Sales Impact Academy

What is it?

Paul and Alex were shocked by the lack of structured learning opportunities for sales and go-to-market professionals. Frustrated by how the global education system had grossly overlooked the profession for decades, they set out to build a structured and scalable learning platform, backed by proven pedagogy, with curated courses taught by experts. Sales Impact Academy soon became the largest go-to-market learning community in the world.

Why we invested?

The founders:

Alex started her career in partnerships at Amazon and later became head of outreach at UNiDAYS, the world’s largest student affinity network. Paul brought 20 years of experience in founding and scaling global companies. As CRO he grew two technology businesses, Cero and UNiDAYS, from zero to $100M in combined sales and over $700M in value.

The problem:

While the sophistication and knowledge requirements for go-to-market professionals have grown exponentially, there is no educational infrastructure to support them. Half the world’s companies rely on a workforce with no formal training to grow their business, while these professionals work in a constant state of anxiety coupled with short employment tenures.

The solution:

Sales Impact Academy is an online learning business for go-to-market employees with courses led by the world’s best go-to-market professionals. Through interactive training, exercises, and tests, SIA empowers employees to do their job better and progress faster in their careers. It helps sales leaders to grow their companies more effectively by empowering their sales teams.

Sales leaders buy access to the Sales Impact Academy platform for their go-to-market teams. Employees can get to join online classes across a broad range of subjects and learn practical lessons that they can immediately apply in their jobs. Employees also earn course completion certificates of course completion that help evidence their knowledge and support career mobility.

The opportunity:

Sales Impact Academy falls directly into two of our four key investment areas:
1. Cost-effective and flexible pathways into employment
2. Enable employers to access, develop and retain talent

There are more than 20M go-to-market professionals in B2B organisations around the world. On average, these organisations spend $1,459 per salesperson, which is higher than any other function. The bulk of their training spend goes towards in-person training. However, this is costly and largely ineffective, with ManpowerGroup ranking “sales representatives” to be the second hardest job to fill, – above engineers. SIA presents an opportunity to disrupt this with a scalable online platform providing better outcomes and access to world-class teachers. 

The impact:

“You have to be involved with SIA, it should be compulsory. I have been in sales for 20 years and I have never experienced anything like it. I have literally let my team loose on the platform and the results have been amazing.” Brett Riley, CEO

“The courses are incredibly focused and very very transferable. About 85% of the content taught were practical teachings. Our close rate at the beginning of the year was around 20% and now we’re at 30% across the team, thanks to the practical lessons from the ‘Managing the Complete Sales Cycle’ course!” Jonathon Ilett, Sales Director

Quote from the CEO:

After selling Trilogy back in 2019, I have been passionate about investing in the next generation of breakout edtech companies. In 2019, I joined Emerge as an LP and, over the course of the next few years, became increasingly involved with their community of leading edtech operators –- a group which I am now privileged to chair. This group is such an incredible value add to both portfolio companies and the operators themselves, as they have opportunities to co-invest, support the companies and join their boards. I did precisely that with SIA, joining as it’s first independent board member in 2022.

A startup’s needs are dynamic and constantly evolving; the diverse expertise within the group allows Emerge to seamlessly support founders with these needs, while providing operators with exciting opportunities that align with their interests. For me, I was keen to move beyond only investing, and wanted to be able to operate again. When the opportunity presented itself to support SIA’s next phase of growth, I jumped at it. In my role as CEO, Emerge has been an invaluable partner, helping me with fundraising, talent and market insights.  Dan Sommer, CEO