- Work/Life balance. Not only is the expectation to be in the office 5 days a week , but 9 hours is just not enough to be successful there. Early mornings (especially if you are working the east cost with a 6am start) and late nights. Come prepared to completely throw yourself at this job.
- Immaturity: From the IC level to management. This is not uncommon in silicon valley tech sales, but feels especially pervasive here. As an AE, your AE counterpart in the seat next to you could be as young as 23. You will be coached and given council on the same template as that co worker (regardless of your age or how much experience you carry going into the role). Pipeline looking soft? More dials. Deal stuck in middle of funnel? Just bring in your mid 20 year old manager to hammer discounting incentives. Any tenured rep coming into Verkada as a Mid Market rep will get annoyed with this dynamic very quickly.
- Territory equality: Verkada has grown their salesforce 3-4x over the past couple years. With growth comes territory splits. As I mentioned, Verkada is unique in having tremendous success in a land expand sales strategy. So, when territory's are split, current customers should be accounted in that right? Nope. In the most backwards logic I witnessed at Verkada, that was only about 15% of the decision when splitting territories. That perpetuates huge inequalities amongst reps. You could have one of those fresh out of SDR bootcamp reps, take over a territory with a built out customer base, while you still work to grow your own book of business. The "territory lottery" term often cited on many of these reviews are true. There is no equality in sales territories at Verkada, so you just have to hope you are one of those reps that get a good territory when you join.
- Just as there are outliers in reviews on Glassdoor, there are outliers for performance. The 200%+ to plan stories recruiters will sell you are not the norm. For every 200%+ rep there are <50% reps. Because of the con mentioned above, those distributions are not often based on merit. If you are joining, plan on making your OTE at best case for budgeting purposes.
- You are valued on your sales performance. While this again is not unique to Verkada, you can quickly feel undervalued and inadequate if you underperform 1 quarter. The attachment to revenue and self worth this company has will become very hard to shake, which could have implications even in your life outside of work. If you join Verkada, make sure to recognize that dynamic early on and refuse to buy into it, for the sake of your own mental health.
- Meaningless equity now. Your equity package SHOULD NOT be a needle mover for you in considering Verkada as a MM Sales Rep. Your equity package as a sales rep, as an example, will be about 1/30 to that of an entry level engineer. If you want to see what your equity package is worth, take your 1 year equity cliff amount and multiply it by the current stock price of a similar style publicly traded company like Samsara. That will give you a real idea of your equity's worth.