SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SalesImpact Hits $1.5m ARR Training SaaS Sales Leaders
18 Jan 2021
Chapter 1: What is the background of Paul Fifield and his entrepreneurial journey?
In dollars, the average is about $15,000 a year, and that gives access up to now about 20 people. We've kind of evolved the pricing quite a few times over the past year. How many customers do you have today? So we have just about 100 customers. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed.
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Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion. We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content. Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Paul Fifield.
He's an entrepreneur with 18 years experience in founding and scaling global companies. Over the past seven years, he's grown two international tech businesses from zero to 70 million in combined sales as CRO and 500 million bucks in total value. He's also raised over 100 million bucks of investment across all stages. Paul, you ready to take us to the top? I am indeed. All right.
What were those two companies? What was your last CRO role? Last CRO role was a company called Unidays in the student space. And what was it before that? Previous to that was a company called Seros. I don't know if you've talked to anyone there, but yeah, they just did a big secondary of 100 million about five months ago. Okay. Now, did you have equity in those businesses or you joined too late?
No, I had equity. That's good. So what the hell are you doing on a call with me then? You should be rich on a private jet. Because I'm building something else that's way more important than those two companies. What are you building? So in my journey as CRO... Starting at Seros, where I was EVP of sales, I moved to New York. This is back in 2011. We raised a Series A from Greycroft.
I was thrust into this role as EVP of sales, and everybody around me was going, Well, now you just got to build a kind of scalable, repeatable revenue model. Just get on with it. It's just like, wow, this is pretty scary. I've moved my whole family to New York. I just raised capital. You know, I've always had commercial-like roles, but it was really, it was like massive single swim time.
And I literally, through my 15-year career in sales and revenue leadership, I've never felt entirely comfortable in the role because I've known that I've got these huge gaps in my learning. What I'm trying to do now is basically build a complete education platform for basically every major persona in a B2B SaaS company,
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Chapter 2: What challenges did Paul face when building scalable revenue models?
And so just that continued volume is a little bit like Netflix, right? Paul, what is the number though? I mean, we can just look at this from the number. What is churn? Yeah. We have 100% net dollar retention, basically. But on a gross basis, gross revenue churn.
It's a bit tricky because we've just, you know, some of the early clients we brought in were just kind of wrong because we didn't really have like a nailed on ICP. But looking, so last year we had like 10 customers in the last quarter and seven of them were stayed. So it's like 30% churn, but it's not really reflective of going forwards. I think our ICP got very tight in like this time last year.
And I'd say I'm not expecting high churn. Here's the thing. Paul, that's really high though. If in last quarter you had 10 customers sign up and today only seven are still active, that's 30% churn in three months. That's on pace to be like 120. You're going to turn your whole customer base in 12 months. Yeah, but it's not reflective of going forwards.
I think any company that starts out, any SaaS company, any company, You're just trying to learn who gets the most value from your product. So we had a bunch of non-ICPs. But the ICPs, we had 100%. So you must have this very clearly defined then. What is your target today? B2B tech companies, leaning heavily to SaaS, Series A to Series D. Why can't bootstrap companies use you?
To be honest with you, you're going to start to get quite a lot of churn back then, and some of the churn was super early-stage companies. The most value you get, and this is talking to your churn question, the reason why we're not going to experience churn is that, and I experienced this when I was growing in the days, I went from a handful of people to 100 people over the course of three years.
So you're constantly, constantly adding headcount, whether that's SDRs, your CSN team, your AEs, management layers, all of that stuff, plus your B2B marketing function. As you're piling those people in, they all have varied skills, good habits, bad habits.
What we're able to do with our platform is that eventually every single member of your team will go through these courses as they join the company. And that will level the skill base across the team. So someone joins a company that's paying for your thing. One of the first things in the onboarding deck is you have to go through these 10 courses and 10 hours on Paul's Academy.
We're a pretty integral part of a lot of companies onboarding that. Finishing my question, it's top-down, I imagine. It's sort of like a CRO saying, you must use Salesforce. Why? Because that's how they track metrics, even though salespeople hate it. So what I'm curious is, how do you actually measure consumption of your course from the people actually taking it? Yeah.
Well, there's a number of ways. Obviously, through the learning management platform that we have, we can see usage. Who do you use? What's your LMS? We're actually moving to Docebo. Who do you use now? We're using now... Oh, God, I actually literally can't remember. I just had two weeks off and my brain's gone to mush. Okay, no problem. Yeah, can't remember now.
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Chapter 3: How does Sales Impact Academy address the knowledge gap in sales education?
So barely profitable, which is good. It's better than not being profitable. Yeah. Where are you of the 30 people on your team? How many are engineers? Zero. Okay. How many sales reps with quota? We now have three AEs and four SDRs. They all have quota or no? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, nice. Interesting. And what do you set the quota at for the AEs? The quota is in Sterling, it's like 68,000 of ARR a month.
Got it. So that's about 800,000 bucks a month. 800. It's about a million dollars of new ARR per year. Um, so obviously you're not at 7 million an hour, but you have seven or you have three reps. I mean, how do you, yeah. How do you get them to ramp faster? Like what's the choke point right now? Um, well, we kind of, we've got, we've got.
To be honest with you, we had two APs start in November, and they both closed about $20,000, about $30,000, $40,000 of revenue in December.
Chapter 4: What pricing strategies are used for the Sales Impact Academy courses?
So they ramped pretty fast. The beauty of having a sort of content model like we have is that we don't have very complicated integration, all that kind of stuff. And the product is relatively easy to understand. And so, yeah. And actually, the problem is really, really acute and we're getting a huge pull from the market. What do you think it'll be at by the end of 2021 in terms of runway?
I think we'll be at 7 million. All right. We'll have to come back on at that point. In the meantime, though, let's wrap up with the famous five ball. Number one, favorite business book. Ah, favorite business book. Wow. I do love Mark Roberge's Sales Acceleration Formula. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Without sounding too corny, I mean, obviously Elon Musk is pretty huge. I love the book. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the company? Probably Zoom. What is it? Zoom. Oh, Zoom.
Chapter 5: How many customers does Sales Impact Academy currently have?
Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Five. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? Divorced, child, single. One kiddo? Yeah. Okay. And how old are you? 45. 45. Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? not to get from a business perspective, not to get into a business model that is not recurring. Guys, there you have it.
Sales Impact Academy. He helped a bunch of other companies grow from, call it 1020 in AR up to much larger amounts, combined value of $500 million in terms of valuation. Now teaching other sales leaders how to do this. He's got about a $1.5 million run rate today up from just 100,000 12 months before that. 100 customers paying on average about $1,100 per month, again, for this training.
They're not churning because he's adding new content every month. We'll see if he can keep it going and grow to 7 million by the end of 2021. Paul, thanks for taking us to the top. It's summary. Thanks.