Training the Modern B2B Sales Professional with Paul Fifield, Founder and CEO of Sales Impact Academy

**Ray Reich** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by Paul Fifield, founder and CEO at the Sales Impact Academy. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas with Paul. First, the challenges to train go-to-market resources, especially sales and customer success. Second, the catalyst and the vision behind Sales Impact Academy. And third, the foundational skills and competencies required for today's modern B2B go-to-market employees. Hey, Paul, take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Paul Fifield** (1:15)
Thank you, Ray. Great to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me on. So yeah, just very briefly, my background is I've been sort of mucking around building companies for the last 20 years. I've always been on sort of revenue side of that. And the last 10 years have been especially pretty successful. I co-founded a SaaS company in New York. We raised a bunch of money there called Ceros. That's still going strong. I think it's about 40 plus million in ARR, worth about 600 million. I put all the sales infrastructure in place there and sort of grew the team and the revenue in those early days. I came back to the UK and joined a company in the student space called Uni Days, scaled that from two to 40 million in three years, built a hundred person team in four countries and got that to a pretty high valuation as well.

**Ray Reich** (1:57)
Great background for I think why you're doing what you're doing today. I found almost every founder that I've had a chance to speak with here on a podcast, that they've had specific challenges or experience in dealing with the problem that no now attempting to solve. So would you mind telling me a little bit about those two or three kind of primary challenges that you faced in scaling revenue generating teams that led to your vision behind the Sales Impact Academy?

**Paul Fifield** (2:24)
Sure. Well, I can be very, very succinct in saying that in that decade of building those two companies, I was pretty unhappy and miserable and stressed, right? It was a pretty brutal experience because I was essentially learning on the job, right? I had no real idea about how to do what I was doing. I was picking it up as quickly as I could, but this is the underlying problem in our industry is that we're all making it up as we go along. No one's really, there is no formal structured learning in our profession, which is just an absolute crime. And the net effect of that is that it creates an entire global profession of tens and tens of millions, about way over 100 million people who go to market globally, who are all generally speaking, making it up as they go along. And it's really, really stressful. And it's really, really miserable. So I'm solving that pain that I directly had, but it wasn't just my pain, I was witnessing it, right? I'd be hiring these teams all over the world. And all these people would come in from these different companies and different backgrounds and different experiences, but everyone had good habits and bad habits, but in varying degrees. And I was thinking, this is just chaos. And I was probably registering in my subconscious. And then when I left uni days, just I was exhausted. I'd had two fairly challenging CEO experiences, especially the second one. He was a psychopath and just a horrible person to work for. And so I promised myself I'd never work for a CEO again. And I just went off and did some voluntary teaching. And then I did like the sort of giving back phase. And I was in front of hundreds and hundreds of companies. And I just put a very simple class together about how you build a predictable and scalable revenue function. And that's when I realized, literally, I was probably in front of 500 companies and barely 10% even knew what an SDR was. And I was like, this is a major, major problem. And the consequences of this lack of deep, lack of skills and knowledge is like literally terrible for the industry, terrible for the profession.

**Ray Reich** (4:07)
Well, let me ask you a question though, because you've got experienced really scaling B2B tech companies, right? Kind of software as a service and cloud companies. Do you find that the skill sets that you're training at Sales Impact Academy are specific to B2B tech sales or they're broadly applicable across industry segments?