Welcome to “The Show” - The Amazon Story
WMMM #055 - This week, I share one of the classics, a favorite memory.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter February 24, 2024 14 min read
It was February 2004, a leap year with an extra day in the month just like this month.
Twelve months earlier, I had been assigned a new role at Oracle.
A reorganization had eliminated the industry vertical sales organizations established by Ray Lane.
The Communications vertical contained accounts segmented as landline, cable, wireless, long-distance, network equipment manufacturers, fiber optic networking, and Points-of-Presence providers.
The simultaneous dot.com bubble burst with the telco meltdown had caused the organization that once had a sales management team of eighteen (18) people to shrink to one (1), me.
Tech Tech Tech
I got a call one morning from a guy named Tony.
He begins the conversation with:
"Relax, Jeff. You are highly thought of and have been slotted to lead a team in a new org called Enterprise Accounts.
We are separating Applications and Technology.
We have Tech, and you are working for me.
Are you okay with that?"
Me: "Do I have another option?"
Tony: "You always have options, Jeff. Look, we don't know one another, but I ran Financial Services for Jay. You were in Telco; in my opinion, Telcos and Banks are the largest and most challenging accounts. If you succeed in either of those verticals, you'll crush it in the rest.
Do you know Matt? He is running Applications, and I think he'd find a spot for you in a heartbeat.
But the Company slotted you here, with me, in Tech."
Me: "Sure, I know Matt well. He's excellent.
But I'm in, Tony. All in.
What do you need me to do?"
Tony: "I'm assigning you a team and 100 accounts. Think of it as one-fifth of the Fortune 500.
You are keeping a number of your Telecom accounts.
The geography spans from Houston to Seattle.
Just deliver the number.
Do what you did in Telecom with the retail and energy accounts you are picking up.
And use me. I'm here to help."
And that was that.
Donny, Dickie, Gregg, Doug, and Chris were chosen as my peers and assigned the remaining 400 accounts. The six of us would run the Fortune 500 for Tony for the next ten years, an unthinkable length of tenure at Oracle in 2003.
Tony and Matt proved to be outstanding choices as they would lead Tech and Applications, respectively, on a 10-year run of unprecedented growth.
Old, New, Borrowed, Blue
My new team was:
something old (Comms vertical veterans),
something new (we had open headcount),
something borrowed (we had new faces on our pre-sales and inside sales teams),
something blue (we had a few who, despite our best intentions, chose not to embrace the changes.)
Something Borrowed
Jack was the manager of the pre-sales technical talent mapped to my new team.
On our introductory call, we learned that we both had experience selling the Express family of products that Oracle acquired from IRI Software in 1995.
Jack had worked for IRI, and my first assignment as an Oracle employee was leading an Oracle sales team formed with former IRI employees.
Jack was famous for being the IRI employee to sit down with then Oracle CFO Jeff Henley to demonstrate a forecasting and budgeting application written with the multidimensional database Express.
As rumor had it, Mr. Henley was so impressed that he recommended to Mr. Ellison that Oracle acquire the technology from IRI.
The Express team I led back in 1996 distinguished itself by calling on predominantly CFO and Finance departments rather than the IT departments that most of the rest of Oracle called on.
Jack and I now found ourselves seven years later as partners, leading teams selling Tech to enterprise accounts.
We were both planning road trips to meet our new teams, so we decided to coordinate.
On our first trip, we rendezvoused in Seattle.
Jack planned to meet up with Phill and Maxina.
I would connect with my telecom veteran Steve, covering Voicestream, which had been renamed T-Mobile the prior year.
I also wanted to interview a candidate for my open PacNW territory while I was up there.
Something New
Recruiting top salespeople to leave their current roles and join your team is challenging at any company.
The role's location set the bar higher in this particular situation.
Seattle, are you kidding?
That's a reasonable response.
Surely we can find someone at Microsoft who wants a new opportunity.
Again, that doesn't sound irrational.
But, for whatever reason, it simply was not that easy.
Jack and I soon learned that it wasn't a coincidence that we both had open headcount.
Could it have been that if you lived in Seattle and were employed by Microsoft, you never wanted to leave?
Could it have been that Microsoft owned the system software market for enterprises in that area?
What if we shift the perspective and then ask different questions?
Enterprise software has to handle hundreds of thousands of internal users simultaneously from a single instance.
Enterprise software needs to support hundreds of millions of external users simultaneously.
Enterprise software must be able to manage and process petabytes of data.
Enterprise software must run 24 hours, seven days a week for 52 weeks.
Enterprise software needs to be carrier-grade and impenetrable by outside threats.
The people you had to influence in an enterprise sales cycle had very complex problems on their minds.
