UPDATED 09:54 EDT / JULY 21 2021

EMERGING TECH

Sales Impact Academy receives boost from Stage 2 Capital with $4 million investment

A growing go-to-market learning platform received a major boost forward today with the announcement that Stage 2 Capital would provide a $3 million seed round and $1 million in debt financing to fund additional educational content.

Sales Impact Academy Ltd., which started in 2019, has seen 900% growth in subscription revenue over the past 12 months by creating a live curriculum for sales teams taught by leading experts in the field. The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer believes that SIA is filling a significant unmet need.

“The global education system has done us a massive disservice. I call it the greatest educational travesty of the last 50 years,” said SIA’s CEO Paul Fifield (pictured, right). “Higher education has entirely overlooked sales as a profession. The core fundamental skills within revenue teams and within salespeople are now completely lacking because there is no structured formal learning out there. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve.”

Fifield spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE, for a digital CUBE Conversation. He was joined by Mark Roberge (pictured, left), managing director at Stage 2 Capital, and they discussed the live teaching model, how the startup has drawn from an extensive venture community for instructors, and the global market opportunity for results-oriented sales instruction.

Up to 90% completion rates

With over 160 customers currently, SIA’s live instruction model is proving to be an attractive inducement to participate for many firms.

“The really powerful thing is that entire teams within companies can actually learn exactly at the same pace,” Fifield said. “We teach it at 8 a.m. Pacific, 11 a.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. in in the U.K. and 5 p.m. in the rest of Europe, so your entire European and North American teams can literally learn in the same class with a world-class expert. We have 70%, 80% and even 90% completion rates of the live class experience.”

SIA’s high-profile coaching roster has also been one of its selling points. The company lists top representatives from Zoom Inc., Gainsight Inc., Tableau Inc. and the former director of sport for the Great Britain Olympic team as instructors.

A portion of the coaching roster was drawn from Stage 2 Capital’s backers, which include 250 go-to-market leaders.

“Our limited partner base was going to be a key ingredient at least in the first cycle of this business,” Roberge said. “That was a nicety around the scale and investment thesis for this one.”

Addressing sales tech stack gap

The investment by Stage 2 Capital comes at a time when 79% of sales organizations miss revenue forecasts by over 10%, according to research from SiriusDecisions Inc.

“We’ve been thinking a lot about the sales tech stack; it’s evolved a ton in the last couple of decades,” Roberge said. “But nothing has really happened on the education side, and that’s really the enormous gap we’ve seen. It’s almost like all of these companies are reinventing the wheel of looking in the upcoming year, having a dozen salespeople to hire, and trying to put together a sales enablement program within their organization to teach people Sales 101.”

Fifield reports there are 60 million people in sales based on data from LinkedIn and 150 million people in various go-to-market roles. This is a total addressable market that both SIA and Stage 2 Capital see as a golden opportunity.

“The TAM is huge,” Fifield said. “If half the world’s companies are B2B, that’s probably a proxy for half the world’s GDP. Half of the world’s economic growth is relying on the revenue function of half the world’s companies, and they don’t really know what they’re doing, which is absolutely staggering. If we can solve that in a meaningful way at massive scale, then the impact should be absolutely enormous.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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