How Sales Impact Academy Reached $4M ARR and 200 Customers with 120% Net Dollar Retention (Interview with Co-Founder and CEO Paul Fifield)

Introduction and Paul Fifield's Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Paul Fifield. He has twenty years of experience in founding and scaling global companies. Over the past eight years, he's grown two international tech businesses from zero to $100,000,000 in combined sales as CRO and over $700,000,000 in value. He's also raised over a $100,000,000 of investment across all stages from seed to growth, VC and debt based out there in England. Paul, you ready to take us to the top?

Paul Fifield

00:21>> I am indeed.

Nathan Latka

00:23All right. So what was intriguing to me about you for this interview is you came back on in January, gave us some interesting data points working with 100 customers to pay on average a grand a month. You were flirting with sort of $100,000 a month in revenue. But really, what's more interesting is there are a lot of SaaS vendors that I talked to today that are trying to outsource or at least get a cheat code to

00:44their initial sales hires. And this is, I think, where you really come in. So explain to people what Sales Impact. Is doing.

Paul Fifield

00:50>> Yeah. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Nathan. I should just say I'm recovering from COVID as well. So if I have a little cough, that's what it is.

Nathan Latka

00:57Well, I'm glad you're recovering. I'm glad to hear that.

Paul Fifield

00:59>> Yeah. Double jabbed as well. Anyway, so

01:03>> So essentially we're building a live learning platform for pretty much every role in a go to market team. And I guess one of the unique things is that it's a subscription based model. And so what basically we were able to provide 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

01:30>> often actually working right now. So they're sort of cutting edge of the industry.

Nathan Latka

01:40Now 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?

Revenue and Customer Growth Since January 2021

Paul Fifield

01:47>> So we've been busy. So we are about 1,000,000 of ARR when we talked back in January, just over. So we're close to four now. We're over 200 customers. We've landed companies like Gong, Outreach, Klaviyo. G2 is just about to sign something special. And we have another huge, huge brand that we actually can't talk about just yet, who's just about to roll us out globally after a three month trial in Europe. So we have over 200 customers

02:23>> now. I'd say the bulk of the customers are sort of series A to series C, but as I've just alluded to, we're now winning customers also kind of in the enterprise.

Nathan Latka

02:34And so help me understand, why is Gong paying? And is it one time, 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.

Why Customers Stick: Multi-Year Learning Journeys

Paul Fifield

02:45>> Well, you know, there's actually a huge amount to learn. 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. We're actually building out learning journeys that literally go over 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. We can upscale you over your

03:11>> 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 management up to VP right up to becoming a CRO. So we literally have learning tracks that can stay with you for many, many years.

How the Live Learning Platform Works

Nathan Latka

03:32And 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 gonna get on Monday? I log in, and what do I see?

Paul Fifield

03:48>> Well, actually, they kicked off with so we're working with the the SDR team. And we actually just we kicked off with them. It's a short course that's quite new for us. With Kevin Dorsey. He's an absolutely fantastic, fantastic coach. And he kicked off with a, so we teach two hours a week. That's it. So we're not overwhelming the learners. Everyone's got targets. It's busy being in sales and go to market. And they loved it. It

04:13>> was basically 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, attitude, the whole piece. And it went down an absolute storm.

Nathan Latka

04:27Where can I find, like, do you publish a list of all of your courses? Again, best practices in cold calling is one. Do you have a list?

Course Catalog and Teaching Format

Paul Fifield

04:34>> Yeah. So if you go to salesimpact. And click on courses and then course catalog, And you can see the entire catalog there. So we have about 35 courses And

04:46>> we've got just some of the best people in the world from companies like Tableau and HubSpot, Outreach

04:54>> that are teaching. It's kind of like, if you think about like masterclass, but for sales, but like

Nathan Latka

05:00No, no, I get it. It's just, it's very difficult to Like, let me keep asking questions here, right? So how do you incentivize Kevin Dorsey to teach this?

Paul Fifield

05:08>> Pay him.

