Company: Oracle
Date: 2016-06-15
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Oracle Direct Mpls - the Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Pros: -Industry experience agnostic - they will train quota achieving sales people without IT, tech, software experience.
-Great sales training curriculum - both internal and external trainers
-The earning potential for no travel, 40 hours or less per week
-Great benefits  
-Great brand - opens a lot of doors
-Deep technology stack, there is not a single tool you do not have in your toolbox of solutions
Cons: -When you receive your offer letter you are not told what product or territory you will be covering.  Not all patches are created the same and so simply by luck of the draw you can be off to a great start or sunk before you've made a single call.
-Division of 'credit quota' between Oracle Direct (ASR's - inside sales) and Oracle Applications Sales Managers (ASM's - outside sales) creates division and challenges effective team-building ethos. 
-You truly are a grain of sand on the beach of Oracle's sales department.  Your direct manager may care about you and genuinely have your best interests at heart, but all empathy stops there as the upper echelon of sales management are driven by quantifiable data alone.  
-As an inside sales rep you do not control your own destiny in large part.  You may find a deal, start running it in the early innings but rarely will you not be levered to your ASM being competent to close the sale in the later innings.  Not all ASM's are equal and some are far superior than others.  If you are unlucky to be assigned to an average or below ASM that can and will most likely will directly impact your ability to make money.  
-3 years of successful quota achievement and base salary was never increased.  This role is truly a 'stepping stone' with a shortish shelf life; 3-5 years tops unless you have limited ambitions.   
-Unethical pressures to 'persuade' customers to buy a Cloud/SaaS solution even though it may not help their organization.  Regularly would sell sell Cloud modules on a 12 month contract simply so I could negotiate a steeper discount on their on-premise license purchase.  
-The Ugly as teased in the title - REMAPPING.  You have '0' control over your patch/territory and every 4th quarter they go through major changes in account ownership.  Rarely do these changes leave you in a better situation than you were in the previous year. 
-