To help educate the next generation of tech sales professionals, Chicago education company Victory Lap is raising $25 million to expand its programming and reach more students.
Victory Lap raised the $25 million in performance-based growth capital from Leif, a New York-based income share agreement management platform. Victory Lap’s business model relies heavily on income share agreements it makes with students who don’t want to or can’t afford to pay tuition up front. This is the first outside capital Victory Lap has taken since it was founded in 2016 and the company will receive the capital from Leif incrementally over the next five years if it hits certain growth metrics, said Victory Lap founder and CEO Brian Bar.
Victory Lap’s eight-week, virtual cohort program offers students an intensive technical sales bootcamp that also connects graduating students with companies looking to fill sales roles. The program is part-time and includes about 80-100 hours of instruction. Victory Lap’s 55th cohort launched this month, and the company is gearing up to launch a more intensive four-week, full-time program.
Guest instructors have been professionals from companies like LinkedIn and Salesforce, as well as local tech companies like G2 and Sprout Social. Victory Lap grads have gone on to work at 230 different companies like BenchPrep, ActiveCampaign, Centro, Amazon, Uber and ShipBob.
Victory Lap programs cost $6,900, but if students can’t afford tuition or don’t want to pay upfront, they can also opt into an income share agreement. The agreement allows students to pay Victory Lap 8% of their gross income over a two-year timeline once they’ve secured a sales job making over $30,000. Each agreement expires after four years, Bar said.
“If we’re not doing our job, you’re not going to be on the hook for this thing forever,” he added.
The genesis of Victory Lap goes back to Bar’s days working in sales at Groupon.
“We were the fastest-growing company in history to hit $1 billion in actual revenue and we did that largely through sales people,” Bar said. “We were hiring dozens at a time every month."
To help train all of those new employees, Bar was leading the creation of an in-house sales boot camp, teaching everything from cold-calling to marketing strategies. Nearly 500 Groupon employees went through the program.
“It was amazing to see how much education had helped,” Bar said. “When you actually taught new hires the proper way to do things, it was having a major impact on their confidence levels and of course, their performance.”
After seeing the success with the program within Groupon, Bar eventually decided—after a stint at ThinkCERCA—that it was time to launch his own business for aspiring sales professionals everywhere.
Now, Victory Lap, which employs eight people, is offering sales courses to all kinds of students, those with previous experience in sales and those with none. Students aren’t required to have a college degree or prerequisites either, Bar said.
The new funding from Leif will be used to launch new programs and hire more employees, including instructors, Bar said.
“Sales is a teachable skill and it’s a teachable behavior," Bar said. “Our north star is longevity in sales.”
