Pros
Only saving grace is it was remote + I liked my immediate team for the most part.
Cons
This is by far the worst company i've ever worked for. In fact, it's the only company Ive ever worked for that I hated and where I dreaded work every day. PLEASE read the other Glassdoor reviews from salespeople that worked here and believe them -- I wish I did. Things I disliked: - Low support: We had tons of pressure put on us, but was very difficult to find anyone to answer a single question when you ran into an issue. Being remote is great, but when you are new it can be tough when you can't get a response from anyone. Everyone is overworked and therefore not only unwilling but also unable to lend a helping hand. Youll probably be assigned a new hire buddy who will flake out on 80% of your calls. The calls are 20 mins long and barely have time to discuss anything. Same with your 1:1 with your manager - they are 20 mins, managers always is running 5 mins late because theyve been in "back to backs" all day - and you have about 10 mins to talk business after smalltalk is done. Cant tell you how many AEs I spoke to that had this same experience. Very high pressure: Couple the above with very high expectations and you have a recipe for disaster. It's fine to expect people to be independent and figure things out on their own -- but when you expect people to be closing large deals from day 1, you've got to train and support them! Vast majority of the team (I was an AE in mid-market) was nowhere near their quota. And 90% of us were still on a ramp! Our region had an hour long WEEKLY meeting where everyone went over their forecasted number, one by one. You are asked to present in front of everyone. The point is to reward the few reps who are actually on target, and embarrass the reps who werent. Reps who were not on track are called out in front of everyone. The second you start pacing behind on quota, your performance will be documented. Even if you keep a high level of activity, they will find an angle on how you werent doing a good enough job. If you hit your cold call numbers for the week, you didnt send enough emails. You will be told you need to have more trials going - once you do, you will be called out for having too many open trials that need to close. Micro-managing: - Some flexibility comes with being remote, but trust me your every move will be tracked and monitored. You will be expected to make 100 cold calls a week and to record them. How many emails you send is tracked. How many trials you have out will be tracked. Tons of internal meetings daily to keep tabs on you and ensure you are at your desk. You are expected to have your camera on. People are super flaky. Meeting times will be changed last minute so you better make sure to block your calendar for a DRs apt. Rather than cancel a meeting, people just wont show up to give the illusion they were busy -- leaving you sitting in am empty zoom for 10 mins for no reason. Tons of internal emails, customer calls. New trainings every other week, and whether you complete them will be tracked. You will get inbound, round robin calls with potential customers - if you dont pickup then you go to the back of the line. Half the time these "deals" are bogus and ghost you anyway. You will constantly be asked to update your pipeline and report on deal status. - No teamwork: The value "win as a team" could not be farther from the truth and should be removed from their website. "Dog eat dog" would be more fitting. Not uncommon for AEs to steal accounts from each other. You can work a deal for months and then be told it was assigned to another AE and lose all you've worked for. NOTE: I liked everyone on my team as a person. Great, smart and cool people. But Samsara has created a structure that pits reps against each other, and that will ultimately inform people's behavior. Customer sentiment: Every customer in your book has been called by 10 Samsara reps. They have been burned in every which way. Sure, sometimes customers are with a competitor and may become open to switching to Samsara. To be fair, I believe the product is mostly superior to other brands - but the price is also the highest. Just know that there is no Greenfield territory in your book and its not an easy product to sell. - Unexperienced Team & Managers: 90% of our region (including managers) were hired in the same month. With very few tenured reps and managers, communal knowledge is extremely low. You will be sent a 100 page FAQ and told to look in there for the answer... and half the time this FAQ wouldnt even include the info you need. None of the managers know what they are doing. Some of them didnt even come from Software. - Awful Salesforce Functionality & Tech: 50% of my day was spent trying to fix salesforce & tech issues. There are so many bugs in it and its a huge time suck. Thats fine if you dont have a huge quota breathing down your neck - but not good when you need to produce and perform and you literally cant get a signature done because of a random bug that no one knows how to fix. You will be circulated from one team to the next and never get your question answered. Its like calling a customer service hotline where you keep getting passed to a new person and have to re-explain your issue and again and again -- but you actually work for the company. Our favorite saying: when you work in tech, but tech doesnt work for you. - Turnover: Reps are churned and burned at this company. My entire team was hired around the same time and 50% of them quit within 6 months. One guy left within a few weeks, said he would never even be putting Samsara on his resume. He had worked in software for 8 years. If you don't leave on your own accord, you will be promptly fired if you falter for 1-2 quarters in a row. There is no loyalty. You could be a top performing rep for years and have 1 bad quarter and you will promptly go on a PIP. In training, they put a Powerpoint slide up that said "the tale of two AEs" -- basically one hits quota and keeps his job, the other doesnt and goes on an PIP and gets terminated. Great way to make a first impression.. - Promotion opportunities: VERY difficult to get promoted from what I saw. You will need to start doing the job of a manager while still doing your AE job - including being a new hire buddy for multiple reps, flying out to sales meetings to give presentations, join office hours to try to help reps with SF issues, etc. And they will kick the can on promoting you while in this hybrid state. In the meantime they will hire external managers with zero SaaS or company experience, who have NO IDEA how to be successful in the role. Then when you finally get promoted, you will take a pay cut since only the highest performing AEs get promoted who are blowing their quotas out of the water. - Customer Service: Non-existent. Samsara's strategy is to get customer's to sign a 3-5 year contract, get their credit card info, and then disappear. This is not good when you are an AE trying to upsell current customers to drive sales. To be fair, new logo sales is the clear path to success. But its difficult when you are getting calls from current customers who are extremely unhappy on a daily basis. You will be told to have them fill out a form, which they will rarely get a response on. But then you are expected to turn around and upsell them on products to hit quota the next day. Compensation: Salary is so relative, but you can make a lot more at another company. The reps that were truly crushing it were making good money, but they were veryyyy few and far between. Since most reps were not hitting quota (and definitely not every quarter) the OTE range is totally unreasonable.
