Rich Liu: Sales in 2023; How to Onboard, Manage and Scale Reps; PLG vs Enterprise Growth | E1023

What are the biggest fuck-ups that you see people make?

Ah, ah, ah. Biggest fuck-ups would be... (instrumental music)

Rich, my man, I have heard so many great things. I've been so looking forward to this. Some of the references gave me things that we could talk about in the show, some we've just bonded about instead. But thank you so much for joining me today.

Happy to be here, Harry, thanks so much for having me.

Not at all, the pleasure is mine. But I wanna start with a little bit on you, 'cause you've worked at some of the most incredible orgs in, in the last kind of 10 years of business building really. And so I wanna start with, how did you make your way into the world of tech and sales first?

Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. Fir- first of all, it's, uh, it's, uh, there's a lot of luck involved. I think it's a lot easier to see things going back than looking forward. Um, but I, I started my career as a, as an engineer, biomedical engineer. My parents are both engineers, we're immigrants, and so that idea of get a technical degree, get a technical background, and then, you know, you'll always have work to do was a little bit of what I grew up with. But after finishing, I realized, oh, wow, I watch the movies, I, I see TV, and I really wanted to be some kind of a business executive someday. I didn't really know what that meant. Uh, and I thought, well, okay, this was during the, uh, dot-com bubble burst, so there weren't a lot of jobs out there. And I was reading and doing my research and going, huh, you know, it looks like a lot of these, uh, these, uh, business leaders, these CEOs, they, they seem to have this, like, sales background. That's interesting. Maybe I should try that. And, uh, and, you know, if I, if it, if I don't, can't do it well, if I suck at it, you know, I'll go back and take one of these engineering offers I, uh, that, that I had walked away from. And so my first job was, I always think the base salary was, like, $20,000. And so it was like, well, if I can't make a good commission, I won't pay my rent anyway, so why don't we give this thing a shot for a year? And that was really it, right? I went into an investment company called Fisher Investments that was really transformational at the time, really trying to get people from all money management being distributed through your financial advisor or brokerage house to, oh, we're gonna build this direct-to-consumer money management shop through what was junk mail, cold calling, and later, you know, internet advertising, search advertising, and, uh, to sell high-net-worth asset management into institutions. And so it sounded, like, kooky, right?