About DAT
DAT is an award-winning employer of choice and a next-generation SaaS technology company that has been at the leading edge of innovation in transportation supply chain logistics for 45 years. We continue to transform the industry year over year, by deploying a suite of software solutions to millions of customers every day - customers who depend on DAT for the most relevant data and most accurate insights to help them make smarter business decisions and run their companies more profitably. We operate the largest marketplace of its kind in North America, with 400 million freights posted in 2022, and a database of $150 billion of annual global shipment market transaction data. Our headquarters are in Denver, CO, with additional offices in Missouri, Oregon, and Bangalore, India. For additional information, see www.DAT.com/company.
The Opportunity
DAT operates the largest truckload freight marketplace in North America. Carriers are the supply side of that marketplace. Our Carrier segment is a multiple-hundred million dollar run-rate business built on subscription revenue from the carriers, primarily through DAT One, with a growing portfolio of financial services including factoring, payments, and fuel.
Ninety-five percent of carriers operate ten or fewer trucks. They buy on a phone in minutes and self-serve, manage their business while on the road, and re-evaluate every month what services deliver value against what they earned that month. We reach a fraction of the addressable carrier base today. The path to a 2-3x business over five years is through growth and retention.
Through acquisition, DAT has also brought together a number of strategic products in recent years and is bringing them together into one carrier suite. This role sits right in the middle of that work.
You'll own carrier growth end to end: the product suite to find and manage work, the acquisition and activation lifecycle engine that powers its new revenue growth, the sales and retention organization that supports it, and the growth agenda that Product and Engineering build against.
If you have run supply growth at a marketplace, this will be familiar in shape and different in one important respect. Here the carrier is a paying customer, the subscription is the revenue, and growth spend has to earn a return through subscription economics. You get the analytical discipline of supply growth and the accountability of a P&L in the same job.
What You'll Do
The full carrier lifecycle
- Own acquisition, onboarding, activation and first value, engagement, retention, expansion, and reactivation of lapsed carriers.
- Instrument every stage, assign an owner to each, and give each a conversion target and a named intervention set.
- Treat the product and the lifecycle system as the sales motion, because in this market the customer will not take a call.
- Prioritize funnels and cohorts above marketing campaigns, and change the pricing or fix activation before you grow headcount.
- Kill a program you built when the payback math does not hold.
- Keep penetration and retention as your scoreboard, and substantially rebuild a business that is performing today so that it can triple.
The carrier subscription P&L
- Own revenue, growth, retention, and contribution margin for the base carrier subscription package.
- Own pricing and packaging, the acquisition and promotional budget, and the return that budget delivers.
Penetration and supply density
- Use share of the addressable carrier base as your headline growth measure, nationally and at the market and lane level.
- Treat markets as individual growth problems, not as a single national number. A marketplace does not need more carriers in general. It needs more carriers where brokers are short of capacity.
Quality of growth
- Work with Marketplace Integrity to define what a good carrier looks like, and hold your funnel to that definition.
- Keep out fraudulent, non-compliant, and low-performing carriers, whose growth damages the broker side of the marketplace and costs more than it earns.
Growth spend as an investment portfolio
- Manage paid acquisition, promotional pricing, trial economics, referral programs, and the use of financial services pricing as an acquisition lever.
- Measure each on payback and incrementality, size it against return, and cut it when it stops working.
Persistent value
- Define the recurring value carriers get from DAT One, and measure whether they are actually receiving it. Retention here is not a save desk. It is whether a carrier opened DAT One this week and made more money because they did.
- Prove that value back to the carrier in terms they recognize, and do the commercial work required to make it habitual.
The growth roadmap with Product and Engineering
- Work with Product and Engineering leadership to bring the growth agenda into the roadmap: funnel instrumentation, onboarding, pricing and paywall mechanics, engagement surfaces, and experimentation infrastructure.
- Arrive with an evidence-based point of view on what the product must do differently to grow, and win those arguments on merit rather than escalation.
