Sonya Cates

Senior sales executive with a record of success creating supply chain solutions to enhance efficiency and retentive profitable growth. Previous collegiate athlete: bringing teamwork, emotional intelligence, servant leadership, and excitement to drive Company and Customer success.

Director of Sales - Kenco Group

(2025-11)

Owner of consumer sales focused on the retail and Food & Beverage verticals. Leader of Customer Experience team creation and internal change management deliverables for 2026. Hyper focused on organically expanding existing Customers base into new modes, as well as pipelined new logo's.

Director of Sales - Best Bay Logistics and Transportation

(2025-01 - 2025-09)

Managed consumer sales (all modes) primarily asset-light and port drayage. Focused on developing Enterprise Customers and the expansion of Highway and Intermodal.

• Responsible for hiring outside sales representatives, lead and train best practices
• Brought onboard four top Fortune 500 customers including the execution of Brokerage and Asset contracts within the last 5 months since being onboarded with Best Bay.
• Developed a travel policy and expense approval program, and implemented across the current sales teams

Director Strategic Account Executive Sales - Uber Freight

(2022-12 - 2024-11)

Manage consumer sales (all modes) for a strategic portfolio of top revenue generating accounts with a focus on the retail vertical, while also hyper focused on new logos, new lines of business, account financial health, and internal integration and management of customer service account teams

• Drive top-line and bottom-line growth for a portfolio of current and new customers
• Work with customers to continually seek new solutions for their logistics challenges
• Handle any issues that come up in the normal operation of freight movement
• Manage and support internal customer experience team in anticipating challenges and crafting solutions to support internal and customer objectives
• Work directly with legal, marketing, onboarding, integrations and sales enablement teams to ensure

Senior Director of Strategic National Account Sales - J. B. Hunt Transport, INC.

(1997-02 - 2021-10)

Managed many top 20 accounts, delivering an average of $300M annually. Building internal and external relationships while understanding customers' end to end supply chain to best provide innovative value add solutions. Establishing and maintaining internal infrastructure to support business, ensuring that front line internal SOPs are set up to provide continuous value and opportunities for growth.

• Mode Conversion. Initiated study of mode conversion from highway to intermodal for a consumer product company. Implemented conversion that saved more than $12M vs. Customers budgeted transportation spend. Over the following seven years, this customer grew from $800K annual revenue to $130M annually all modes.
• Innovator of the Year award. Developed SOP and new SCAC for a large retailer enabling auto-coverage of rainfall rejections to be automatically transmitted to the digital platform for 100% coverage at that day's market rate with set markup. This solution eliminated customers' soft cost of calling for coverage while providing a baseline to budget in said time of uncertainty. This expanded solution generated an incremental $7M top line revenue for that pilot year. As well as that Customers' annual
• International – Domestic Container capacity project Worked with the Internal and customer's international teams to set up, plan and load new manufactured intermodal containers loaded with customer paid vendor products in Shenzhen to arrive at the Port of Los Angeles. From there, cargo is shipped to a deconsolidation facility, unloaded, sorted, reloaded and sent within 24 hours to a Distribution Center. The solution provided client container capacity and ship capacity from Asia, efficiency at the
• Single Source- OTR Solution: Conducted onsite visit and analysis for a large food shipper and demonstrated potential gains in efficiency, space management, and cost savings by moving to a single source OTR solution vs. Utilizing 5 different carriers. A significant win for the customer yielded $15M in top line revenue internally.

BSBA - Supply Chain Management - Sam Walton College of Business, UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS

Supply Chain Management