The Fighting Chair
WMMM #071 - This week I share a personal experience I’ve never revealed.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter July 27, 2024 7 min read
Background
That year, Oracle hired me and 6,000 others to increase its global workforce by more than 30% to 25,000 employees.
Oracle was a growth company.
My initial role was Product Sales Manager.
I was responsible for a team of sales reps selling developer tools to enterprise companies.
The sales reps on my team were called Product Sales Representatives (PSRs.)
The Oracle Database had its own PSRs that reported to PSMs like me.
The Branch and Regional Sales Managers were responsible for all of Oracle's products, and their reps were called Account Managers.
They were really responsible for managing each account versus selling Oracle's product (s).
The Account Managers "owned" the accounts and led the deals.
The PSRs and PSMs helped the Account Manager by being experts in their particular software industry segment.
For example, the ideal Tools PSR would be an expert in the software development segment of the industry and how Oracle's dev tools differentiated themselves.
Backpack
Recalling the deep-sea fishing analogy, don't be fooled by the picture of the trophy fish with a dozen smiling faces patting one another on the back.
There is only one "fighting chair" on that boat.
A fighting chair is a special seat in the cockpit of sport-fishing boats.
They are highly engineered to provide safety and comfort to people reeling in large gamefish such as swordfish, tuna, sailfish, marlin, and tarpon.
Landing a large gamefish, which can weigh up to 1,000 lbs, is a rigorous, physical ordeal that involves wearing a fighting belt and harnessing oneself into a fighting chair for up to 90 minutes.
That chair only has room for a single human being.
One person caught that fish.
The others were bystanders.
The same went for large deals at Oracle.
The Account Managers did the deals.
They were the ones held accountable throughout the sales cycle.
They were the ones peppered with questions on the forecast calls.
They carried the largest quota, the aggregate of all the PSR quotas assigned to that account.
The rest of us, the PSMs and PSRs, were known internally as "overlays."
Someone cleverly coined the term "Backpack," and it stuck.
Could I Be That Guy?
Oracle's sales leadership was excellent at giving recognition, especially to large deals.
There were regularly scheduled calls where the field sales force would learn about the latest wins.
Account teams were featured, and their names instantly became legendary throughout the organization.
But more importantly, sales management would routinely drop up-to-the-minute soundbites when walking the halls of our field sales offices.
The biggest deals appeared to be concentrated in two industries: banking and telecommunications.
During one of those announcements, I thought to myself:
"I know a little about telcos and banks; I'd like to be that guy someday.
I want to lead a team that does the big deals."
Be Careful What You Wish For
Self-serving?
Arrogant?
If you write about yourself and do so honestly, you often find yourself bare-naked - open to criticism.
Looking back at that moment in my career, it may have been a bit ambitious to think I could fill those shoes.
While the big deals garnered all of the glory, that's not all they captured.
With more revenue at stake, more eyes were attracted to these deals.
They appeared on the executive management dashboards.
More revenue meant more interest from the overlay sales teams, too.
They all wanted to make sure there was a line item on the order form with their product(s) on it.
With more eyes came more opinions on sales strategy.
Each overlay sales team was staffed with accomplished salespeople with their own sales management chains.
Their opinions could not and should not be merely dismissed.
It required advanced skill by the account lead to sort out those opinions contrary to their own and determine if they were helpful to Oracle and the success of the deal or if they were cloaking a self-serving agenda for that particular individual or product team.
If one cared what others thought of them, having the "lead" for these large deals was not the place to be.
Unintended Consequences
An unexpected outcome for the account teams on these large deals was turnover.
Closing such a deal earned the team recognition.
Their names became legendary across Oracle.
Because of Oracle's sales incentive compensation plan, they earned exponentially more if they closed a deal that enabled them to exceed their annual quota significantly.
That made it all the more noticeable when we looked for their names the year after their big wins.
One or two instances would not have been a cause for concern.
But it was hard to ignore what transpired.
In fact, it was strange if the account team remained employed at Oracle, especially in telco.
But why?
With a bit of investigative work, we found plausible causes.
1) Oracle was a growth company.
It established its annual sales quotas based on YoY growth objectives.
Closing a big deal earned you no relief the following year.
One was unlikely to achieve anywhere near their assigned quota in this scenario.
You don't earn your on-target earnings if you don't make quota.
If you don't make quota (at Oracle,) you don't have a job.
"Hero to Zero" affected these account teams much more severely.
2) The large enterprises, especially the telcos, were brutal negotiators.
