Have you ever worked with someone and thought, “If I ever started a company, this is the first person I’d hire?” That pretty much sums up how the four founders of CoachEm came together. Twice.
With over 100 years of sales, sales leadership and sales training experience CoachEm’s four founders have been SDRs, VPs SVPs and CROs, led Fortune 100 sales organizations, trained tens of thousands of sales reps, and coached thousands of sales leaders. Their story is a series of successful joint endeavors, spanning nearly 25 years, that led them here.
Colum Lundt, Mike Myers, Rebecca Schmidt and Matt Benelli came together through the sales training industry. After early training with long time sales and leadership coach Mike, Colum went on to become a highly successful coach and entrepreneur. Matt recruited Mike to train his team at Oracle, a 25-person pilot that grew to a program training thousands. Thanks to early opportunities with Mike, Rebecca went on to become a skilled sales and business development executive. When their paths crossed throughout the years, mutual admiration grew alongside their achievements.
“Mike is the common thread among us, he trained us all. But our shared perspective on seeing new opportunities is what brought us together.” – Colum
Having successfully launched other new companies individually, the four founders’ first venture together was Revenue Performance Group, a consulting and training firm dedicated to helping clients improve the performance of their revenue engine with the Sandler Sales Methodology as the foundation. Thanks to their shared background, similar outlook on the market opportunities and exceptional sales skills, RPG quickly found its niche – and the attention of The Sandler Training organization, who acquired RPG in 2019.
“When you’re really fortunate enough to work with people you enjoy, and then an opportunity presents itself where you can start a business with those same people, it’s a wonderful thing.” – Rebecca
As they continued to train under the Sandler company umbrella, a pattern started appearing. Despite the bundles of money being thrown at sales productivity tools and technology, the same core problems remained; too many reps missing quota, too much attrition, and the inability of most sales organizations to scale efficiently. The team knew that front line managers were the key to reinforcing the training they delivered. But their observation was that most FLMs were ill equipped, lacked the time and were insufficiently supported to effectively coach their reps and scale their teams. The norm for coaching was to revert to deal reviews or to skip coaching and 1:1 meetings altogether.
This crystallized the problem for them, because coaching was the key to ensuring that sales training was put into action to achieve individual and organizational success. It’s also what helped improve retention rates and built positive team cultures. Coaching affected everything and it wasn’t being done well or consistently.
“I don’t think much has improved in my 25 years. Few people can point to a consistent coaching relationship. What’s changed is that front-line managers have a lot less time, more tech to master, and more reps to manage. Effective coaching is extremely difficult, and as a result, it just doesn’t happen.” – Matt
With that in mind they decided to start CoachEm and build the world’s first and only coaching execution platform.
CoachEm is reinventing coaching. The coaching execution platform changes how managers lead and develop their people, by elevating managers to become great coaches. The application makes it easy for front line managers to focus on coaching the behaviors that matter most, to deliver stronger quota attainment and better team and rep participation.
“We have so much knowledge from working with so many companies over the years, training and developing so many people in sales and leadership. Now we have the ability to apply areas of machine learning and AI and leverage technology to grow people in a way that is exponentially more effective.” – Mike
Developing an evidence-based culture of coaching effectiveness is the missing ingredient in driving consistent, scalable revenue. The team built CoachEm to address that need and deliver all the other benefits that come with using data to improve productivity, retention and scalability at every level. CoachEm helps companies GrowEm, KeepEm, ScaleEm, and LeadEm.
