Company: Oracle
Date: 2017-03-21
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Application Sales Manager
Pros: 1. Autonomy in day to day management of my efforts
2. Very good benefits
3. Comprehensive product portfolio
4. Selling at Oracle is a game of 3d chess with multiple players and different interests.  You need to be good at strategy and have a very thick skin.
5. Lots of opportunities to move around within ORacle if you know how to manage it
Cons: 1. Very political internally.  So many pillars competing for budget dollars often had different teams working against eachother with the customer often the victim
2. Quarter to quarter life in sales.  No overt pressure to do the wrong thing for a customer but tons of pressure to make your number.  Reasonable but depending on patch, it can be an impossible challenge and the sales team is set up to churn not nurture.  A lot depends on your manager and product pillar which changed a lot while I was there over 4 years.
3. High pressure.  There is a lot of responsibility on the sales guy back
4. For me, the negatives were stressful but also sickeningly  fun at some level.  Not sure how to really explain that.  If you have a thick skin and sometimes enjoy the friction, it can be fun to manage this stuff.
5. In 2015, culture and focus at Oracle began to shift with major changes in product strategy which totally emphasized the cloud Saas Apps.  While I agree with the long-term goal, the implementation in the sales team, especially BI where we had a fading product, made survival difficult in most pillars.  Huge turnover and incentive programs that removed a lot of the ways we were successful in the past. 
6.  Most of my customers hated Oracle and dealing with us.