Nathan Latka

05:10Got it. So he's not a full time employee at Sales You just pay him a flat Yeah,

Paul Fifield

05:13>> exactly. We pay our coaches. Yeah, fees. There are kind of other components to the package as well. But also it's a pretty elite club, right? If you're teaching at Sales Impact Academy, it's actually

Seed Round with Stage Two Capital

Paul Fifield

05:26>> quite a thing. People are approaching us now to want to get involved and teach. I'd also say, you mentioned this fundraising. So we raised a 3,000,000 seed round with Stage two Capital, which is co founded by Mark Roberge and Jay Po, who used to work at Bessemer. What's unique about Stage two Capital is that all the LPs

05:49>> are literally two fifty 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 the president of Salesforce, the president of SAP, the CRO of Box and LinkedIn and Gong and that sort of list kind of goes on.

Nathan Latka

06:08Me a range. What is Kevin Dorsey or someone like Kevin Dorsey committing to? It's two hours a week for how many weeks?

Paul Fifield

06:16>> Well, was a really short course for us. So that's literally two hours for two weeks. So four hours every two weeks.

Nathan Latka

06:22Oh, see. Okay, got it. And so Gong's a light load, right?

Paul Fifield

06:25>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

06:26So Gong's paying to put all of their SDRs with Kevin, two calls, two hours each over a two week period.

Paul Fifield

06:33>> Yeah. Well, yeah. So we sell seats, right? So you can access anything in the academy, basically. 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 teams, and then you crack on. And the results have been brilliant. Top of funnel increases, conversion increases.

Nathan Latka

06:54So does everyone People are paying for the catalog. What is the catalog though? Is it a bunch of Google slide decks? Is it a bunch of recordings of people like Kevin Dorsey? What is that catalog?

Paul Fifield

07:04>> Well, like I say, everything we teach live, but we also record the classes as well. So there's that piece. Excuse me.

Nathan Latka

07:12Yeah, take your time, take your time.

Paul Fifield

07:14>> There's that piece. And then obviously you can go into the archive and see it, but every course repeats you know, five up to maybe 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 08:00 Pacific, eleven Eastern, 4PM in The UK,

07:35>> 5PM Europe, 6PM Israel. So literally, if you're a company with teams in North America, LatAm, Europe, Africa, Israel, your entire teams can join this class, 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.

Nathan Latka

08:04Yep. Yep. Yep. 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 hour calls and like all that jazz. What's?

Paul Fifield

08:14>> Yeah. So we pay a really decent 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 for them to have people sort like bounce so they sort of bounce off each other basically.

Nathan Latka

08:33Can you give me a sense of what you would pay for them to set up the course materials? Are we talking like more or less than $5 just to set up, not for their hours, just for the setup?

Paul Fifield

08:41>> Yeah. It's based on a sort of per hour. So some of our courses we have, the longest we have is like twenty four hours of learning. That's called the definitive guide to revenue leadership. And that's aimed at like VPs of sales and CROs. I mean, that was obviously a big investment, but look, it's multiple thousands per hour of class development, right? So you'll be in the sort of like 15,000 to $20,000 range for like a ten

Nathan Latka

09:04>> hour course.

09:04Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. And how instructors like that have you already paid?

Paul Fifield

09:10>> Oh, we have about 50 now. Five zero.

Nathan Latka

09:14Yeah. Yeah. Mean, this a crazy operation. So, I mean, are you seeing people, I mean, Gong's new, but people that maybe signed up a year ago, are they sticking around? Decreasing Are number of seats over time?

Net Dollar Retention and Expansion Strategy

Paul Fifield

09:25>> They're buying more. So our net dollar retention, bearing in mind, we're still like just over eighteen months old, right? Our net revenue retention's about 120%, but I think we're predicting that that's gonna, you see as the curriculum grows, teams start to then buy seats, right? So we're really going deep at the moment on building out curriculum for customer success. Once that happens across 200 customers, that could be another 200 times 20 seats of customer success people

10:00>> that want to upscale, right? So we have a really amazing multi like NDR story that's going to happen over multiple years as we build out the curriculum. And there's not really that many tools in sales stack that could literally, you could get a seat for every single person in go to market. Not even a CRM would have that reach into a go to market team.

Team Size and Engineering Plans

Nathan Latka

10:22And so what is your full time team size today? Ignore sales coaches,

Paul Fifield

10:26>> you pay one time.

Nathan Latka

10:2780 people now.

Paul Fifield

10:28>> Eight zero.

