Sales Gravy Grows Revenue 10x Using the Thought Industries Platform

The company found unlimited scale using diverse revenue models and multi-tenant distribution.

Founded in 2007, Sales Gravy is a sales training company working with clients all over the globe, primarily in the B2B space. The company has more than 41,000 learners on its digital learning platform, Thought Industries.

Homegrown or Homegroan?

Sales Gravy started to offer online training in 2015, when they saw the opportunity to use digital learning to scale their business. They used an open source platform, Moodle, to build their first iteration of Sales Gravy University, but quickly found serious limitations with the homegrown approach. 

Running their own software, the team found themselves spending more time fixing bugs and maintaining the technology than growing the training business. “Trust me on this,” said Sales Gravy CEO and Founder Jeb Blount. “We’re really good at training salespeople. We’re really terrible at software development.”

Scaling their online business was also a serious challenge using Moodle. As a traditional training and consulting company, they worked with large companies all over the world who had their own unique training needs. One customer’s learners could not be mixed in with others, much of the digital work they were doing was customized to individual clients, and clients had unique supplemental content that they wanted to include. Solving for this was not possible with their homegrown solution.

Digital Scale & 10x Revenue Growth

In 2017, Sales Gravy started to search for an online learning solution to create custom, branded instances for their customers. They found it with Thought Industries and their multi-tenant solution, Panorama. 

Fresh off their success with multi-tenancy, in 2019 they started to use Thought Industries’ e-commerce tools to test individual, self-serve subscriptions. Online learning went from reinforcing in-person training to a business unto itself.

“We went from how can we solve the problem of reinforcement to how can we solve the problem of always on training all the time and provide mechanisms for people to get training anywhere, anytime anyhow and in the format that they wanted,”  said Mr. Blount.

Using digital content as the accelerator, the company has grown their revenue 10x since joining Thought Industries, and now has three main business lines:

Individual / Self-Serve Subscriptions

• Individuals can purchase an all access pass, giving them over a thousand hours of content, with 10 – 12 new courses added monthly. Subscribers also get access to live instructor-led training with master trainers, and a peer community of salespeople who are experiencing similar challenges.
• With Thought Industries, the company can create multiple types of subscriptions, customized and personalized to specific needs. They run marketing programs and marketing funnels around those individual subscriptions. The entire business line runs via credit cards connected into Stripe, which they use for other parts of our business. “It’s super easy to set that up, run it, and take care of our individual subscribers,” said Mr Blount. “It’s easy to pull reports, easy to get information, and it’s easy for them to self-serve.”

Team Hubs

• Small businesses purchase access to a private space for their teams with full reporting, custom dashboards, and dedicated support. These are traditionally businesses that have between three and 25 sales people, and they get access to a customized learning environment with their logo and brand colors; more than over 1000 hours of on-demand courses; live, instructor-led workshops and mastermind group coaching; a personalized learner dashboard with AI powered recommendation engine; the ability to add their own specific training content; and a dedicated account manager. 
• Key to delivering Team Hubs is Thought Industries’ Panorama framework. Companies come in, purchase using a bulk subscription model that allows them to  self-serve and add additional seats as they go. The entire experience is branded and tailored to the individual business.

Enterprise LMS Distribution

• Here large, enterprise companies can integrate their LMS with Sales Gravy’s training platform. These customers have large numbers of salespeople, and Sales Gravy can easily set them up in a Panorama instance where they can preview a course, grab the course they want, and drop them into their LMS. These are sophisticated customers who know what they’re doing.
• The key to making this model thrive is easily managing licenses, via SCORM. Sales Gravy can give LMS administrators the ability to self-serve by choosing the courses that they want. They also can restrict the courses that these customers have access to based on what they’ve paid for those particular licenses. 

Building these business lines on Thought Industries has allowed Sales Gravy to grow and scale, giving them the power and flexibility to adapt their business to market needs.

“There’s nothing else out there that allows you to serve all three of those different types of constituents.”  

~ Jeb Blount, Sales Gravy CEO and Founder