Company: Oracle
Date: 2021-04-07
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Oracle is an accounting-focused company, not a sales focused comany
Pros: Lots of spots to hide out and collect a base. If your idea of "sales" is "Audit Bargain Close" (google it) and you enjoy parsing through contracts to move the customer spend from one bucket to another, then this is the place for you.

Upward mobility because of high turnover.

You'll also get a big pay bump when you leave.
Cons: Go-to-market is terrible. Over half of reps won't even get to 10% of their number. 90% won't even get to 75% of their number. The outliers who hit their number generally do so when an existing customer naturally expands and the "Audit Bargain Close" process "works". This low attainment is despite the org itself hitting it's number most quarters. Which, mathematically, means that quotas are over-assigned by 4-6x most years. The solution year after year isn't that Oracle's GTM needs to change, it's that they must have hundreds of bad sales reps, thus the high "warm body" churn rates. 

Further disincentives to collaborate, if there is a co-prime, you are cut off at a certain threshold. In other words, you don't want to work a deal "too big" or it will get taken away. This leads to poor communication and confusion of the prospect/customer. 

Churn and burn culture with a warm body in place. Oracle treats sales as a cost, not an investment. No incentive to cross sell or collaborate with your co-workers. This leads to a high loss rate to competitors who sell strategically. It also leads to a dishonest work environment in terms of deal collaboration. Close rate is around 10% mind you. 

Oracle rewards Audit Bargain Close and moving a customers spend from one bucket to another and neglects any kind of incentive to find genuine new revenue.

Vast majority of sales managers and even VPs have never sold genuine net new revenue, but got to where they are by the same Audit Bargain Close methodology, reading Oracle contracts to exploit the comp plan, or have managed KPI-based sales "support orgs" and somehow moved into managing sales. Thus, they have no real ideas of how to find new revenue. Oracle's revenue hasn't grown in 8 years, so obviously no one is actually selling genuine net new revenue. High customer churn because Oracle would rather pay audit jockeys to screw over customers than hire enough customer success managers.



TL;DR, is this the kind of company you want to "sell" for?

Oracle's revenue hasn't grown in 8 years, yet EPS has.  High churn and low sales payouts (due to most reps not even remotely getting to their targets despite the org number as a whole being 100%+).

Oracle has been sued multiple times for "Audit Bargain Close" sales tactics.  This leads to high customer churn because Oracle doesn't understand that modern technology isn't as monolithic or hard to remove as it was in the 90s.  

There is an entire industry dedicated to servicing Oracle customers and protecting them from over usage and being audited.

This is not a sales company, it is a legal/accounting company.  It's a shame because the technology itself is world class.