The capital will fund additional educational content to ensure go-to-market teams have the skills needed to consistently hit their demand generation, sales, and retention targets
Sales Impact Academy, the world’s leading go-to-market learning platform, today announced the company secured a $4 million investment, including a $3 million seed round led by Stage 2 Capital and $1 million in debt financing, after seeing over 900% growth in subscription revenue over the last 12 months, winning customers like Outreach, G2, Klaviyo and Verbit.
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This additional capital will ensure that Sales Impact Academy can continue to deliver on what it does best – creating high-quality live curriculum, taught by the world’s leading experts to ensure go-to-market teams of high-growth technology companies have the skills they need to consistently hit their targets.
As part of the investment, Jay Po and Mark Roberge, co-founders of Stage 2 Capital, will join Sales Impact Academy’s Board of Directors. “The go-to-market ecosystem has needed this solution for a long time. Internal learning and enablement resources are scrambling to equip their new hires with the same core sales, marketing, and customer success skills, and constantly reinventing the wheel from company to company,” said Roberge, former CRO at HubSpot. “SIA takes away this educational burden and allows internal teams to focus on the final mile of skills unique to their organization’s go-to-market context. We have been very impressed with the execution of the team so far and excited about the potential synergies between our LP base of 250+ GTM executives and SIA’s growth strategy.”
Stage 2 Capital is the first venture firm to be backed by over 250 of the world’s elite go-to-market leaders, including John McMahon (board member, Snowflake), Allison Pickens (former COO, Gainsight), Jay Simons (former president, Atlassian), Janine Pelosi (CMO, Zoom), Ryan Longfield (CRO, Gong), Leela Srinivasan (CMO, Momentive–formerly SurveyMonkey), and DJ Paoni (President, SAP).
The Sales Impact Academy coaching roster already features over 50 world-class coaches including Greg Holmes, former CRO of Zoom; Elissa Fink, former CMO of Tableau; Dan Steinman, Chief Evangelist at Gainsight; Channing Ferrer, VP Sales Operations and Strategy at HubSpot; and Sir Clive Woodward, former Director of Sport for the Great Britain Olympics team.
Sales Impact Academy’s astonishing growth in just 20 months is due to a rapidly escalating supply and demand crisis for go-to-market talent. Given the near-total lack of formal structured education in modern sales, every member of the go-to-market profession is learning on the job, which has created wildly varying skills and lengthy onboarding processes. This ultimately impacts the potential success of individuals and teams. At the same time, there is an unprecedented demand for go-to-market talent, driven by the explosion of the technology sector in recent years and the record levels of investment into the industry.
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The resulting industry scorecard is pretty grim. According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of sales organizations miss their targets by more than 10%, and CSO Insights reports that 54% of deals forecasted to close by reps never will.
However, with Sales Impact Academy’s schools in management and leadership, marketing, sales, prospecting customer success, and revenue operations, companies can ensure their go-to-market teams have the core skills and competencies to succeed. Each course requires just two hours of class time a week, complementing the working week rather than interfering with it, with clear actions and takeaways for continued development and implementation after each class.
Cognism, one of 200 Sales Impact Academy customers, saw conversion rates across their entire sales team go from 20% to 30% in just three months, and Brandbassador’s SDRs increased top of funnel meetings by 36% after their reps went through the prospecting school.
“No question, the core skills of teams and their leaders is the difference between hitting targets and missing them dramatically,” said Paul Fifield, CEO and co-founder of Sales Impact Academy. “A skilled salesperson with an email address, a phone and a spreadsheet will still do well, but an unskilled salesperson with the best tech stack in the world will fail. For the first time ever, go-to-market teams can now add elite-level learning as a product – like Gong or Outreach – to the sales stack and see an immediate impact on pipeline creation, conversion and retention.”
In the past year, the company has created over 30 digital-first courses on the platform and taught over 900 hours of live classes to thousands of learners every day. Moreso, Sales Impact Academy has maintained a highly engaged student base, with retention rates often exceeding 85% over 12-14 weeks of learning, which speaks to off-the-charts user love. This funding will also go towards further development into a world-class team and in the curriculum for continued expansion.
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