 Every company needs great salespeople. It's one of the most lucrative professions out there, and there's plenty of wisdom and knowledge that's been gathered over the years about selling. We've heard it all, famous quotes from the greatest salespeople of our time, like Zig Ziglar, Jeffrey Gittermer, Dale Carnegie, and Jack Welch, and many others, things like each of us has only 24 hours in a day. It's all about how we use our time. And you don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great. And then I love this one, people hate to be sold, but they love to buy. There are no traffic jams on the extra mile. Make change before you have to. And the all-time classic, put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers. Thousands of pieces of sales advice are readily available in books, videos, on blogs, and in podcasts, and many of these are free of charge. So why would entrepreneurs start a company to train salespeople? And how is it that sharp investors are pouring millions of dollars into this space? Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Cube video exclusive. My name is Dave Vellante, and today we welcome Paul Feifield, who's the co-founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy, who's going to answer these questions and share some exciting news on the startups. Paul, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. Yeah, good to see you again, though. Great to be here. Hey, so before we get into the hard news, tell us a little bit about the Sales Impact Academy, why'd you start the company, maybe some of the fundamentals of this market, your total available market, who you're targeting. What's the premise behind the company? Yeah, sure. So I mean, I started the company, it was actually pretty organic in the way it began. I had a 10-year career as a CRO. And it had a couple of great hits with two companies, but it was a real struggle to basically operate as a CRO and learn your craft at the same time. And so when I left my last company, I kind of got out there, I wanted to kind of give back a little bit. And I started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London. And actually one of the companies I started was in New York, so I got schooled very much on the sort of US approach to how you build a modern, go-to-market and sales operation. Started going out there doing some teaching, realized that so many people just didn't have a clue about how to build a scalable and predictable revenue function. And I kind of felt sorry for them. So I literally started doing some online classes myself. I got my co-founder, Alex, to put some curriculum together as well. And we literally started just doing online classes and very live, very organic, just a Google Drive and some decks. And it really just blew up from there. That's amazing. I mean, so you heard my tongue and cheek up front, but people might wonder, why do you need a platform? There's so much free information out there. Is it to organize? Is it a discipline thing? Explain that. Well, I think the way I sort of see this is that the lack of structured learning and education is actually one of the greatest educational travesties I think of the last 50 years. Okay, now sales and go-to-market is a huge global profession, right? Half the world's companies are B2B. So roughly that's a proxy for half the world's GDP, right? Which is $40 trillion of GDP. Now that $40 trillion rests on kind of the success of the growth and the sales functions of all those companies. Yet in its infinite wisdom, the global education system literally just ignored sales and go-to-market as a profession. Some universities are kind of catching up, but it's really too late. So what I sort of say to people is you imagine this day, right? You imagine if the way that law worked as a profession let's say, is that there's no law school, there's no law training, there's no even in work professional, continuous professional development in law. The way that it works is you leave university, join a company, start practicing law and just use like YouTube just to maybe like, where you're struggling, just use YouTube to like work out what's going on. The legal profession would be in absolute chaos and that's what's happened in the sales and go-to-market profession, okay? What this profession desperately desperately needs is structured learning, good pedagogy, good well-designed course and curriculum. And here's the other thing, right? That it's the sort of paradox of infinite information is that just because all the information is out there, right? It doesn't mean it's actually, it's a good learning experience. And like, where do you find it? What's good? What's not good? And also the other thing I'd point out is that there is this kind of myth that all the information is out there on the internet. But actually what we do, and we'll come into it in a second, is how the people teaching on our platform are the elite people from the industry. They haven't got time to do blog posts and just explain to people how they operate. They're going from company to company, working at like, you know, working at these kind of elite companies and they're the people that teach. And that information is not already available and freely out there on the internet. Yeah, real opera. You made some great points there. I mean, it's, I think business schools are finally starting to teach a little bit about public speaking and presenting, but nobody's teaching us how to sell. And as Earl Nightingale says, to some degree we're all salespeople, selling our family and living the good life. Or whatever, what movie we want to see tonight. But okay, let's get to the hard news. You got fresh funding, a 22 million. Tell us about that. Congratulations, you know, who the investor is. What else can you share with us? Sure. Well, I mean, obviously, you know, immensely proud. We started from very sort of humble beginnings, as I said, we've now scaled very rapidly. We're a subscription business, we're a SaaS business. We'll come on to some of the growth metrics shortly. But just in a couple of years, you know, the last financial year which ended January, we grew 500% from year one. We're now well over 125 people. And I'm very, very