Sales Impact Academy Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is paul field he's an entrepreneur with 18 years experience in founding and scaling global companies over the past seven years he's grown two international tech businesses from zero to 70 million in combined sales as cro and 500 million bucks in total value he's also raised over 100 million bucks from investment across all stages paul you ready to take to the top i am indeed all right what were those two companies what was your last cro role uh last cro was a company called uni days in the student space and what was it um i don't know if you've i've talked to anyone there but yeah they just did a big secondary of a 100 million about about five minutes about five months ago okay now did you have equity in those businesses or you joined too late no yeah had equity yeah that's good so what the hell are you doing on a call with me then you should be rich on a private jet because i'm building something else that's way more important than those two companies what are you building so um in my journey as cro um you know starting at cerros foreign evp of sales i moved to new york we raised this is back in like 2011. we raised you know a series a from graycroft and i was kind of thrust into this role as like evp of sales and everybody around me was going well now you just got to build a kind of scalable repeatable revenue model just get on with it it's just like wow this is pretty scary i've moved my whole family to new york i just raised capital you know i've always had commercial like roles uh but it was really it was like massive single swim time um and you know i i literally through my sort of 15 year career in in sort of sales and revenue leadership i've never felt entirely comfortable in in the role because i've known that i've got these kind of like huge gaps in my learning and what i'm trying to do now is basically build um a complete kind of like education platform for basically you know every major persona in a sort of b2b sas company right from cro right down to like the sdr and try and kind of fix this this knowledge problem with just very high quality live education when did you launch this spa october last year okay so 2020 and um looks like pricing wise there's a bunch of different options what are customers paying on average per month to get access to your course in dollars the average is about 15 000 a year and that gives access um up to now about 20 people we've kind of evolved the pricing quite a few times over the over the past year but we're now about how many customers do you have today so we have just about Currently serving 100 customers 100 customers 100 customers okay got it yeah and are these usually are these usually brands are brands typically paying for this for their heads of sales yes the companies typically typically pay that like the head of sales is typically a sort of like decision maker stroke buyer and and they're buying it for their teams basically to have like a scalable um kind of education site like solution um yeah and we're doing about 1.5 million Monthly recurring revenue in in arr already in about 12 months of selling and where did you finish 2020 at what was run rate last team last month uh we finished 2020 on 1.5 sorry actually instead of run right what was total sales in 2020. you were only selling for a couple months but was total sales so we we ended the we ended the year on 1.5 million in arr basically yeah let's run right what was total sales cat you only were saying for october november december yeah oh you mean you mean in 19 2019. you said you just launched last year 2020 in october oh no sorry we're sorry sorry no we launched in october 2019. guys not last year anymore sorry yeah sorry sorry so what did you do in 2019 in total sales oh 2019 was was was small we had about 15 customers um so yeah in arr probably about a hundred maybe like a hundred thousand back then yep okay majority yeah yeah and take me through how you got those first one or two customers where'd you find them probably like network i've been doing a lot of in the in when i left uni days i did a lot of like voluntary teaching and so i was that's what discovered this kind of like problem existed kind of almost everywhere in in sales um so i built a pretty good network and we just hustled the first few customers and we literally started with maybe like with just two of us we had like three or four decks and we had a couple of courses but we we immediately when we launched the business we wanted to do it on subscription because one of the main problems in sort of sales education if you like is a lot of the solutions whether you're looking for an expensive consultancy firm or an expensive consultant they come in one hit whereas what we're creating i guess the category that we're trying to create and is you know recording sales education as a service so you literally subscribe to this and we repeat our courses five six times a year so challenging the challenging part the challenging part is though if it works people don't need you anymore because it works right so this is you're always in a catch-22 and this is why every member every person that runs a membership course that i ever talk to they always have a churn issue and they never have a good answer for it so if you should have a churn issue if your product is working correct no because and then this is the this is why number one like we're we're like 20 done in terms of the catalog right so we've got a huge amount of like courses and education to create and so just that that continued volume is a little bit like netflix right um you know paul what is the number though i mean we can just look at this from the number what is churn yeah we have a hundred percent metal retention basically but on a gross basis gross revenue churn it's a bit tricky because we've just we you know some of the early clients we brought in were just kind of wrong because we didn't really have a like a nailed an icp but looking looking so last year we had like 10 customers in in the last quarter and seven of them have stayed so it's like like 30 churn but it's not really reflective of going forwards i think our icp got very tight in in like this time last year and i'd say i'm not expecting high churn and here's the thing paul that's really high though if in last quarter you had 10 customers sign up and today only seven are still active i mean that's 30 churn in three months yeah it's on pace to be like 120 you're going to turn your whole customer base in 12 months yeah but it's not reflective of going forwards i think any any company that starts out right any sas company any company you're just trying to learn who like who gets the most value from your product so we had a bunch of like non-icps but the icps we had 100 like um so who is your you must have this very quickly defined then what is your target today b2b like tech companies like leaning heavily to sas series a to series d why can't