Enjoy Uber while they last

Oracle has one the most aggressive salesforces, they could sell combs to bald men. As long as they convince the non technical CXO teams thats all they need.

I attended an Oracle sales conference once (for the canapes, very good) and happened to be in the auditorium for one of the speakers.

There were lasers.

There was dry ice.

Vanessa Mae was playing the electric violin.

A director on stage bellowed we will bring $competitor TO THEIR KNEES!

Everyone was on their feet cheering, I've been to metal gigs that were less intense. Oracle takes sales very, very seriously.

The gotcha in all of this is that the brutal competition in the cloud means that there isn't the profit margin to pay for all of this glitz anymore in the business.

I don't doubt this lavish event paid for itself many, many times over in terms of how pumped up the sales people were to hit their numbers that year

Granted. It's just that to my ears, Larry Ellison's announcement scores the wrong check marks:

bluster: check hubris: check realism: nope

I would have expected that someone who takes marketing very, very seriously tries to sound realistic, not overoptimistic or full of that which makes plants grow.

Saying "oracle's database rocks" and asking for a stiff price has a certain touch of realism. I can see how a good salesforce can do that with success. My question is along the lines of: Can a good salesforce use bluster as a main tool to sell something shitty, such as oracle's IaaS offering? How does that sales process work?

>Can a good salesforce use bluster as a main tool to sell something shitty, such as oracle's IaaS offering? How does that sales process work?

Well, yes, obviously and consistently. The sales process starts on the golf course/opera/football private box

Enterprise sales is a menagerie of sharks. Some are Makos, some are threshers, but the best are Tiger and Great White. We were planning a forklift upgrade of our enterprise backup system; a relatively boring exercise. The team responsible for coming up with a recommendation evaluated the four major candidates, made a proposal, and quickly watched the most expensive and least suitable candidate dominate their rivals. The other team stood no chance. The team tried to influence the purchase with the decisionmakers, but it fell on deaf ears. The tech wasn't very impressive, but the sales team made Alec Baldwin in GlenGarry, Glen Ross look like an amateur.