From Yale Engineer to 3 IPOs: How to Hire the Right Rep for Your Sale | Rich Liu, ex-Navan CRO
The Crew PodcastShow Notes
Most companies hire sales reps from the hottest logos and hope they work out. Rich Liu has built sales teams at Meta, MuleSoft and Navan, and his rule is to hire for the sale you're actually running. In this episode he breaks down how MuleSoft turned hiring into religion, why a great rep can fail in the wrong motion, and how Navan rebuilt its go-to-market when COVID took travel revenue to almost nothing.
Rich's Background
Rich Liu is a go-to-market advisor to AI-native companies and the former CRO at Navan (formerly TripActions), where he helped rebuild the business through COVID and on to an IPO. Before Navan he ran enterprise sales at MuleSoft, leading a team of a couple hundred people across six offices as the company went from roughly $800M in valuation to a 10x in three years. He joined Meta when it had around 2,000 employees and ran sales and account management teams as it scaled to 20,000. A Yale engineer by training, he got his start in a sales boiler room cold-calling for Fisher Investments after 9/11.
Timestamps • (00:00) Cold open • (01:19) Welcome to the Crew podcast • (03:12) From Yale engineer to a sales boiler room • (05:47) Breaking into Meta • (08:24) Leaving Meta for a company named after a farm animal • (12:15) The MuleSoft pivot • (16:49) When hiring became religion • (22:38) Why you can't raise the bar later • (25:19) Know the sale before you interview • (27:45) The Vans store BDR • (37:39) Selling travel during a pandemic • (43:58) Advising AI-native companies • (45:57) Chasing Anthropic-level growth • (49:45) Which sales orgs produce the best reps
About The Crew Podcast The Crew podcast interviews GTM leaders and investors at top AI startups and early-stage companies. Every week, host Chris Balestras, partner @ Crew, talks to the people actually building go-to-market motions in real time, not in retrospect.
About Crew Crew is a recruiting, investing, & media firm for seed through series D AI-natives & fast-growing SaaS startups. This Episode Is Brought To You By Attention: Put a team of revenue agents on every deal. Attention captures every customer interaction without a bot in the room, updates your CRM, automates your reporting, scores reps and opportunities against any framework, and forecasts in a way you can actually trust. Trusted by Lovable, Abridge, Avoca, and hundreds of other fast-growing companies. Try it at https://www.attention.com/
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