Welcome to Inside the Ohana!

Sarah Patterson, CMO of Samsara, shares valuable lessons learned at Salesforce which lead her to achieve a career goal: taking a company public as CMO. Learn about the challenges Sarah faced and overcame while part of the Ohana, and how these experiences set Sarah up to lead marketing at a company with a $12B valuation, and much more.

Guest Bio - Sarah Patterson is the CMO of Samsara, overseeing go-to-market strategy, brand building and lead generation in support of Samsara’s strategic plan. Prior to Samsara, Sarah spent more than 12 years at Salesforce, most recently serving as executive vice president of CRM and cross-product marketing where she was responsible for the marketing for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, and also ran a cross-product marketing team that led C-Suite solution marketing, product naming, release marketing and launch marketing. Sarah has run marketing for Service Cloud since 2013, helping to scale the business into Salesforce’s largest product line. In 2020, she also led the launch of Salesforce’s Work.com solution and Vaccine Cloud. Through her tenure at Salesforce, she has run EMEA product marketing team, industries marketing and SMB product marketing.

“Through my time at Salesforce, I had been prepping... What type of opportunity and challenge do I want to tackle next? I always tell this to folks: look for the job descriptions of the job you want to have next in 4-5 years down the road, and think through what are the skills that you need to add to your tool belt. That's what I was doing. I was growing all of the skills to be a well-rounded marketer.” Sarah Patterson

Episode Timestamps:

*(1:52) - Meet Kris Lande, SVP Trailhead Marketing & Community 

*(3:11) - What it means to be an accidental admin

*(4:17) - Kris’ Salesforce journey begins

*(9:31)  - Becoming apart of the Ohana 

*(12:50) - What it means to be a Trailblazer 

*(12:50) - Lessons learned on the path to Trailhead

*(14:84) - Best practices for writing articles and blog posts
*(15:30) - Kris’ favorite Ohana moment
*(21:22) - What’s next for the Trailhead Community 

*(28:55) - Kris’ favorite Salesforce persona 

*(33:11) - Advice for aspiring marketing leaders of community