In 2003, Oracle sold enterprise software to enterprises, and Microsoft sold desktop and departmental software to enterprises.
Could it have been that selling Oracle to enterprises differed significantly from selling Microsoft?
Could it have been that the Oracle sales culture was unique, unlike Microsoft's?
Answered honestly and backed with data, these questions explain the open headcount.
Finding the right sales talent for the Oracle role in Seattle in 2003 was difficult.
Show Me The Money
At Oracle, we certainly had our share of unique obstacles not found anywhere else.
Money wasn't one of them.
My office was on the 11th floor of the Xerox Tower in the Las Colinas office park of Irving, TX, for the first ten years of my Oracle career.
This dates me. Does anyone have an "office" anymore?
In each of those ten years, at least one salesperson on my floor made $1m selling for Oracle.
This was when OTE for a software salesperson was under $200k.
Only 40 sales cubicles were on that 11th floor in any of those ten years.
So, for a salesperson employed by Oracle and working on my floor in Las Colinas, every year that you came to work from 1996-2006, you had a 1 in 40 chance of making over 5X your expected annual earnings.
I got pretty good at telling that story to those I was recruiting.
That story spread like wildfire through OracleDirect, our inside sales organization and internal training ground for Oracle's field sales force.
It became an infinite well of motivation to distinguish oneself with inside sales and earn a shot at "The Show."
Dain
I had identified a candidate in OracleDirect (OD) who wanted to move into a field sales role.
Inside sales meant the interaction with the account was done by phone versus field sales, which required in-person meetings with our accounts.
At Oracle, in accounts like those found in the industry verticals, OD salespeople were mapped with senior accounts reps as a team to cover the assigned territory.
This candidate had been mapped with Bob on my Comms vertical team and had crushed his numbers.
His name was Dain, and he had exceeded his minimum 2-year commitment with OD.
He was a free agent eager to make a name for himself in "The Show."
The Interview
We pulled the trip to Seattle together quickly.
Having a bias for action, we let typical priorities slide to get ourselves up there as soon as possible.
One of those priorities was Dain.
He wasn't notified until Friday that I would like to meet with him in Seattle on Monday morning.
Knowing what I know now, of course he was there.
Early.
Prepared.
Enthusiastic.
He was surprised by my interview style.
I recall hearing afterward that he quietly asked others how many interviews I typically required before deciding.
But I had read his resume before the meeting and did not need to have him walk me through it like others might.
I was also familiar with the training he received from our OD org.
What was most interesting to me were the intangibles, the things a person has that aren't taught in a class.
They don't come with a certification or degree, and you can't find them on a resume.
How did Dain measure up with those things that require Zero Talent?
The questions I asked that day to help me assess Dain's intangibles may not be permitted in the sales interviews in 2024.
What a shame.
Understanding what motivates a person by having them tell you their life story is one of the best ways to identify exceptional talent.
And if I had to choose one area where I zeroed in on Dain, it was Coachable.
Specifically, how well might he receive coaching from me?
As we concluded the interview, I asked Dain if he could attend the account transition meetings later that afternoon.
He could.
He did.
And that was the beginning of Dain's field sales career with Oracle.
(Back then, I used my gut instinct on hiring salespeople a little more than I do now.
My instincts worked well, but I learned that to make it repeatable, I had to have a process backed by data.)
Oracle's Sales Culture
A famous saying about the sales culture at Oracle goes like this.
Mr. Ellison wanted a sales force of lions.
And, at feeding time, for every den of five lions, he would only throw enough meat in for three.
This culture revealed itself when the sales force was separated by the Oracle software products they could sell, creating multiple Oracle sales teams for each account.
The two heavyweights in the battle for the attention and budget of the customer were Applications and Technology.
They were the alpha males in that den of lions.
The stories of conflict and cooperation between Tech and Apps are legendary and would fill a month of these newsletters.
I introduce the topic for this week's edition to provide context for our account transition meeting.
Account Transitions
Jim was the Apps Regional Manager in Seattle, and his team was responsible for many of the accounts we inherited in the PacNW.
That afternoon, he had graciously offered his time to Jack, our teams, and me.
We met in a beautiful conference room with floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides that marked the corner of the building.
We had a spectacular view of Bellevue, WA.
Going account by account, we learned who's who in the zoo and account information not found in the account files or our CRM system.
When we reached Amazon, the conversation went something like this.
The account is sold out for Tech.
I don't know if I'd waste any time on it.
They have concurrent user licenses for the database to cover their Oracle Applications usage.
They will never need another database license.
Even if the usage of our Apps grew beyond their database license entitlement, Oracle has no way of monitoring concurrency without invoking a license audit.
Sorry to be such a downer. If I were you, I'd want to know.
