By: Roy Ng
Barry Sowerwine is joining as VP of Global Sales! When you first meet Barry, you instantly feel his energy for selling mission-oriented products. Ensuring our developers and customers are our number one focus has not only proven to be the right way to build a financially strong company at Mapbox, it’s also exactly what Barry did at Tableau. With this idea in mind, he grew the business from $7M in bookings in 2010 to over $325M by 2016 as SVP of Americas Enterprise Sales.
What we most value is Barry’s focus on customer empathy and maximizing human potential and relationships. It was this same passion and energy I see day in and day out at Mapbox from our founding team — and it’s that relentless energy and enthusiasm combined with detailed-oriented discipline we look for in a sales leader to take us to a new level of scale.
We work this hard building our product so that everyone in the world will benefit from our location stack, and our sales team is that direct relationship with developers, builders, and product leaders to make sure that happens. They support our customers by giving them the right building blocks to create exactly what they need. Part of sales is aligning dollars to our products, but that only happens after the customer realizes the impact of our product and understands how powerful our SDKs and APIs are. It’s this obsession with both our product and taking care of customers that is our foundation, and it’s that product understanding that not only sells our product, but also helps our product and engineering teams understand what the world needs. This opportunity is best said by Barry himself:
“Everything about Mapbox felt different, refreshing for sure, but very different. There was a beautiful simplicity in how everyone talked about the mission of the company. Location data is critically important today, but in the future, it will be integrated into our daily lives in ways we are only now beginning to imagine. With a product and people first mentality, I believe Mapbox is uniquely positioned to help organizations leverage location data in a way that’s specific to their business, use case and desired user experience. Simply put, Mapbox provides the only location data platform that can be leveraged “your way”. With Mapbox, you’re enabled, not controlled. I am very excited to be joining such an amazing company.”
“Mr. Passion” as Barry was known at Tableau, was all about living up to the higher purpose of the company. He was equally a builder and coach, and his teams all looked up to him. People follow him, he’s a natural leader with a zen leadership style, and became one of the “spiritual leaders” at Tableau. He builds chemistry with intelligent people, not just dollar motivated people. It’s this kind of leadership style that we expect across our entire team.
Welcome aboard Barry!
Welcome Barry Sowerwine, VP of Global Sales was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.