The biggest downsides at Samsara AE role is the unexpected work that is given. You not only have to outbound but its also a customer success manager role tied in. Your original CSM's have so many accounts to maintain that they literally do not have the bandwidth to help every single account. For an experience sales professional, they do not get the basics correct. They still run the old version of SFDC and is very unorganized. From an outbound stand point, they do not have enough key metrics (ex. Decision Maker to DM demo ratio or Dial to Decision Maker Ratio) to determine how effective you were on calls or how many dials it takes to reach someone who can make a decision. Your success literally is determined on how well the growth team did that month to generate you leads. Depending on the territory you get and the amount of reps in that territory determines how many IB leads you will get for the month. They do a great job at spreading them out evenly, however, sometimes not enough to consistently hit an AE2 quota. Which creates more strain on your day 2 day life at Samsara. The worst part of the sales cycle is when there is malfunctions with the software and customers are unhappy you deal with "churn." These "chargebacks" are applied to your next month (not your check) so you start out in negatives from an already impossible quota. They raised quota 4 times in 6 months.
Another huge problem is the eery unspoken rules. Most of the reps there are afraid to speak to management or even HR. One of the big benefits that Samara offers is their unlimited PTO, however, it's very frowned upon to use regardless of already hitting your number. Overall, Samsara is very high growth company but definitely at the expense of their sales team.
