Culture:
Sink or swim. Great if you're doing well and really miserable if you aren't. At times it felt like a scene from the Wolf of Wall Street. It's a highly pressurized grind culture, very bro-y with limited diversity. There is an expectation that you are at your desk at all times.
Day to day:
Pipe is 80%+ self sourced. You'll need to cold call a few hours a day every day. Quoting, getting discount approvals and generating proposals could be much more efficient.
Financing- I believe this has been covered in another review but this is the most frustrating part of the Samsara sales cycle. A 3rd party financing company is required to give monthly payment options (an industry standard in transportation) to customers. A large % of customers are not approved and you are left in a situation where someone wants to purchase and you literally can't sell the product to them. This may be a teething problem as Samsara grows but it is a huge source of frustration especially as targets grow.
Business Systems/Processes:
Often try to build in-house systems and bolt them onto the CRM which leads to things inevitably breaking. Fixes for these bugs can take weeks and even months, probably a teething problem but very frustrating. It's hard to know if this is a cost saving thing but the cost to productivity should justify investment in some better systems.
Work/life balance- This is not something that is fostered. It's a regular occurrence that reps receive calls from management and directors whilst on PTO. Expect calls in the evenings and on the weekend from your customers and prospects.
Other-
Without going into specifics communication was poor. ADR's take a paycut to progress to AE which I've never heard of before. Pay discrepancies between people doing the same role were common. Targets seemed to be plucked from the air, increasing by 230% when I was there with no additional resources and smaller patches.
In summary, Samsara isn't for everyone, but it may be for you. Don't expect to be developed as a rep but if you can grind it out there is real earning potential. For me the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. There are companies that are better to work for who pay more in the Bay Area. If you get a funny feeling when interviewing that this might not be the place for you you are probably right. If you love the grind, high pressured fast pace environments and enjoy cold calling you'll love it.
