Inside Dispatch
5
min read
Q&A With New Sales Leader, Brian Carr
Kelsie Hengel
Published on:
February 19, 2025
Updated on:
Published on:
February 19, 2025
Updated on:
With a career spanning top companies like CBS Interactive, Twitter (now X), and Lyft, Dispatch’s new Vice President of Sales, Brian Carr, brings a wealth of experience in sales strategy and business growth. Now at Dispatch, he’s focused on leveling up our go-to-market strategy, strengthening customer relationships, and driving long-term success. Learn more about his vision and leadership approach in this Q&A
Q: Tell us about your career and experiences.
A: I began my career in the media sales space working for CBS Interactive, where I sold digital advertising across their sports and entertainment platforms. I moved up the ranks there from account coordinator to account manager to account executive, working with large brands to invest in display advertising on those platforms. From there, I moved into advertising for Twitter, now known as X, when they were building up their sales team. I spent about four years at Twitter helping build out the sales strategy for the travel vertical as an account executive. Then, I was recruited and brought over to Lyft in 2016 to help manage the business-to-business sales team. I spent nine years there, building up that team across multiple offices, multiple verticles, and multiple target industries to ensure that Lyft was the software and transportation solution of choice for any organization within the US and Canada. That’s the history of the last 10 to 15 years of my career prior to landing here at Dispatch!
Q: Why did you decide to join the Dispatch team?
A: I thought the opportunity that Dispatch had was very similar to what I saw at Lyft, specifically, where they had a stellar product and a lot of opportunity to grow and expand the existing customer base and new areas as well. I think taking my knowledge of an existing product that works very well and has a lot of customer satisfaction but being able to put some order to the go-to-market (GTM) strategy and grow across different regions and industries was really attractive to me. It’s a lot of work and it takes time, but what was the most satisfying professional experience was to take a step back after nine years, throw a pandemic in the mix, see a lot of ups and downs, but realize that you've achieved a lot in terms of business growth. I felt that Dispatch would allow me the opportunity to lead the GTM sales strategy and achieve this growth.
Q: What’s your short and long-term vision for the sales organization?
A: The short-term vision for the sales organization is to continue to hit the ground running and waste no time building up the pipeline and focus on customer engagement, activity, and relationship building =to ensure we're leaving no stone unturned within our ICP. Then in the long term, when I say long term, I think that could even be three months, six months, and then three years down the line to ensure we're putting all the necessary tools and guardrails in place to equip the team to move quick and be able to leverage technology and products that are going to be the go-to solution for our customers. So, ensuring that the sales team has all the right direction, the right collateral, the right talking points, and the right tools to be able to make their job more seamless. And then having a closer relationship with the Product team to ensure that we're having constant feedback and conversation on how we can iterate our product and technology to meet the growing demands of our customers and ensure we’re embedding ourselves into all their logistical delivery needs.
Q: What does “level up” mean to you as our new sales leader?
A: It means being able to part ways with what may have been old norms and work to achieve scalability and efficiency. So perhaps let go of some of the activities or the strategies you’ve had before, and really hone in and focus on accounts that we've identified as our lowest-hanging fruit and focus on a better strategy and document that. Own it, have a plan, and not take heed of all the madness at the periphery, but really hone in on your individual lists, the activity that you need to complete, and the accounts that you need to work within those specific regions and create a plan around that. So to me, that's leveling up in strategy, but taking a step down in terms of the things that you need to do, I want people to work smarter, not harder.
Q: What does customer relationship building mean to you and why it's important?
A: I would say relationship building is important because our core objective is to make the lives and the day-to-day activities of our customers easier and help their bottom line, which really comes down to efficiency and cost savings. In order to achieve that, I think we have to understand the psyche of our customer and what keeps them up at night and stands in the way of meeting their operational objectives. You really can't unlock that unless you have a very close and strong relationship with customers, especially at the Enterprise executive level, and understand that your primary role is to know how we can make their lives easier and understand that may evolve over time and the relationships you have with those customers need to be long term and based on trust.
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