIA), the world’s leading go-to-market learning platform, announced $22 million in new funding to accelerate the growth and development of its learning solutions. This investment is led by a pair of new and notable entrants: Boston-based HubSpot Ventures and MIT Investment Management Company, in partnership with existing investors, Stage 2 Capital and Emerge Education. The fresh capital will enable SIA to develop more curriculum and continue to build out their underlying learning technology platform so they can keep delivering on what they do best – offering ongoing education and professional development across the go-to-market function covering sales, customer success, marketing, management, and operations.
Nearly every business-to-business technology company in the world is looking to upskill their existing go-to-market teams and recruit more quality talent in a competitive market with massive demand and limited supply. However, enablement teams are already struggling to keep up with the demands of training related to their companies’ own products and solutions, and quickly fall behind in the complex task of developing core skills-based learning programs from the ground up for every member of the go-to-market organization.
The SIA technology platform coupled with its best-in-class live curriculum, taught by the world’s elite go-to-market practitioners, solves this problem on a global scale for companies like HubSpot, Gong, Klaviyo, GitHub, G2, and 6sense. The platform has a proven impact on recruiting, retention, and productivity at scale while simultaneously serving as a career companion for in-work or aspiring go-to-market professionals.
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“Half the world’s companies are selling business to business, and the growth engine of those companies is the go-to-market team. It blows my mind every day that, unlike law, finance, or HR, there is no structured learning or education for go-to-market teams, either as a student or an in-work professional,” said Paul Fifield, CEO and co-founder of Sales Impact Academy. “It means everyone is learning as they go, with the education burden falling on the companies themselves, who are simply not natural educators. The net result is average internal learning programs and a profession in utter chaos. Given that these teams are responsible for the growth of half the world’s GDP, ensuring they have strong learning and development resources couldn’t be more mission-critical.”
SIA’s investors in this round understand both the need in the market and how this particular solution is poised to meet it. “We see a clear lack of accessible quality education targeted toward go-to-market professionals. SIA is a mission-driven team tirelessly solving this problem and we are excited to support them as they bring innovative education solutions to enterprises worldwide,” said Navneeth Harikumar, Global Investment Team with the MIT Investment Management Company.
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Brandon Greer, Head of HubSpot Ventures, agrees, also noting how SIA is building community in the process. “There is a massive opportunity to provide world-class go-to-market educational content to professionals in sales and marketing roles as they seek to grow their careers, upskill, and contribute meaningfully to their organizations. SIA is seizing this opportunity while building a real community in the process. We have conviction that SIA can become the digital-first standard for achieving early go-to-market excellence.”
“Investing in employee growth and continuous education are requirements of company culture. With the incredible demand for great sales, marketing, and customer success talent, there needs to be an equally growing source of modern learning on the job,” says Jay Po, Managing Partner and co-founder of Stage 2 Capital. “SIA is the first to bring a specialized education-as-a-service solution at scale for thousands of go-to-market professionals.”
Sales Impact Academy has grown from 25 to 125 employees over the past year, from 82 to over 260 customers, and has seen 500% YoY revenue growth. The learning community has grown from 3,330 to 14,560 professionals, making SIA the largest go-to-market learning community in the world. In addition, their executive board has seen significant growth with Ryan Scheuermann, previously with Process Street, coming on as Chief Technology Officer in September of 2021, and Tony Jackson, formerly of Tableau, MongoDB, and Snowflake, joining as Chief Revenue Officer in February of 2022. In addition, Katie Landaal, formerly with ZoomInfo, joined SIA as Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Business Development.