They view contract negotiations with Oracle as a "fight."
They sent their sourcing employees to the best negotiation training.
They adopted the famous slogan, "There is no such thing as a fair fight."
With so many Oracle "eyes" on these deals, each with an opinion on strategy and ego, these telcos employed tactics that often embarrassed Oracle leadership not accustomed to this "game."
When leadership was embarrassed, they often looked for someone to blame.
The lead account team and the person in the "fighting chair" were often where the blame landed.
Not everyone in leadership positions was a veteran of these battles in the trenches.
Some had yet to experience how difficult it was to extract large sums of money from an enterprise for conceptual, intangible widgets (systems and applications software).
Although these enterprises wanted and needed our solutions, they all intentionally implemented obstacles that made spending money difficult for their employees.
The unenlightened held Pollyanna beliefs that large-scale deals between Fortune 500 companies were not "fights" of negotiation but rather celebrations of friendship forged into a business relationship consummated with feel-good lunches and cocktails.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Well-run enterprises make it extremely difficult for their teams to spend money.
And nearly every telco was well-run.
Each had a family tree that traced back to a common parent: the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T.)
AT&T was so well-run that it ascended to a monopoly status before the government broke it up in 1984.
With each telco having a common origin in AT&T, their cultures and processes were similar.
Navigating these processes required perseverance, skill, experience, and a thick skin.
Year 3 at Oracle found me leading an ERP applications sales team.
Instead of PSRs, my sales team was known as ASRs.
Oracle had over-hired for application sales coverage in anticipation of the Year 2000 date change phenomenon.
As 2000 approached, Oracle chose to reconfigure its sales force.
I could continue as a PSM in the BI/Analytics space or take on a Regional Manager role.
Duh?
Regional Manager is the job I had wanted.
This was my chance.
There was just one catch.
The job was in the telco vertical.
Yikes.
I'd have to take some of my ASRs with me and assign them to some of the telco accounts.
Since they had no history with these accounts, that was not ideal.
I would also have to accept some transfers from other parts of Oracle who had no experience with these accounts either.
Were there any reps left who had called on their account before?
Yes.
A single salesperson was left from the sales region that had just experienced 99% turnover from the prior year.
Many accounts were "sold out" for the next couple of years.
I would be inheriting the scenario I described earlier.
But, our team would represent all of Oracle's products.
We would be the leads on every account.
We'd have account ownership and all that comes with that.
Time to put up or shut up.
I took the RM role in telco.
From: What Had I Gotten Myself Into?
It had taken nearly four years, but I had made it to Regional Manager.
Some may have said I got the role because no one else wanted it.
SBC was sold out for three years, and the negotiations were brutal.
It resolved a dispute by SBC that the Oracle Database did not perform as advertised ("write once, run anywhere") when running on UNIX servers made by Data General.
As a result, no one from that former SBC account team remained employed by Oracle.
Qwest and GTE were on our account list, and neither was a picnic.
Nor was Level 3 or Century Telephone.
To: The Best Thing That Could Have Happened For Me
Starting with the first line manager role in the telco vertical, I had a 16-year run leading sales teams that were the account leads for Oracle in the largest accounts - the Enterprise.
We did some of the largest deals in the largest accounts.
We carried the largest quotas.
(Comparing the BI/Analytics path to the path I chose, the first ten years would have been better for me financially had I chosen BI/Analytics.)
We learned how to navigate Enterprise sales:
How they bought
How to get them done within Oracle.
We learned how to negotiate with these enterprises, especially the telcos and banks.
We learned how they negotiated.
There were lots of eyes on our deals.
We learned how to communicate what was happening to Oracle leadership in a manner they could consume and understand.
We learned how to minimize ill will.
We learned to shield them from how the sausage was made.
We learned how to set expectations.
We learned how to deliver desired outcomes under extreme pressure.
We were accountable for our wins and our losses.
(We won more than we lost.)
We learned how to teach and coach others to do what we were doing.
WE SPENT HUNDREDS OF HOURS IN THE FIGHTING CHAIR.
It wasn't the easiest path.
It wasn't the best path for optimizing income and continued employment.
We were forced to improve or face failure.
We were forced to improvise to survive.
It's not for everyone.
It was the road less traveled.
It was fulfilling.
It was thrilling.
Lessons Learned
1) Take the tough assignments.
2) Get comfortable being uncomfortable.
3) Only one person is strapped into the fighting chair.
4) There is no such thing as a fair fight.
Thank you for reading.
Jeff
When you think “sales leader,” I hope you think of me.
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