Jim had no incentive to misrepresent the Tech opportunity at Amazon.
I believed he was being authentic and transparent with us.
Regardless, we didn't have a choice in the matter.
We needed to find reasons for Amazon to buy Tech from Oracle.
I later learned that Jim had unknowingly lit a fire under our team.
If they heard that they could not do something that needed to be done, they set their minds to proving otherwise.
(Oracle had received approximately $200,000 in Tech license revenue to run over $1m in Apps products at Amazon by 2003.)
Impossible is Merely the Degree of Difficulty
After the transition meetings, we readied ourselves to go out and break bread together.
A new team with new faces requires team building, and sharing a meal is an excellent place to start.
Jack was a master at selecting restaurants the team would like.
He would find places like Chantannay, Wild Ginger, and Perche No that would be mainstays for customer dinners for years.
I don't recall where we went, but Daniel's Broiler was a popular Oracle go-to, and my guess is we went there.
Located at the top of the Bellevue Hyatt, it was convenient as most of us had rooms reserved at the Hyatt.
Dain joined us for dinner, found a room, stayed overnight, and was the first one in the meeting room in the Oracle office the following day.
We had arranged to follow the account transitions with a Tech-only planning session.
When the topic of Amazon came up, I was not surprised when Phill and Jack jumped right in and began to discuss all of the possible ways we might help that company with its growth objectives.
Oracle Technology is not limited to running Oracle's HR and Financial Apps.
Dain was not fazed by the "sold out" message.
He introduced his own ideas while soaking up Jack's and Phill's.
With the right behavior - doing the right amount of the right things - coupled with the right technique, all with the right attitude (perseverance, mental toughness,) one can achieve what initially seems impossible.
The Ph.D.
A few months and dozens of sales calls later, we identified an Oracle database user outside of Amazon's IT department.
She preferred to remain under the radar - almost off the grid - and was very careful as we attempted to engage with her.
She had a doctorate.
We took extra pains to earn her trust and secured a meeting.
She said she had a data warehouse/data mart that she was building and was interested in learning more about our Partitioning product, an option for the Oracle Database.
I remember joining Dain with Rehka, a new hire of Jack's, on the sales call.
As we learned more from her through probing questions, I asked if what she had built was known as an operational data store.
She agreed that it was but wanted us to refrain from using that term, fearing it might expose her project to IT, and she wasn't ready for that yet.
The implication of the term operational data store is complexity.
Unlike data warehouses, they update the data as well as query it.
This was a real-time, external-facing application being built on the Oracle Database.
She captured user behavior and purchase history from the production e-commerce website.
Using this data, she tested the theory that there was a correlation between the browsing and buying patterns of users who bought the same products.
Her project ultimately became Amazon's now famous personalization engine.
Dain saw the potential and contacted Robert in Database Product Management.
Robert worked for Juan, and they were looking for the field to open doors for them with customers using the database in large e-commerce websites.
The goal was to help address real-world technical obstacles that could inform them of upgrades required in the database code or additional features and options to extend Oracle's leadership in this area.
Another benefit of salespeople from OD was that they had yet to be dispersed to field sales offices.
Their offices were at headquarters, very close to R&D and Product Management.
A good networker had the chance to get to know these Oracle geniuses.
Dain was an outstanding networker.
Things Take as Long as We Give Them
We plugged Robert in to help with our Ph.D.
The personalization engine became a reality.
Moving it to production required additional database options that Robert, Phill, and Rehka introduced.
Amazon was only licensed for the Tech required to support the internal use of our Oracle Applications.
They were not licensed for external-facing use of Oracle Tech.
We chose the Processor metric to support an uncountable population of users.
Processor was easy for Amazon to understand and count for the Personalization Engine application.
Dain completed the business case, and Amazon's management approved the investment.
Our Ph.D. was thankful for our help in getting Amazon's IT and Procurement engaged and satisfied.
Writing those words makes it sound much easier than it was.
Amazon is a brutal negotiator.
Dain set me up as Oracle's management sponsor for the negotiations, a very shrewd move.
I was able to witness Dain in action first-hand in the final months.
I helped a little, I guess.
Amazon took us to late in the evening on the 29th and final day of February.
It was also the last day of Oracle's Q3 FY2004.
In his first full fiscal year on quota, Dain sold the first Tech order to Amazon for a single application with customer-facing entitlements.
It closed on February 29, 2004 for just over $3M.
He had his sights set on a much bigger prize.
Welcome to “The Show!”
Lessons Learned
Impossible is merely the degree of difficulty.
Most of what it takes to make it requires Zero Talent.
Being coachable is a superpower.
Hire the person, not the resume.
Thank you for reading.
Jeff
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