Sales job at Oracle or Dell, which would you take
June 30, 2011 7:02 AM   Subscribe

If someone was offered a sales position to work for either Oracle or Dell, which would you recommend and why?

Assuming geographical location and salary was not an issue and the sales role is a generic entry-level one. Anecdotes and personal experiences are welcome.

The impression I am getting from verbal and web sources is that between these two Fortune 500 companies there are issues of arrogance, low staff morale, overly-bureaucratic, many obstacles, very high work activities, high sales staff turnover. Obviously that's just the negatives we would mostly from companies like these.

I'm absolutely sure there are positives too and would love to hear experiences about it.
posted by gttommy to Work & Money (9 answers total)
 
Anecdotal evidence only: I always heard the sales culture at Oracle was cutthroat. Absolutely brutal. But if you perform, you can actually make some money.
posted by gertzedek at 7:09 AM on June 30, 2011


Best answer: arrogance, low staff morale, overly-bureaucratic, many obstacles, very high work activities, high sales staff turnover.

That's going to be true of any sales job in a Fortune 500 Tech company. In this case, more important that the company is the product line you'll be selling. You want to be selling something that is growing. Pushing Dell servers in the age of cloud computing is probably only a great job if you are selling to Amazon and Rackspace. Likewise, I wouldn't think selling Oracle dB licenses is the place you want to be in the Oracle Corp.
posted by COD at 7:21 AM on June 30, 2011 [1 favorite]


From my perspective as a customer: Depending on where you are (hardware or various software arms), Oracle is very cutthroat but is a decent sales culture with a lot of skilled salespeople. Dell will allow you to feel very laid back but most salesmen are failures and essentially order-takers. If you can find a good mentor at Dell, you can be very successful.
posted by SpecialK at 7:24 AM on June 30, 2011


As someone who just ditched a Dell-based infrastructure for EC2, I say pay heed to COD's advice.
posted by mkultra at 7:38 AM on June 30, 2011


Check your MeFi mail.
posted by seventyfour at 8:01 AM on June 30, 2011


Best answer: I'd go for Oracle. Dell is essentially selling commodity boxes -- the product is simple, there's healthy competition, and the customer knows their own needs very well. No sales person is going to convince a Dell customer to buy $50k extra through a really classy presentation.

On the other hand, Oracle is selling a very complicated, vertically integrated mess of products...some of which are competitive, others of which are not. It's not hard for me to imagine an Oracle sales rep convincing my company to buy $50k in extra software/sales/service. Heck, Oracle convinced the CIO of a place I used to work to spend $10m on software which they didn't really need and abandoned after less than a year... So there's clearly a ton of up upside potential for someone in sales.
posted by miyabo at 8:12 AM on June 30, 2011


Also the cloud companies are all buying their servers from Rackable/SGI, which is a lot more flexible in doing custom orders than Dell. Of course maybe that will change if Dell gets its act together.
posted by miyabo at 8:13 AM on June 30, 2011


I would go with Oracle, because I am in the Austin area. Dell is evil.

“Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.” - Jerry Garcia
posted by BuffaloChickenWing at 10:51 AM on June 30, 2011


Rock or hard place?

Funny timing, though: just this morning I got my monthly, "Hi, this is $name and I wanted to introduce myself as your new Oracle rep" call. Sorry, but I will stick with my VAR. *hugs CorpTech*
posted by wenestvedt at 12:47 PM on June 30, 2011


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