bootstrap companies use you to be honest with you like you're gonna start to get quite a lot of churn back then and some of the some of the chairman was like super early early stage companies um the most value you get and this is to talking to your kind like church question the most the reason why we we're not going to experience churn is that you know i experienced this when i was growing uni days i went from you know a handful of people to 100 people over the course of like three years so you're constantly constantly adding head count whether that's sdrs your csn team your aes like management layers all of that stuff plus plus your b2b marketing function as you're piling those people in they all have varied skills good habits bad habits and what we're able to do with our platform is that you know every eventually every single member of your team will go through these courses as they join the company and that will level the skill base um across the team so someone joins someone joins a company that's paying for your your thing one of the first things in the online is you have to go through these 10 courses and 10 hours on paul's academy yeah we're we're like a pretty integral part of a lot of companies onboarding well so yes finishing my question it's a it's it's top down right like i imagine right it's sort of like a a cro saying you must use salesforce why because that's how they track metrics even though sales people hate it so what i'm curious is how do you actually measure consumption of your course from the people actually taking it yeah well there's a number of ways and obviously we're through the learning management platform that we have we can see like we can see usage who do you use what's your element um so we're we're actually moving to da chabot but who you use now um we're using now um oh god i actually literally can't remember i just had two weeks after my brain's gone to mush okay um yeah i can't remember now but anyways we got usage metrics in there we're also tracking at the end of every course we have like a we have a survey i think you're using learn upon by the way but i'm not sure thank you very much how did you know that with your research we are using learn upon thank you yeah and look you know we do we do a ton of like customer surveys you know our mps score is like 49. harvard business school's like 41. i had a customer matt harris from brown bastard say like his actual problem is that people doing too much rather than too little yeah so i just can't figure out why you're doing this so like your best time to spend if you really believe what you're teaching is to go do this and have equity inside of a company and go early and earlier join early and earlier in a new tech company so you can get a larger chunk of equity like why are you not doing that it's a bit messy to go down that end and start taking equity what we want is a really like just very um frictionless model um and we actually just signed um we're announcing this on the 19th of january we just signed a global partnership with the revenue collective so every single revenue collective member of which there's 4 000 gets a single user access to sia the combined revenue of the revenue collective membership companies is about a trillion dollars so we've got a very you know we've got a two-year partnership with them which was struck that's going to be absolutely huge and that that is kind of getting us like firmly into icp those those uh revenue leaders get access to our you know world-class education and then and then we sort of upsell the the um the academy to to to them that's a nice simple there's no kind of equity discussion it's literally per seat model after 20 seats per region and that that's that's the core business got it how many people are on your team today uh 30. and have you bootstrapped this or Raised raised capital we raised 300 000 pounds about 400 thousand dollars in a convertible loan note and we've been cash flow positive the last three months how casual positive like how much to the bottom line each month a bit maybe like 10 000 bucks okay okay so barely profit which is great it's better than not being profitable yeah where are you of the 30 people on your team how many are engineers zero okay how many sales reps with quota uh we now have three aes and four sdrs they all have quota or no yeah yeah oh nice interesting and what do you set the quota at for the the aes quota is in sterling it's like sixty-eight thousand an hour a month got it so yeah it's like about nine thousand bucks a month eight hundred it's about a million dollars a new ar per year yeah yeah um so obviously you're not at seven million an hour you have seven or you have three reps i mean how do you yeah how do you get them to ramp faster like what's the choke point right now um well we kind of we've got we've got well to be honest with you we we we um secure we had two ap start in november and they both closed like about 20 in dollars about 30 40 dollars of revenue like in december so they ran pretty fast the the beauty of having like a sort of content model like we have is that we don't have very complicated like integration all that kind of stuff the product is relatively sort of easy to understand um and um so yeah so and actually the the problem is really really acute and we're getting a huge pull from the market um so what do you say by the end of 2021 in terms of runway i think we'll be at seven million all right we'll have to come back on at that point in the meantime though let's wrap up with the famous five ball number one favorite business book ah um favorite business book wow um i do love mark roberge's um sales acceleration formula number two is there a ceo you're following or studying without something to corny i mean obviously that elon musk is pretty huge i loved his i love the book number three what what's your favorite online tool for building the company probably zoom what is it zoom oh zoom number four how many hours of sleep to get every night five and what's your situation married single kids uh divorced child same one one kiddo yeah okay and how old are you 45 45 last question what's something you wishing you knew when you were 20 not to get from a business perspective not to get into a business model that is not recurring guys there you have it sales impact academy he helped a bunch of other companies grow from you know call it 10 20 an ar up to much larger amounts combined value of 500 million dollars in terms of valuation now teaching other sales leaders how to do this he's got about a 1.5 million dollar run rate today from just 100 000 12 months before that 100 customers paying average about a thousand eleven hundred dollars per month again for this training they're not churning because he's adding new content every month we'll see if he can keep it going and go to 7 million by the end of 2021 paul thanks for taking us to the top good summary thanks one 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