Happy Birthday Sales Impact Academy – Our 2 Year Journey!

2020 blog

Sales Impact Academy is two years old today! It was two years on the dot when we opened our virtual doors to our first customers. Now at this humble age, we thought it would be a great time to celebrate the things we have done over the last rotation of the sun. 

It’s been a busy year, to say the least, and we could not be more thankful to our customers, partners, advisors, investors, and wider tech community for coming on this journey of growth with us. Here are a few things we have achieved together…

Scale, Scale, Scale 🚀

You may know that we have been rapidly scaling our team recently and been joined by some absolutely amazing people. This time last year we were a team of 25 and had aspirations of expanding our team further into the US. Now we are 86 and counting! 

In this year of growth, we have expanded every aspect of the business and launched many new teams including Legal, Business Operations, People Operations, Account Managers, Onboarding, Course Development, Production, Product Developers, and several US-based teams.

When it comes to our revenue, like our customers we strive for predictable, scalable, and profitable growth. So far we’ve achieved almost 500% YOY growth and are projected to reach 130% NDR when the years out. A massive shout out to the team for this one as this shows the strength of our product-market fit (PMF), that we have a great LTV (Lifetime Value) story, and a powerful bunch of people pushing our value into the world. We’re confident we can get into the top decile of 140% NDR as all this plays out. 

Our Fantastic Customers

We’re already supporting the skills development of almost 200 companies and 6000+ individual learners including Hubspot, Gong, G2, Klayvio, and much more. This is massive as this time last year we had only 50 companies on the books. We’re immensely proud to be enabling even more GTM teams worldwide.

As a way of adding value to the SIA experience, this year we’ve begun offering more to the learner community through member perks and the launch of our exclusive member events with our partners. One example being our members get a 42% discount off 12 months of access to Subly – a platform that makes editing video content easy! Members, see your perks here.

We’re continuing to build out our community offering so that our members can engage more with their peers outside of class.

The Growth of Our Courses and Schools📚

When we launched on October 14, 2019, we had a roster of only four coaches. Now we have 52 coaches-36 of which joined us over the last year! We’ve been joined by the likes of Dan Steinman, considered the godfather of customer success, Sir Clive Woodward, Britain’s Olympic team coach for London 2012 Olympics, and Kevin “KD” Dorsey, LinkedIn Top Sales Voice 2020 and Sales Dev’s Exec of the Year.

Our Education team has been working non-stop to expand our curriculum offering, and over the past year, they have developed 23 new courses. We have also added more resources, more support for managers, and better in-class engagement and accessibility tools. 

In January 2021 our largest class ever went live with Sam Nelson coaching Prospecting Through Sequences. It was an amazing experience having a mix of SIA customers and Outreach customers come together to learn from the creator of the Agoge Sequence himself. We had two weeks to prepare for over 1000 learners, and it ended up being one of our most successful courses. 

“Our founding mission was to use our skills and experience to teach more businesses about taking their product to market, how to structure a sales team and do the role of an SDR, and not too much has changed,” said Alex Damgaard, Co-Founder & COO at Sales Impact Academy.

“However, our catalog of courses has exploded! We have a rapidly expanding team of world-class coaches delivering across functions.”

Next month we’re excited to be launching a brand new course with Chris Voss, a former hostage negotiator for the FBI and the world’s #1 negotiation coach. He will be teaching NEGOTIATION THROUGH TACTICAL EMPATHY starting November 1, 2021. Check it out here.

The Belief in SIA⭐️

One of the greatest things to come out of this year has been hearing the feedback from the industry about the business. In July we’ve raised $4M from Stage 2 Capital to help create a new category of in-work learning to solve the GTM skills crisis

The resounding message is that we are the solution to the world’s GTM skills crisis and that the global TAM is vast – essentially every B2B company in the world could benefit from comprehensive L&D.

With this belief, we have been able to build our brilliant board of Investors and Advisors🤝

Our board of investors includes Mark Roberge (Managing Partner of Stage 2 Capital), Jay Po (Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Stage 2 Capital), and Jan Lynn-Matern (Founder & Partner at Emerge Education) Their investment and input has been immeasurable. With the added support from our Board of Advisors, we are destined to make some big moves in our third year.

However, what we’re most proud of is that we’re adding value. People are seeing the need and we’re helping to tackle a chronic never-seen-before supply and demand crisis for GTM talent. 

>> 79% of sales organizations miss their forecasts by >10%*

>> 54% of deals forecast by reps to close never will **

>> 82% of reps report job satisfaction as less than great ***

>> 17 months is the average tenure of a revenue leader ****

 

* Hubspot ** CSO Insights *** Siriusdecisions **** Revenue Collective

Against this backdrop, companies have always been forced to teach core GTM skills, and now more than ever they are hiring people with very little experience. Until now there has never been a place where all GTM commercial teams can access comprehensive education at scale. We’re so proud to be part of the solution!

What’s next?

Hopes of a new platform are on the horizon with our ambition to bring you a bespoke SIA platform to access all our or live courses featuring added learning support and gamification. 

We also think that there are plenty of people out there who want to take their professional development into their own hands so we aim to launch single-user access next year. It will allow individuals to take out a subscription with SIA without the need for their employer to be a customer. It also allows those who are not employed by an organization to access SIA.

As always, we will continue to rapidly expand the curriculum catering further to revenue-driving functions and growing our headcount across the board, especially in the development and product teams.

Thanks again to the team and all of you who have engaged with us this year.