Nathan Latka

10:29And how many engineers? We

Paul Fifield

10:31>> actually have just hired a CTO who I used to work with at Ceros, which is a company that we both sort of co founded that. He's amazing guy called Ryan Sherman. And we're now literally building out our own kind of learning platform because we've been using a third party tool to date, which is going to be absolutely amazing for customers. We're going to be opening up single user access in February, March next year. So literally

Building Own Platform and Self-Serve Launch

Paul Fifield

10:59>> anybody could like sign up with a credit card for something like $99 a month. We see that it's going to be a huge driver of growth next year. And then we're thinking about what can we do around the app? Can we create like a sort of Duolingo gamification support learning app to really help to embed the sort of learning? So there's a lot we'll be doing in that space too.

Nathan Latka

11:21What was that third party tool that allowed you to get going without hiring an engineer until now? $4,000,000

Paul Fifield

11:28>> people are buying into the live classes, structure, the learning design is fantastic. The pedagogy, the people teaching is fantastic. That's what people are buying into, right? This kind of structured learning to help them be better.

Nathan Latka

11:42Well, sure. There's a lot of people that have really good content like this, they don't know how to organize it to consume it, whether it's their own teams, own courses, whatever. So you have like Lessonly, Trainual, I mean, Kajabi, there's tons of like membership sites out there. I'm just curious, what did you choose to use?

Paul Fifield

11:55>> Oh, we use Docebo. So we still use Docebo. Say that again? It's called Docebo. It's like a learning management platform basically.

Nathan Latka

12:03Okay. D O C E B O?

Paul Fifield

12:06>> C E B O. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a public company.

Nathan Latka

12:09Yeah. That's big, big, big guys. Okay. Interesting. And so people might be listening going, wait, why does he need to raise for a business like this? There's not a lot of hard costs. Why raise $3,000,000 and sell that equity?

Why Raise Capital and AE Team Ramp

Paul Fifield

12:21>> Well, we're going pretty fast. So we've now we've just ramped up our AE team to nine people. Where we want to get to is basically about 20 courses in production every single quarter. So we want to go super, super fast. I know you're a huge fan of bootstrappers, and I am absolutely too.

12:45>> But also I'm a huge fan of speed, that's obviously what capital kind of gives you. So we're kind of going for the sort of speed strategy and dilute rather than the kind of like maybe take it a little slower and kind of bootstrap. I mean, we could have done, but I just chose not to go down that route. We want to kind of like establish ourselves as the global platform. And to do that, we need to

13:07>> move super fast in my view.

Valuation and Upcoming Fundraise

Nathan Latka

13:09Valuation, 3,000,000 you raise. Obviously this is a different kind of model. You're probably not getting as high valuation as a traditional SaaS company would have been. Maybe you are, your NDR is up there. So what valuation did you raise 3,000,000 on?

Paul Fifield

13:19>> 20.

Nathan Latka

13:20And did that feel fair to you?

Paul Fifield

13:21>> Yeah, was pretty decent for where we were.

Nathan Latka

13:24Pre money or post?

Paul Fifield

13:26>> Post. Okay. Yeah. So we're about to raise again now at an 83. Mhmm. And and

Nathan Latka

13:33and how much are you gonna raise?

Paul Fifield

13:35>> Probably about sort of a 6 or a 7. Mhmm. And then do a major A round in sort of February, March.

Nathan Latka

13:43Yeah. I mean, you're you're very much on the path of like, this is one of those things where it's gonna have to be bought by like, you know, LinkedIn. Right? And you're not gonna, like, lead LinkedIn learning or something like that. Mean, every round you raise at a higher valuation decreases, obviously, your liquidity options because people are gonna pay. But but also, there's a lot of room to grow here. So it's interesting just to hear. I

14:00mean, you're on the raised trail. That's for sure.

Paul Fifield

14:02>> Yes, we are.

Nathan Latka

14:04Yeah. It's

Market Size and Growth Ambitions

Paul Fifield

14:05>> But good to look, the market is absolutely massive. There's so many people that are stressed because they don't know what they're doing. And the TAM is insane. You know, I've got I've just been putting on our deck together. And you just do a simple search LinkedIn. There's 14,000,000 like reps in B2B. There's 3,200,000 SDRs, 4,600,000 customer success people, 4,400,000 sales engineers, 3,200,000 in revenue operations. None of them have any form of structured learning or anything. They're

14:37>> learning pretty much on the job. So the market's massive. There's 30,000,000 people just in that group and that's even without marketing.

14:46>> So the market is absolutely huge.

