How Sales Impact AcademySales Impact Academy CEO Dan Sommer grew Sales Impact AcademySales Impact Academy to $21.1M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is paul fivefox he has 20 years of experience in founding and scaling global companies over the past eight years he's grown two international tech businesses from zero to 100 million bucks in combined sales a cro and over 700 million dollars in value he's also raised over 100 million bucks of investment across all stages from seed to growth vc and debt based out there in england paul you're ready to take us to the top i am in date all right so what was intriguing to for to me about you for this interview is you came back on in january uh gave us some some interesting data points working with 100 customers to pay on average a grand a month you are flirting with sort of 100 000 a month in revenue but really then what's more interesting is a lot of sas vendors that i talked today that are trying to outsource or at least get a cheat code to their initial sales hires and this is i think where you really come in so explain to people what sales impact that io is doing yeah yeah sure thanks nathan i should just say i'm recovering from covet as well so if i have a little little cough that's that's what it is well i'm glad you're recovering i'm glad to hear that yeah double jabs as well anyway so yeah so um yeah so essentially we're building a live learning platform for pretty much every role in a go to market team um and i guess one of the unique things is it's a subscription based uh model and so what basically we're able to provide uh customers and teams and reps is a constant all year round access to like the very best learning and go to market and the people that teach are literally the biggest names in the industry who are you know often you know actually working you know right right now so they're sort of cutting edge um of of the industry now you price this it says on your pricing starting at 17.50 per month what do people get for this and who are some of your customers so we've been busy um so we were about a 1 million of ar when we talked back in back in jan just just over so we're close to four now um we're over 200 customers um we've landed companies like gong outreach clavio g2 is just about to sign something special and we have another huge huge brand um that we actually can't talk about just yet who's just about to roll roll us out globally um after a three month trial um in europe so we have over 200 customers now i'd say the bulk of the customers are sort of series 8 series c but but you know as i've just alluded to we've now winning customers also kind of uh in in the enterprise and and so help me understand like why why is gong paying and is it one time you know train my account executives one time and then i quit in six months or what's going to make them stick content stickiness is tough well you know there's actually a huge amount to learn if you're like if you're a bdr if you're a cs rep if you're in sales if you're in revenue operations if you're in marketing there is an enormous amount to learn and we're we're actually building out learning journeys now that literally go over you know multiple multiple years and actually really what you could do over let's say a five or six year period you could literally start as an sdr week it up we can upskill you over your two-year stint as an sdr we can stay with you as we then you transition into an ae and spend three four years into as an ae we can then help you as you develop into an ae leader and start doing sales uh sales management up to vp right up to um becoming a cro so we literally have you know learning tracks that can stay with you for many many years and what's like the medium like if i say if gong if i'm an ae at gong and gong just emails my whole team and says hey guys just so you know we just bought sales impact you're gonna kick off on monday i'm like as the am going oh gosh another training tool they want me to go through what am i going to get on monday i log in and what do i see um well actually they kicked off with uh so we're working with their sdr team um and we actually just we kicked off with them it's a short course that's quite new for us with kd kevin dorsey he's an absolutely fantastic fantastic coach um and he kicked off with uh with uh so we teach two hours a week that's it so we're not overwhelming the learners everyone's got targets it's you know it's it's busy being in sales and go to market um and they loved it you know it was basically you know one of the big names in the industry teaching them it was a four hour course over two weeks on best practice in cold calling so best practice in scripts uh attitude that hope the whole the whole piece and it went down on absolute an absolute storm where can i find like do you publish a list of all of your courses you know again best practices in cold calling is one do you have a list yeah so if you go to sales impact dot io and click on courses and then course catalog and you can see that the you can see the entire catalog there so we have about 35 course courses now um and we've got just yeah some of some of the best people in the world from companies like tableau and hubspot outreach um that you know that are teaching it's kind of like if you think about like master class but for sales but i get i get it it's just it's very difficult like let me keep asking questions here right so how do you incentivize kevin dorsey to teach this pay him okay got it so he's not a full-time employee at sales impact you just pay him a flat fee yeah yeah we exactly we pay our coaches um yeah fees there are there are kind of other components to the package as well um but also it's a pretty elite club right you know if you're teaching at sales in fact academy it's actually quite a um you know it's quite it's quite it's quite a thing um you know people are people are approaching us now to want to get involved and teach i'd also say you know you mentioned us fundraising so we've we raised a three million seed round with stage two capital which is co-funded co-founded by mark roberge um and and jopo who used to work at bessemer what's unique about the state capital is that all the people of all the lps are literally 250 of the sort of biggest go to market leaders in the world who have literally invested and created this kind of fund so we have access now to people like president of salesforce the president of sap you know the cro of box and linkedin and gong and that sort of list kind of goes on give me a range what might like how many what is kevin dorsey or someone like kevin dorsey committing to it's two hours a week for how many weeks well that was that was a really short course for us so that's that's literally two hours for two weeks so four hours every two weeks oh i see okay got it and so it's called a light load right yeah yeah so gong's paying to put all their sdrs with kevin two calls two hours each over a two week period yeah well as a yeah so we sell seats right see so that so you then access you can access anything in the academy basically um so if your company buys a seat for you you literally access everything we have a customer success team who plots out relevant learner journeys for for teams and then and then you crack on and the results have been brilliant top of funnel increases conversion increases so does everyone does people are paying for the catalog what is the catalog though is it a bunch of google slide decks there's a bunch of recordings with people like kevin dorsey what is that catalog well like i said we everything we teach live but we also record the classes as well um so there's that there's that there's that there's that piece that's excuse me take your time take your time there's that piece um and then obviously you can see you can go into the archive and see it but every course repeats you know five up to maybe even 12 times a year so you can always catch the next kind of live class and one of the great things about the live instruction is that actually teams can learn exactly the same time so we have this magic hour that we teach in which is eight o'clock pacific 11 eastern 4 p.m in the uk 5 p.m europe 6 p.m israel so literally if you're a company with teams in north america latam you know europe africa israel your entire teams can join this class uh learn absolute best practice from you know the world's best what typically then teams then come back together after the class finishes embed the learning make a game plan stick it into action and then see kind of like immediate immediate results and so the pedagogy is working really really well yup yup yup and then don't obviously disclose what you paid kevin but give me a general sense of what you might pay somebody like kevin who is doing i assume the prep work for the two out two hour calls and like all that yeah yeah so we pay a really a really decent um amount for the development of each class and then we have like a teaching fee per hour as well and each class has two coaches in it as well it just improves the sort of the dynamism of the class and and uh for them to have people sort of sort of like bounce so they...