I was following some Oracle deals, as their quarter closed last month, and what struck me most about some of these deals is that Oracle competitors are trying to out-Oracle Oracle–and failing.
Let me give you an example. One of the most common, best-known plays in the ERP salesperson’s playbook–the equivalent of post-right in football–is called elevating the deal.
When you elevate the deal, you try to take it out of the hands of the “team” that has been assembled to evaluate your product and put it in the hands of busy executives, preferably several levels up, who are in a position to override the team. When you’re put in front of these executives, you pitch business benefits, instead of functional capabilities, and fill their soft little heads with visions of flexibility and agility, competitive differentiators, and money dropping like rain to the bottom line. At this level, of course, you just assume that your software actually has the functionality that will allow you to gain those benefits, which is of course what that low-level team was taking all this time trying to assess.
Both Oracle and SAP are past masters of this particular play; when they run it, it’s Tom Brady to Randy Moss, man.
So this quarter, I heard about two situations where one ERP vendor tried to elevate the deal, at the express instructions of the coach, er, head of sales. In either case, was it Oracle? No, it was the other guy. And did it work? Not a bit. The only thing the competitor succeeded in doing was ticking off the selection team.
It’s a pretty small sample size, of course. But it made me wonder. I know that the applications themselves showing their age. Is it possible that the tactics that go along with those apps are beginning to fray, too? I have been saying for some time, now, that they’ve outlived their usefulness to the customer (if there ever was any). See my blog post, “Lawson’s New Office,” for instance. But now, I’m wondering, have the old sales tactics stopped working for the vendors, too?
I’d be curious to get comments on this; as I said, my sample size is too small. But assuming I’m right, there’s one other question to ask. Why has Oracle figured this out and other companies haven’t?
If so,
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