Nathan Latka

14:49How would you ever go to jumpstart your growth and grow even faster? Would you ever go buy a community like Rev Genius or something like that? Same way Outreach bought Sales Hacker?

Paul Fifield

14:58>> Interesting you say that. Yeah. It could be an option. It could be an option.

Nathan Latka

15:02Are you in discussions with Jared right now?

Paul Fifield

15:05>> I am not in discussions with Jared right now. And have you got access to my email?

Nathan Latka

15:12Well, there's only have you Have you got access to my brain? Yeah. No, no. It's a genius way for companies like yours to shortcut growth is to buy communities with great leaders like Jared. And there's just very few Jared's out there. There's very few sales communities out there with the kind of engagement he has.

Paul Fifield

15:28>> We can put you know, we've we've got a strong partnership with Pavilion. You know, we can we can we can partner as well as as well as buy. But, yes, of course, those those are those are all options, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

15:37So how much are you paying for Rev Genius in q four this year?

Paul Fifield

15:41>> Mate, we're getting it for a steal.

Nathan Latka

15:45No, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. But no, okay, this is really interesting. So what's the risk to the business? Like, what is the risk? Can someone else create like better coaches, more interesting dataset? Like how do you churn customers?

Paul Fifield

15:57>> Well, I think, again, I can't overstate honestly, competitive advantage of being part of Stage two Capital. Yes, we're on the fundraising journey, but we've been very, very strategic with who we partner with.

16:12>> And it's just wild. I mean, I'll just whizz you the link in

16:19>> Zoom now, and you can have a look at the LP network. It's just, I've started meeting a lot of these people. We've started getting business from these people. They have great curriculum development advice, potential coaches as well. It's pretty amazing. So yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:38Yeah. It all makes a lot of sense. Very cool. Anything I missed that you want to wrap up with before I hit you with the famous five?

Projected 500 to 600 Percent Year-on-Year Growth

Paul Fifield

16:46>> No, I think we're good. I think all I can say is that I think we're on track to do 500, 600% growth year on year.

16:56>> Think kind of watch this space.

Famous Five Rapid-Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

16:58Yep. We're obviously bullish on it too. We at Founderpath are getting capital out to a lot of SaaS founders. One of the key things we see it, the ones that use their capital the most effectively is they're spending it on helping their SDRs and AEs close faster. They're spending it on people like salesimpact.io. So it makes a lot of sense. Let's wrap up here with the Famous Five, Paul. Number one, favorite book.

Paul Fifield

17:19>> Oh, favorite book. I'm reading the book of joy at the moment, which is the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. Went away for a week and this guy recorded what they had talked about. You're talking about the whole concept of joy and happiness, and I'm loving it.

Nathan Latka

17:35Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Paul Fifield

17:39>> Nope.

Nathan Latka

17:40Number three. Well, actually, I'm going say your favorite online tool is probably Docebo, right?

Paul Fifield

17:47>> I'd probably say Zoom is probably the most impactful for us.

Nathan Latka

17:52Alright. Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Paul Fifield

17:55>> Not enough, maybe six if I'm lucky. But I'm based in London, but I work on US East Coast hours. So my whole world's a bit screwed up.

Nathan Latka

18:04And are you still 45? Or did you have a birthday since we last spoke?

Paul Fifield

18:07>> No, I'm still 45 for about three more weeks.

Nathan Latka

18:11Oh, oh, happy early birthday. That's exciting.

Paul Fifield

18:13>> Yeah. So I'm closer to nought than 90.

Nathan Latka

18:16Okay. And you didn't get married in the past eight months.

Paul Fifield

18:18>> Did you

Nathan Latka

18:18still not married with one kiddo?

Paul Fifield

18:20>> I'm unmarried, single, and still have one kid.

Nathan Latka

18:25Alright, that's perfect. Those are all good things. Let's wrap up with a last question here. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Paul Fifield

18:32>> Don't work in a business that doesn't scale.

Nathan Latka

18:35You know what you told me last time for this, which is is hysterical looking back at this? Answer was, don't get into a bad business model. And if I was being honest, I would look at what you're doing now and go, this is the shittiest business model ever. Content is horrible. It's so difficult to scale, but you're proving me wrong. You're you're crushing it. It's working. So kudos to you. Paul, thanks for taking us to the

18:55top.

Paul Fifield

18:56>> Alright. Thanks, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

18:59One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday 1PM

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