Company: Oracle
Date: 2014-06-09
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Current employee - sales
Pros: Solution integration - the Red Stack
Cons: I have never been a part of a more dysfunctional, non collaborative organization in my 20+ years in IT sales.  Turnover is extremely high - 7 of 10 reps on my team have left the company in the past 15 months, only 2 of the 10 hit quota (in each of the last 3 fiscal years). There is no "team" i.e. working together or collaborating, sharing institutional insights.  The inside sales team has their own quota and is not structured to work with the field reps.  When I climbed on board I asked my inside sales guy for a list of our accounts and he sent the names of the accounts.  When asked about contact info I was told - you're on your own (I did get the info but it took a week of internal bickering). Other account managers who represent other solutions such as security, database, middleware, webcenter... are your competitors as much as other vendors are - absolutely amazing!!  They work against you in an account to get the customer money off the table for their solution before you can close your deal.  The CRM tool contains no customer information, no history, no nothing.  And it took almost 3 months for me to gain access to what information there was because access has to be approved by the President's office (Mark Hurd’s office - no kidding!!!) Getting things accomplished is complexity to the extreme - the tools used for pricing and other essentials are absolutely not intuitive, there are several different tools needed to accomplish a single pricing request/approval and other sales folks won't easily help (because it doesn’t  benefit them financially).  Which goes back to the beginning - there is no onboarding beyond the compliance stuff online so, integrating and succeeding is more difficult.  Solution training does not exist.  One more thought which absolutely blew me out of my socks - customers don't like us.  They buy because the solutions integrate easily and it makes their lives a bit less painful then having multiple vendors but Oracle leverages that with arrogance. I have followed reps who have left into their former accounts and in first meetings I have been given an earful.  It is hard to earn customer trust because other reps are operating with an agenda that is in their best interest - not necessarily the customer's.  I was with one rep (shortly before he left) who gave the customer a quote for $500K and they went nuts – he had not bothered to discuss the solution and help them understand it's value to their environment and the ROI.  Would I recommend Oracle?  Absolutely not