Most sales communities look the same from the outside. Here's a due diligence framework that goes beyond the sales page and finds the signal in the noise.
Editor-in-chief, Lion's Den Insider
Affiliate disclosure: We earn commission if you join via our links. Methodology →
Sales coaching communities have a specific information asymmetry problem. The people who built them know everything about them. Prospective members know almost nothing. The sales page — which is itself produced by sales professionals — is optimised to close the prospect, not to inform them. Testimonials are curated. Screenshots are cherry-picked. Income claims are either for exceptional cases or are framed in ways that make them hard to verify.
This does not mean every community is a bad deal. It means the sales page is not a reliable basis for a decision. Something else is needed.
This framework is that something else. It is a structured evaluation approach that goes beyond the marketing materials and looks for verifiable evidence that a community delivers what it claims. Apply it to any sales coaching community, including this one.
Start outside the community's own channels. Search Reddit (r/sales, r/salesforce, r/remotework), Twitter/X, and relevant Facebook groups for the community name plus words like "honest review," "worth it," "not worth it," "scam," or "cancelled." Look for discussions that started without a referral link.
What you are looking for: unprompted mentions of the community by people who have no obvious financial incentive to promote it. These are rare and therefore valuable. A community with zero organic mentions is not necessarily bad — it may be small or niche — but a community with exclusively affiliate-generated content and no organic discussion deserves more scrutiny.
Red flag: multiple posts using identical phrasing about the community's benefits. This pattern suggests coordinated affiliate promotion rather than organic member experience.
Green flag: specific, idiosyncratic descriptions of what someone got from the community — a job referral, a script improvement, a specific call coach whose feedback helped — that could only come from actual use.
Most sales communities are built by people with claimed track records in sales. The question is not whether the founder had a sales career — that is easy to verify through LinkedIn — but whether the specific claims made in the marketing are verifiable.
For Lion's Den / Sales University, Jordan Rassas publicly claims approximately £2.66 million in gross sales over 10 months at Inenco Group, and 2017/18 Salesperson of the Year. These claims can be partially verified by reviewing his LinkedIn work history for the relevant dates and employer. Whether the specific revenue figure is independently verifiable is a different matter — employment records are not public, and the figure is self-reported. What you can verify: the employer existed, the employment dates are consistent, the company operates in the industry described.
The appropriate framing for self-reported figures is "Jordan Rassas claims" rather than "Jordan Rassas generated" — a distinction that this site's editorial standards require. Apply the same standard when evaluating any founder's claimed track record. A history that is consistent across LinkedIn, published interviews, and the community's own content is more credible than a history that exists only in sales page copy.
Every sales community promises training, community, and support. The difference between communities of similar price is in the specifics of those deliverables. Ask:
Some of these questions can be answered by a free trial or a trial period. Communities that offer free trials are giving you verifiable evidence rather than promises — which is itself a signal.
Cancellation policy is a risk-management tool. A community with a no-questions-asked monthly cancellation has a lower barrier to trial and lower risk if the product does not deliver. A community with a 12-month contract and no refund policy front-loads the risk onto the buyer.
This is not to say that annual contracts are inherently predatory — many legitimate training programmes require annual commitments because the transformation they produce takes time. But a programme that asks for a large upfront commitment before you have any basis for trust deserves additional scrutiny on the other evaluation dimensions.
At £50/month on a monthly billing model, Lion's Den / Sales University represents a low financial risk per billing period. The relevant question is not whether you can cancel, but whether the first month is enough time to evaluate whether the community delivers what you need. For a career-change decision — moving into remote sales from another industry — one month is probably not sufficient to evaluate return on the investment of time and effort. Plan for a three-month evaluation with specific milestones.
Sales communities have cultures. Some are energetically motivational, with heavy emphasis on mindset, income goals, and social proof. Some are technically focused, with most discussion on methodology, scripts, and specific objection handling. Some are primarily a job board with a community wrapper.
None of these is inherently better. What matters is whether the culture matches what you need. A rep who needs technical skills improvement will get less from a community heavy on motivational content. A rep who is technically skilled but demotivated will get less from a purely methodological community.
Before joining, look for any publicly available content from the community — YouTube videos, social posts, podcast appearances by the founder — and assess whether the style and content type match what you actually need. A free trial that lets you observe the community before committing is the best way to assess this.
Any community worth recommending should be able to pass this minimum bar:
Communities that fail one or two of these do not necessarily fail to deliver value. Communities that fail most of them are likely to be more valuable to the person selling them than to the person buying them.
Affiliate disclosure: We earn commission if you sign up via our link.
Ready to join The Sales University?
Join on Whop — From £50/mo →Sales outcomes depend on effort, skill, market conditions, and individual fit. No earnings are guaranteed.
Most sales communities look the same from the outside. Here's a due diligence fr…
Most sales communities look the same from the outside. Here's a due diligence fr…
Most sales communities look the same from the outside. Here's a due diligence fr…
Most sales communities look the same from the outside. Here's a due diligence fr…