Samsara Shifting Salesforce Offshore

Background

Samsara is a platform enabling organizations with physical operations to harness Internet of Things (IoT) data to develop actionable insights and improve their operations.

Founded in 2015, they are now a publicly traded company with a $27.5B Market Cap and 3,000+ employees globally, including:

• 1,250+ in Sales

• 300+ in Support

Salesforce at Samsara

Overall, they boast a well structured, heavily resourced internal Salesforce team consisting of:

• 7 Business Systems Leaders

• 4 Salesforce Architects

• 7 Product Owners

• 12 Business Analysts

• 5 Salesforce Developers

• 3 Salesforce Administrators

Perhaps one of the most unique aspects of Samsara's Salesforce team is the fact that 37 out of 38 members are based in the United States.

It's rare for that to be the case once you reach this scale.

Not only because over 1,000 of Samsara's employees are based outside the U.S. but also because you often see sophisticated organizations move toward a global model for cost-efficiency, particularly because they have the structure and processes in place to support a global Technology team.

Comparison to MongoDB's Approach

Before we dive into how Samsara is shifting their Salesforce strategy, we draw a quick comparison to MongoDB.

Similar in scale (1,500 Sales; 300+ in Support), they have a slightly larger Salesforce team (44 people) with a significantly different geographical distribution:

• 18 based in India (41%)

• 4 based in Ireland

• 2 based in England

• 1 based in France

• 1 based in Brazil

• 1 based in Spain

• 17 based in the United States (38.5%)

Evolution of Salesforce at Samsara

The approach taken by MongoDB is far more common for Enterprise orgs, particularly those in SaaS. And it seems that Samsara is finally shifting their strategy in this direction.

In total, we see 7 open positions on their Salesforce team:

• Director of GTM Systems (Remote based in the U.S.)

• 7 Roles based in India

And it's not simply that they are moving Salesforce Development offshore, which is commonly the first step.

The open positions cover a range of disciplines, including Developers, Product Managers, and Business Systems Leads.

This signals that, in addition to moving some of the core build capabilities to India, the team members driving underlying Business Systems strategy will also start to shift outside the U.S.

It's a trend we expect to accelerate across every single organization, from Startup to Enterprise. While some companies are transitioning back to in-person work, the vast majority are still hiring fully remote Salesforce teams - and it doesn't take long for this scenario to play out:

1. Build fully remote Salesforce teams (U.S. Only)

2. Establish the necessary processes & structure to support remote work

3. Become aware of the talent quality available in LATAM, India etc.

4. Model the cost savings associated with moving roles to these regions

5. Begin hiring the majority of the Salesforce team remotely (non U.S.)

Helping companies navigating this transition is a core focus at FoundHQ, working to re-design Salesforce Org Structures to support international hiring, identifying the correct regional distribution of hires, and connecting companies with a network of 8,000+ Salesforce Contractors globally.

Our team is available to talk through the scenario and explore how this model would work at organizations of any size.