As of now, there is nearly no formal structured education in modern sales and each member of the go-to-market profession is learning on the job, creating wildly varying skills and lengthy onboarding processes. This impacts the potential success of early-stage companies at a time when there is an unprecedented demand for go-to-market talent in the technology sector.
Sales Impact Academy is a London-based go-to-market learning platform providing a continuous live learning solution for high-growth tech companies. It is solving this industry crisis by bringing together the world’s best talent to teach structured, live online courses with high learning design principles. Now, the company secured a $4 million (nearly £2.9 million) investment.
Investment details
The investment round includes a $3 million (nearly £2.2 million) in a seed funding round led by Stage 2 Capital and a $1 million (nearly £0.73 million) in debt financing. 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).
This additional capital will ensure that Sales Impact Academy can continue to deliver on what it does best. It will be used to create 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.
Also, 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.”
“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.”
Massive growth
Sales Impact Academy was founded in 2019 by Alexandra Damgaard and Paul Fifield. Headquartered in London, it also works in Austin, Texas. The company witnessed a massive growth in just 20 months due to a rapidly escalating supply and demand crisis for go-to-market talent. Of late, Sales Impact Academy witnessed over 900% growth in subscription revenue over the last 12 months, thereby winning customers like Outreach, G2, Klaviyo and Verbit. 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.
Already, the teaching roster features over 50 global experts including Mark Roberge, former CRO of Hubspot; Elissa Fink, former CMO of Tableau; Sam Nelson, head of SDR at Outreach; Greg Holmes, former CRO of Zoom; Sarah Brazier of Gong; top Linkedin Sales Voice Kevin Dorsey; Marylou Tyler, author of “Predictable Revenue”; Dan Steinman, Chief Evangelist at Gainsight and author of “Customer Success”; and Sir Clive Woodward, former Director of Sport for the Great Britain Olympics team.
The post Sales Impact Academy, London’s go-to-market learning platform secures $4M funding appeared first on UKTN (UK Tech News).