honored, flattered, humbled that MIT, obviously one of the most prestigious universities in the world has taken a direct investment via their endowment fund, HubSpot Ventures, another Boston Great has also taken a direct investment as well. They actually began as a customer and loved what we were doing so much that they then decided to make an investment. Stage two capital who invested in our seed round pretty much tripled down, played a huge role in helping us assemble MIT and HubSpot Ventures as investors. And they continue to be an incredible VC giving us amazing, amazing support that their LP network of good market leaders is second to none. And then Emerge Education, who is our pre-seed investor, they're actually based in London, also joined this round as well. Great, well, actually, let's jump ahead, let's talk about the metrics. I mean, if stage two is involved and they're hardcore, what can you share with us about, you know, everybody's chasing AR and NRR and the like, what can you share with us? They're both pretty important. Well, I think from a headcount perspective, so as I mentioned, our fiscal ends at the end of January each year, we've gone from 25 to over 125 employees in that time. We've gone from 82 to 260 customers, also in that time, and customers now include HubSpot, Gong, Clavio, GitHub, G2, Sixth Sense, so some really sort of major SaaS companies in the space. Our revenue's grown significantly with 5X, so 500% increase in revenue year over year, which is pretty fast, we're proud of that. Our learning community has gone from over 3,000 people to almost 15,000 professionals, and that makes us the comfortably the largest good-of-market learning community in the world. How did you decide when to scale? What were the sort of signals that said to you, okay, we're ready, we have product market fit, we can now scale the go-to market? What were the signals then all? Well, I mean, I think for a very small team to achieve that level of growth in customers, to be kind of honest with you, it's the pull that we're getting from the market, and I think the thing that has surprised me the most, perhaps in the last 12 months, is the pull we're getting from the enterprise. We're, you know, I can't really announce, we've actually got a huge pilot, with one of the largest companies actually in the world, which is going fantastically well. Our pipeline for enterprise customers is absolutely huge, but as you can imagine, if you've got distributed teams all over the world, living and working in this kind of hybrid world, how on earth do you kind of upskill all those people, like I say, that are so distributed, it's impossible, like in work, in the office, delivery of training is pretty much dead, right? And so we sort of fill this really big pain, we solve this really, really big pain of how to effectively upskill people through this kind of live curriculum and this live teaching approach that we have. So I think for me, it's the pull that we're getting from the market, really meant that we have to double down. There is such a massive town, it is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, I think there are 20 million people just in sales and get a market in tech alone, right? And I mentioned to you earlier, half the world's companies effectively are B2B and therefore represent at its largest scope our town. Excellent, thank you for that. Tell us more about the product and the platform, how's it work, if I'm a customer, what type of investment do I have to make, both financially and what's my time commitment? How do you structure that? Yeah, so the model is basically on a seat model, so roughly speaking, every seat's about $1,000 per year per rep. The lift is light, so we've got a very low onboarding, it's not a highly complex technical product, right? We've got a vast curriculum of learning that covers learning for SDRs and the AEs and CS reps and leadership management training. We're developing curriculum for technical pre-sales. We're developing curriculum for revenue operations. And so it's a very, very simple, but we basically, it's a seat model. People literally just send us the seats and the details. We get people off and running in the platform, they start then enrolling and we have a customer success team that then plots out learning journeys and learning pathways for all of our customers. And actually what's starting to happen now, which is very, very exciting, is that we're actually a key part of people's career development pathway. So to go from SDR one, let's say to SDR two, you have to complete these three courses with Sales and Fact Academy and let's say get 75% in your exam. And it becomes a very powerful and simple way of developing career pathway. Yes, a really detailed curriculum. So I was going to say, do I, as a sales professional, do I pick and choose the things that are most relevant for me or are people actually going through a journey and career progression or maybe both? Yeah, it's a mixture of both. We tend to see now, we're sort of starting to standardize, but really we're developing enough curriculum that over, let's say a 15 year period, you could start with us as an SDR and then end as a chief revenue officer, running the entire function. We have, this is the other thing about the crazy world of good market. Very often people are put into roles and it's sink or swim. There's no real learning that happens. There's no real development that happens before people take these big steps. And what this platform does so beautifully is it equips people with the right skills and knowledge before they take that next step in their profession and in their career. And it just dramatically improves their chances of succeeding. Who are the trainers? Who's leading the classes? How do you find these guys? How do you structure? What are the content vectors? Where's all that come from? Yeah, so the sort of secret source of what we do beyond just the live instruction, beyond the significant amount of peer-to-peer learning that goes on is that we go and source the absolute most elite people and go to market to teach. Now I mentioned to you before, you've got these people that are going from job to job at the very peak of their careers working for these