21. Charlotte Delafosse, Regional Sales Director at Navan - From Four Seasons Hotels to Tech Sales, Cold Calling by Persona, and Why AI Won't Replace the Room

Charlotte Delafosse is Regional Sales Director for Mid Market, UK, Ireland and the Nordics at Navan, the corporate travel and expense platform. She studied hospitality management and started at luxury hotel brands including the Four Seasons, then managed a boutique hotel in Brussels. When COVID forced the hotel to close, she reinvented her career with an entry-level SDR job at a cyber security company in London. She later joined Navan, moved from account executive to sales manager, and now leads a mid-market team.

In this episode of Inside the Pipeline, Charlotte explains how she cold calls different personas, such as a CFO versus an executive assistant, and why the message has to be personal and get to the point fast. She walks through how Navan uses the MEDDPICC framework to judge a deal, with a focus on pain, champion and economic buyer. She also covers how Navan wins enterprise customers like OpenAI and Anthropic: understand the customer's business goals, bring in multiple stakeholders, and build a clear business case.

On leadership, Charlotte says she hires for drive, urgency and personal ownership over pure technical experience. She describes the hardest part of moving from account executive to manager: letting go of control, resisting the urge to act as a "super rep", and coaching each person according to what motivates them. On AI, she is clear that it helps with admin, research and outreach cadences, but cannot replace cold calling, reading a room or building trust on large contracts, and that meeting clients in person still matters.

Charlotte also shares where Navan is heading in the future...