Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

Cloud Daddy:

Congrats for not rolling over and wimping out. You stood your ground!

Sales leadership was already gutted....that's why Sales Force has such good management HAHAH

So a few thoughts:

1) You are missing some of the work that sales does. I was up until 8pm last night to get a temporary billing hold removed for a customer so I could generate an OD. Yesterday, I Was up until 9pm waiting on approvals for DAS. There's a lot of sh– like this that sales does. Yes, it's not high skill work, but it is very stressful to make stuff happen internally to get deals over the finish line.

2) Getting these initial meetings is harder than you think. Prospecting f—ing s—s. while CPRs should be selling during meetings, please realize getting these at-bats specifically at ORACLE is hard. People dont like to meet with Oracle.

3) Yes, our sales culture needs to be readjusted. We used to be like AWS/SFDC– Market leaders where we were the best in a market. To lose a deal at AWS/SFDC, you reallly need to be outexecuted. To lose a deal at ORacle 10 years ago, we really needed to be out-executed. As a result, the aggresive "you don't need to know product bc ORACLE RULES" sales style does not work anymore. I do agree that sales people, at large, are not enabled sufficiently and that leadership is very detached from the front lines. As an example, BDCs (lead gen– the cold call kids that get meetings all day for field sellers), in cloud tech were once split into being ATP, ADW, and OCI BDCs all aligned to the saem accounts. SO you would have 3 BDCs all calling into the same company to talk to the same DBAs/Infrastructure leads to talk about ADW or ATP or OCI. A second example is leadership pushing APEX. BDCs have had several campaigns to push APEX. This has resulted in us engaging customers about recreating complex saas in APEX to lower their costs. Yikes.

Tl;dr: On points 1 and 2, please realize that there's a lot of stuff that salespeople do that just stinks. There's a lot of admin work, forcing things to happen, and prospsecting is very hard. I suggest you take a swing at it as pre-sales folks are strong Cloud IaaS/PaaS sellers in my experience (as long as you are not awkward), and that may give you a higher pay salary as well as a new perspective on the value that sales people add. On point 3, I do agree with you, overall. I was a cloud seller hired from college and had to self-teach myself to learn product as in training it was not emphasized. We need a culture shift– better training, gut the sales leadership of "Old" Oracle, and hire sales leaders from AWS and GCP instead of keeping deadweight leadership that only know the "oracle way" around. We need new ideas, new people, and a new approach to customer engagement

Having worked there and now being at a competitor....no you can’t say it’s the same ‘just strip the company name’. Google, aws and others VALUE their technical sa’s because they realize that there’s no canned product to sell it HAS to be architected for the customer. At Oracle it’s the Sales guys that are valued. I would point to aws’s market share, earning and the growth of any of those other vendors if you’re not sure who’s on the right side of that argument.

Yet another reason why Oracle is a sh–ty company to work for. I expect that it is not nearly as bad at other companies.

You could strip the company name and this post could be from an SE/SA at many of the large solutions providers.
If you want a bigger piece of the pie, on those huge multi-year deals, then you're simply on the wrong team. It has always been that way. (Regardless of race/gender) Not saying it's right. Just what it is. The more SE's and SA's learn about a product, and the more churn there is in the sales org, the more unbalanced it seems to become over time. Solutions simply knows the product better.

You still need someone to bring customers in to those solutions. I've been on both sides. Building and maintaining customer relationships and trust also takes a particular set of skills and not everyone is cut out for it. I certainly would never want to do it again.

If you're really unhappy with it, either find your way into sales, or find a position where your customers are all internal, and you'll never have to feel that way again.