Everyone in the sales department has expressed how miserable they are here now, even people who are doing well hate the job which says a lot. Month after month quota continues to climb, which is impacting the sales floor negatively. Expect to have returned deals due to external factors - order ops failures, checkout errors, hardware failures, etc. resulting in churn that directly effects your quota that month and you must make up for those losses. These product failures made the sales team lack confidence in what they’re selling.
Sales skill and strategy is 20% of the job, the rest is attributed to luck. You will not get to quota without inbound leads and you need at least two large inbound leads per month to close, but these are rare. This is problematic because inbounds are random, uneven and based on territories. The easy solve could be outbounding, however this industry is very tough to win an outbound deal from for many reasons (i.e. they are locked in contract or are not willing to pay for a premium product). Because of this, the culture of sales at Samsara is eat at your desk during lunch just to try and hit quota. In my opinion, this is an unhealthy work/life balance.
When interviewing, externally hired AEs were told they’d receive bigger inbounds leads than the new internally promoted ADRs because the ADRs have smaller quotas and zero closing experience. This ended up not being true and bigger leads were sent out randomly. Newly promoted ADRs often receive lucky large inbounds that get them over quota instantly, resulting in less qualified/smaller inbounds landing in externally hired AE's laps (with 2+ years closing experience) struggling to meet their larger quota. It's demotivating to know that no matter how hard you work, luck is the biggest determining factor of your success. Management has verbally acknowledged this.
Don’t count on being promoted into a better situation either. Mid Market inherits accounts that have been touched 7+ times in recent months and have trialed with Samsara but chose not to move forward. Inbounds are no longer relevant - you are lucky if you get 1 per month.
The worst part is churn. There’s no warning about when it will be processed so it can hit you on your last day after you've already hit quota and then all of a sudden you're not at quota anymore. You are are liable for 3 years, even after being promoted and no longer owning the account. 2.5 years after selling a deal, the client could return, resulting in FULL contract value churn, despite the client paying off most of the contract.
Samsara is great if you're in any other department. The company will continue to excel and innovate but if you're looking to join sales..... run.
