Samantha Swart: Full Ownership in Sales and Sport

How Sanofi's Area Business Manager role let a three-time lacrosse champion pursue two ambitions at once

Sanofi's Area Business Manager roles reward autonomy and grit, and the company is hiring for them at pace this year. Philadelphia-based Samantha Swart swapped a shared sales territory at a medical device company for full ownership, and a role built to accommodate a home Olympics bid.

Samantha Swart, a 27-year-old Area Business Manager (ABM) covering South Jersey for Sanofi Vaccines, owns her book of business outright. She is the sole person accountable for the physician relationships and health systems in her 100-mile patch, orchestrating the medical science liaisons, market access specialists and strategic account managers who touch the same accounts.

The role is less like a typical sales job and more like running an independent business, and Sanofi is hiring for ABMs at pace this year. Off the clock, Samantha is a three-time lacrosse world champion chasing a childhood dream: representing the United States at lacrosse's Olympic debut, at the Los Angeles Games in 2028.

Owning the business – not just the territory

Samantha left medical device sales for Sanofi in May 2025. In her last job, she shared one territory with four colleagues, which made it hard to achieve the outcomes she wanted when the team wasn't pulling the same way. "I believe you're a product of your environment," she says, "and as an ABM at Sanofi, you get to build that environment yourself."

When rivals move into her territory, she treats it as fuel rather than pressure, a mindset she credits to her manager, Jason Maier, Sanofi's Area Business Director. Sanofi backs that appetite for ownership with real incentives: four straight years of Circle of Excellence, the company's top sales distinction, earns perks that enable her to do her job to the best of her ability.

Sanofi's mission is to protect roughly half a billion people a year through its vaccines, spanning routine childhood immunizations to newer mRNA research and the AI tools now speeding up how vaccines get developed. For Samantha, that mission stopped being abstract the week she joined Sanofi: her sister Gabrielle, a single parent, gave birth to a daughter, Harper, that same week. Harper was given Sanofi's antibody against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), in the Pennsylvania hospital where she was born, the exact product Samantha sells. "It was such a full-circle moment," she says. "Something I sell became something my own niece received."

Built around a full life

The role is remote-based, with a hybrid selling model that mixes face-to-face physician visits with virtual outreach. Samantha has built her week around it: five or six visits fill her days, then emails and video catch-ups fill the drive home, freeing her evenings and weekends for training. "I basically live in the car," she says, "but it works: Sanofi in the field, emails on the road, then lacrosse."

That flexibility is what makes her Olympic ambition realistic. Samantha's already proven herself on the international stage: a silver medal at the 2022 World Games in China, a box lacrosse world title in Utica in 2024. She knows what elite competition demands—and Sanofi's model lets her pursue it.

A career that keeps opening up

Samantha's move to Sanofi was itself a leap of faith. At her previous company, she was in the operating room every day from 4am to 10pm. "It wasn't sustainable if I wanted to chase my sporting dreams," she says. Her interview with Jason settled it: she told him about lacrosse and the schedule it demanded, and he responded immediately: "Let's do it."

That support has extended into how the team operates day to day. Jason brings Sanofi's seven-person Mid-Atlantic ABM team together every Tuesday, comparing notes across Delaware, North Jersey, South Jersey, and Maryland. "We hear what's going on in other people's territories and bounce ideas off each other," Samantha says. He also told her, from day one, to bring her full personality to the job rather than tone it down, advice she now passes on herself. "Sanofi looks for people who can make it on their own," she says. "Be a sponge. Absorb everything around you."

Her manager often repeats one of Sanofi's mottos: "Chase the miracles of science." For Samantha, the phrase covers both halves of her life. "At work, I'm chasing the miracles of science to protect my niece." She adds: "On the field, I'm chasing the miracle of getting to LA."