Where to start, there are a lot of them:
- First of all Oracle is a HUGE micromanager: From team syncs every morning, to call & e-mail tracking, and forced daily call blitz's they leave no stone unturned. Oracle is the only organization that I've ever worked at where it is standard practice for managers to ask you open your Outlook and check your sent e-mails.
- Your calendar isn't yours: This goes along with the micromanagement aspects of Oracle. In any given week, you can count on a "minimum" of five hours of mandatory training.
- Horrible Account Management Practices: In Oracle's Enterprise practice, there could be more than 80+ different reps (some selling the same products as you) calling into the same account. This creates in-fighting between teams for revenue dollars and account attention. Creating massive customer service issues, lost deals, and constantly fighting internal teams.
- Horrible Commission Practice: First, They make you sign a 80+ page T&C's document, that basically says that they can do whatever they want with your commission and there is nothing you can do about it. Then they play games with commissions and commission amounts. Googling "Oracle Commissions Lawsuit" will pull up numerous examples.
- Commission is either really good or really bad, there is no middle ground: Typically two or three reps on any given team are knocking the cover off the ball and the rest are barely making ends meet. Oracle unlike any place I've ever worked, talent does not equal success. Accounts are bunched up into "Patches". some of these Patches are great accounts with solid purchase histories; others are full of accounts that been audited several times, tired of the 80+ reps spamming them, or do not standardize on Oracle at all. If you are part of the Cloud team, you can count on almost no commission. In Oracle's Enterprise team alone, there has been a 60 - 70% rep and management turn-over in fiscal 2017 because of this.
- Needlessly Complex Systems: Oracle has a ridiculous amount of systems that are needed to do your "daily" job. Twenty different applications is an understatement here. Furthermore, the process to actually receive deal approvals, drafted contracts, and bookings deals; is similar to getting a law passed by today's congress. Reps can spend days on end working with deal management for approvals. It recently took me three weeks to get an approval on one item.
- Your just a number: Regardless of what they say, you are just a number. The "Class Of" program was designed to replace reps as they leave so that there is no lack of a "butt" in a seat. Furthermore, Oracle also has adopted an +1 position; where the sole role of that person is to sit and wait to replace someone on their team the minute they leave. And yes the turn over is that high, again this year alone in 10 months my division has lost somewhere around 70 - 80% of the staff.
- Lack of stability: In my just over a year with Oracle, I've had four different managers, two different teams. two different account sets, two different product sets, and three different commission plans due to constant restructuring and turn over.
- Moving around departments is not as easy as they say: You pick a role, you're pretty much stuck at that role for 18 months at a minimum most likely longer.
- Swim-Lanes: Oracle has a cap on commissions called "Swim-Lanes" for Inside sales (OD), this cap could be anywhere from $100,000 - $200,000 on bookings (not commission)... Meaning if you find a deal that grows beyond that Swim-Lane number, you receive little to no commission beyond it. This also create an issue with the field, because if they "find" a deal before you that grows beyond that "Swim-Lane" number they receive credit for the entire deal and you get "nothing".
- Field vs Inside (OD): This also creates another issue, Field over rules OD almost every time. So, regardless if you really "find" a deal first, they can and will steal it and you will have little to no retaliation to keep that deal. Even if you do all the proper things "management" tells you to do, they are typically too new or bogged down with other work to really help fight for that revenue.
- New Year Shake Up: Every Fiscal New Year (June), you are almost 100% guaranteed to receive completely new set of accounts, losing all the progress you've made with your "Enterprise" accounts throughout the year. This also means, you lose any deals that might push into the new year as well. So, if you've worked 10 months on a six figure deal and it pushes into the new year, it was all for nothing. Sure, they have approvals to "hold" these deals but its never guaranteed, its a very complex process, and good luck getting commission.
Now there is a caveat to what I've written above. My experience was limited to Oracle's Enterprise Team and some bullets relate only to that department but a lot falls true to Oracle as a whole... Quite honestly, Oracle was the worst overall experience I've ever had in my professional career and I wouldn't recommend to anyone! Except if you are new to sales; with all their training and micromanagement, they will give you a great base of knowledge to start your career.
