Company: Oracle
Date: 2017-09-26
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

A tough stepping stone
Pros: - 8 to 4.30 shifts
- Subsidized canteen
- Laid-back atmosphere; all BDCs are in the same boat so eventually we unite against the perpetual process nonsense going on here.
- Some nice career opportunities if you have a nice product/country mix

In short, go there and you'll appreciate your future employers more. Oracle will teach you resourcefulness but not empathy or logic. This experience will be useful in the future and I recommend everyone to stay there for a few quarters as a tough life lesson; it still is a great springboard for better opportunities. If you make it through, you'll be a better sales than most. See cons and details below.
Cons: - The training provided is pure nonsense - they teach you how to prospect 101 with outbound and outdated salesy methods, no training at all on the product you'll be working on. Expect to be assigned to a product randomly, no matter your degree or experience. I still don't know why to this date why Oracle has such a good reputation when it comes to sales training in Dublin.
- No quality lead whatsoever - the leads you get as a BDC are just 1000% garbage, full of duplicates, subsidiaries you can't prospect because the account manager saves it for him/her, most often you'll just get a name with outdated information, no email, no number etc. Expect to do 100% outbound prospection, from googling the front desk number of a company and ask for someone you'll find on LinkedIn.
- Their CRM is unusable, slow and buggy but they force you to use it
- The admin workload is too heavy - you'll literally spent 80% of your time negotiating internally for any opportunity you find. No time to prospect correctly.
- Account managers you'll be working for most probably will be reluctant to convert anything to avoid putting themselves on the map.
- Targets are the same for everyone no matter the product / country / company size / amount of "leads" you're given, leading to huge discrepancies and some hard workers unable to meet targets
- Targets keep increasing as soon as the management see they're reached - expect less than 50% will reach target on average
- Processes keep changing on a month basis, could make sense from a management point of view but none from a front-liner one, making any confirmed opportunity a nightmare to log in the system
- Outdated building and workplace, conference rooms are too small for teams
- Some managers are great, most probably 20% of them. The rest just milks money managing spreadsheets and waiting for the next quarter to announce the target increase.
- Senior management is unseen and anyway not interacting or engaging with BDCs at all.
- No company culture
- Micromanagement