Sales and retention
- Lead a 50+ person organization directly, spanning sales and marketing. This is a leader-of-leaders role, so you'll need real experience managing managers.
- Lead a high-velocity sales and account management organization that supports the segment of the base where a chat with a sales person changes the outcome, primarily small fleets rather than single-truck operators.
Commercial instrumentation
- Build and own the commercial metrics: penetration by market, funnel conversion by stage and cohort, CAC and payback by channel, activation and first-90-day retention, engagement, ARPU, LTV, net revenue retention, and contribution margin.
- Compute them the same way every week, so that Finance and the ELT trust them.
What Success Looks Like in the First 12 Months
- A defensible model of the addressable carrier market, our penetration of it nationally and by market, and the plan to close the gap.
- The carrier subscription P&L delivered against 2027 Annual Operating Plan commitments.
- Measurable improvement in self-serve conversion, with levers documented, instrumented, and repeatable.
- A lifecycle system in production with a funded investment case, measured incrementality, and a roadmap beyond year one.
- Growth spend reallocated on evidence, with the payback math visible and at least one channel or program shut down because it did not clear the bar.
- A revised pricing and packaging structure for the base subscription, tested and rolled out.
- A shared growth backlog with Product and Engineering that is shipping.
The Skills and Experience You'll Bring
Required
- Leadership experience: 10+ years of progressive leadership experience in growth, marketplace operations, or commercial segments.
- Leading leaders: 5+ years leading Manager or Director levels, with a track record of building and developing senior talent.
- Supply-side growth: Direct ownership of supply-side growth or a comparable customer-side growth mandate at a marketplace, platform, or high-volume subscription business. You should be able to describe a funnel you owned, the stages you moved, and by how much.
- P&L ownership: P&L or revenue ownership at a meaningful scale, with a growth story you can substantiate under scrutiny.
- Self-serve lifecycle mechanics: Fluency in acquisition and lifecycle mechanics for a self-serve, low-ACV, high-volume customer base: funnel conversion, onboarding, activation, cohort retention, reactivation, and paywall or trial economics.
- Spend as a portfolio: Demonstrated management of growth or incentive spend as a portfolio, with incrementality testing and a record of reallocating or killing spend on evidence.
- AI in daily work: Consistent practice of using AI in daily work to deliver commercial impact, and readiness to leverage agentic resources.
Strong Plus
- Product change from a growth seat: A record of driving product change from a growth seat, working through Product and Engineering rather than around them.
- Public-company parent: Comfort operating inside a disciplined public-company parent, with the planning cadence and capital scrutiny that implies.
- Paying-supply marketplaces: Supply-side growth experience at a marketplace where the supply side pays, such as local services, seller or merchant platforms, or vertical SaaS for small operators. This is the closest analog to our model and the rarest background in the market.
- Hands-on analytical capability: Write the query, build the cohort model, and challenge an analyst's work.
- Marketplace liquidity: Experience balancing supply growth against quality and cost.
- Financial products: Consumer fintech, embedded financial services, or small-business financial products.
- Mobile-first products: Mobile-first product experience with a customer base that lives on a phone.
- Freight background: Freight, logistics, or transportation background.
- Penetration gains: A documented case of moving a business from low single-digit market penetration to materially higher share.
For Colorado-based candidates, in compliance with the Colorado Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, the salary range for this role is $258,000 - $340,000+ target bonus. DAT considers factors such as scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience, education and training, core skills, internal equity, and market and business elements when extending an offer.
For Washington-based candidates, in compliance with the Washington State Pay Transparency Law, the salary range for this role is $279,000 - $391,000+ target bonus. DAT considers factors such as scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience, education and training, core skills, internal equity, and market and business elements when extending an offer.
DAT embraces the value of a diverse workforce, and believes it is a core strength of our company that we encourage those values in every DAT employee, at every level of our organization, regardless of tenure or rank. We provide equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, amnesty, or status as a covered veteran in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities
The contractor will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor’s legal duty to furnish information. 41 CFR 60-1.35(c)
