Heavy Offshoring and Declining Quality:
Over time, a significant majority of roles were offshored, including SDRs, Customer Support, Engineering, Account Management, etc. 70% of Motive employees are now offshored. Let that sink in. While cost savings may have been achieved, the quality of execution declined noticeably. This was not just an internal frustration — customers explicitly voiced dissatisfaction with support quality, response times, and overall experience. Sales reps were left to manage fallout they did not create.
A Company That Feels like a Ponzi Scheme For IPO:
In my opinion and lived experience, Motive operates with a Ponzi-like IPO mentality. The company appears obsessed with growth optics, cost cutting, and metric manipulation to support an eventual public offering, while deprioritizing customers, employees, and long-term product quality. Decisions consistently favored short-term numbers over sustainable execution. Frontline teams and customers felt like collateral damage in the race to go public.
Poor Territory and Nepotism:
I was assigned roughly 120 accounts, many of which were out of segment, inactive, or no longer in business. Requests for account switching were denied, and the expectation became “figure it out yourself.” While the company claimed to have a fair inbound round-robin system, no reps had visibility into it — only leadership controlled access. As a result, there was zero transparency into how inbounds were actually distributed. Many reps who were supposedly part of the rotation went months without seeing an inbound, while a small group of leadership-favored reps appeared to receive inbounds consistently. Success felt driven less by territory design or execution and more by luck, opacity, and favoritism.
Incompetent Enablement and Internal Chaos:
Sales enablement and frontline management were severely lacking. Basic operational tasks (trials, order changes, Salesforce workflows) were unclear or inconsistently handled. Managers often lacked practical knowledge of core systems, forcing reps to spend excessive time troubleshooting internal issues instead of selling.
Constant Comp Plan and Product Changes:
Commission structures were changed repeatedly, often mid-stream. Fuel card compensation went from first-swipe payouts, to requiring certain spend % to being removed entirely — including for deals already being actively worked. These changes directly impacted earnings and undermined trust in leadership. Reps had little confidence that today’s plan would still exist tomorrow.
Competitor Reality and Questionable Competitive Messaging:
Internally, Motive constantly positioned itself as superior to Samsara, but in practice, Samsara consistently appeared to have better product quality, stronger customer support, and more stable execution. Customers frequently compared the two and voiced frustration with Motive’s experience.
Motive leadership often referenced a third-party VTTI study to bash competitors, including Samsara. In my view, this study was presented in a highly selective and biased way (they literally paid VTTI), yet it was repeatedly used as a sales and internal talking point. Even with that narrative, customers still perceived Samsara as the stronger and more reliable platform.