incredible companies. It's that knowledge that we want to get access to. So we, stage two capital is an incredible resource. The interesting thing about stage two capital is you as you are on no day, you know, run by Mark Roberge, who was on one when we spoke last year and also Jay Poe is all the LPs of stage two capital represent three to 400 of the most elite go to market professionals in the world. So, you know, about seven or eight of those are now on an advisory board. And so we have access to this incredible pool of talent. And so we know by consulting these amazing people who are the best people in certain aspects of go to market. We reach out to them and very often they're at a stage in their career where they're really willing to give back. Of course, there are commercials around it as well. And there's lots of other benefits that we provide our teachers and our faculty and what we call our coaches. But yeah, we source the very, very best people in the world to teach. Now, how does it work as a user of your service? Is it all on demand? Do you do live content or a combination? Yeah, look, one of the big differentiators is this is a live delivery of learning. Okay, most learning online is typically done on demand, self-directed. And there's a ton of research. There's a great blog post on that on Andreessen's site. A short time ago, which was talking about how the completion rates of on-demand learning are somewhere between three and six percent. That was like awful, that was like, why bother? However, we're seeing through that live instruction, so we teach two one-hour classes a week. That's it, we're upskilling very busy people, they're stressed, they've got targets. We have to be very, very cognizant of that. So we teach two one-hour classes a week, typically Monday and a Wednesday or a Tuesday and a Thursday. And that pace of learning is about right. It's kind of how humans learn as well, short bursts of information and then put that learning and those skills that you've acquired in class literally to work minutes after the class finishes. And so through that, and it sits in your calendar like a meeting, it doesn't feel overwhelming. You're learning together as a team as well. And all that combined, we see completion rates often in excess of 18% for our courses. Okay, so they block that time out. It's in the calendar. And they make the investment. Go ahead, please. Yeah, exactly, sorry, Dave, yeah, exactly. So we have course lengths, so one of our shorter courses are like four hours long over two weeks. And again, it's just literally in the calendar. We also teach what we call the magic learning hour. And the magic learning hour is this one specific hour in the day that enables teams all over the Western hemisphere to join the same class. And that magic learning hour is eight o'clock Pacific, 11 o'clock Eastern, four PM over in the UK and five PM in the rest of Europe. And that one time in the day means that these enterprises have got teams all over the Western hemisphere, joining that class, learning together as a team, plus it's in the calendar. And it's that approach, that approach is why we're seeing such high engagement and completion. That's very cool, the time zone thing. Now, who's the target buyer? Are you selling only to sales teams? Can I, as an individual, purchase your service? Yeah, that's a good question. Currently, it's a very much like a B2B motion. As I mentioned earlier on, we're getting an enormous pull from the enterprise, which is very exciting. We have an enterprise segment. We have sort of more of a startup earlier stage segment. And then we have a mid-market segment that we call our sort of strategic. And that's typically most of these venture backed, fast growth tech companies. So very much at the moment, a bit of B2B motion. We're launching our own technology platform in the early summer. And then later on this year, we're going to be adding what's called PLG or a product-led growth. So individuals can actually sign up to SIA. Yeah, I mean, I think you said $1,000 per year per rep. Is that right? Yeah. That's a small investment for an individual that wants to be part of this community and grow his or her career. So is that, that's the growth plan? You go down market, I would imagine. You talked about the Western Hemisphere, there's international opportunities, maybe, local language, what's the growth plan? Yeah, I mean, look, we've identified the magic learning hour for the Middle Eastern APAC, which is eight o'clock in the morning in Istanbul, right? Is five PM in Auckland. It's quite fun trying to work out like what this optimum magic learning hour is. But what's incredible is that we teach at that time and that opens up the whole of the Middle East and the whole of APAC, right? Right out to Australia. And so once we're teaching the curriculum in those two slots, that means literally you can have teams in any country in the world. I think apart from Hawaii, you can actually access our live learning product in work time and that's incredibly powerful. So we have so many axes of growth. We've got single users, as I mentioned, but really Dave, that's single users that will be winning from the enterprise and that will represent pipeline that we could then potentially convert as well. And look, you make a very good point. We've seen what students are now leaving university with over $100,000 in debt. We've got a massive, massive debt problem here in the US with student debt. You could absolutely sign up to our platform at let's say 100 bucks a month, right? And probably within six months, gain enough knowledge and skill to walk into a $60,000 a year based salary job as an SDR. That's a huge entry-level salary and you could do that without even going to university. So there could be a time here where we become a really viable alternative to actually even going to university. I love it, the cost education, go to the roof. It's out of reach for so many people. Paul, congratulations on the progress. The fresh funding, great to have you back on theCUBE. Love to have you back and follow your ascendancy. I think great things ahead for you guys. Thank you very much, Dave. All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time.