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Innovation in Business Practices: Part of the Oracle Culture
I was honored to be included in the “Conversations with Early Innovators” section of Oracle Corporation’s Innovation Showcase, which is now being featured on its website along with a 100-day countdown to Oracle OpenWorld. As the founder of Oracle’s inside sales group, I stressed the innovation of Oracle’s business practices while others interviewed focused on the company’s technology innovations. There’s a fun story about Ted Codd – the father of relational database – in there, too. Here’s the interview in its entirety:
Anneke Seley was the twelfth Oracle employee and the designer of the company’s revolutionary phone sales operation that is now called OracleDirect. She helped to organize Oracle’s first user conferences, which were the predecessor events to Oracle OpenWorld. Currently, she is the CEO and founder of Phone Works, a sales strategy and implementation consultancy that specializes in helping companies incorporate phone and Web selling into their sales models. Seley is also the coauthor of a new book, Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology (John Wiley & Sons, 2008).
Q:What was innovative about the telephone sales organization that you started in 1985?
A:It wasn’t typical for a company to sell complex enterprise software by phone, but in 1985 that’s basically what I was recruited to do. I had joined Oracle in an entry position in 1980, but in 1985, when we were releasing products for the PC, the old distribution model of having a field sales organization sell every single copy of Oracle was no longer practical or economical. So I started the phone sales organization, which everybody in the field thought was going to be a total disaster. They said, “Who would buy software on the phone? This is really important, complex system stuff that people run their companies on. Who’s going to buy it, without seeing somebody in person?”
Q:How successful was this new sales organization?
A:We started out with two employees. By the end of the first year, we had about 20 people. It was the fastest growing sales organization in the company. And now, you can see what happened—OracleDirect brings in hundreds of millions of dollars. We did very well. Prospective customers were very happy to talk to us—and buy products—on the phone, as long as we knew what we were talking about.
Q:Did your sales staff do a lot of cold calling in the early days?
A:No, because we had a very active and successful demand generation marketing program that would drive leads into the company. We also had advertising. I recall one early ad, created by Rick Bennett, which had a picture of a biplane [representing Oracle's competitor] being shot down. It got a lot of attention for being so aggressive.
Q:The book Sales 2.0, which you coauthored, has a chapter about Oracle. Would you give us some highlights?
A:It shows how Oracle in the 1980s was very forward thinking. Nowadays, it’s really common for organizations to launch or have a big part of their distribution strategy include an inside sales or phone and Web selling component. It wasn’t so common in 1985. But a key point about Sales 2.0 is to sell in the way the customer wants to buy and to align your resources appropriately—given the profitability, the size of the deal, the size of the customer, and whatever makes sense. For a lot of customers, it was totally fine not to see a salesperson. Sales 2.0 is about more effective and more efficient selling for both the seller and the buyer that’s enabled by technology. Innovation is not just about the technology, but also about the business practice that you enable with the technology.
Q:You also helped to organize the first Oracle conference—what do you recall about that?
A:It was in 1982, if I remember correctly. I think we called it the Oracle User Conference, and we held it at the Hyatt Union Square in San Francisco. I know we had fewer than 1,000 attendees because I remember it was a big deal when we had the second annual conference and attracted 1,000 attendees. The audience was mostly developers. It was an incredible success—and a useful venue for enabling direct contact between the Oracle developers and the Oracle staff and the customer base.
Q:Any speakers stand out in your mind?
A:Tedd Codd, the father of the relational database, was the keynote speaker at our second user conference. It was held in San Diego at the InterContinental, which was a big step up. I was a kid then, and here was this historical figure who was so important to the company, and we were honored to have him at our user’s conference. I believe he was retired from IBM at the time. My job was to keep the conference on schedule and to deal with the logistical side of things. And here was Ted Codd speaking before the audience, and he wouldn’t stop talking. But we had to get to our next session. So I asked him at least three times—you know, “Thank you, it’s such an honor to have you here, and now we’re ready for the next session.” But he just kept on talking. It was definitely a moment that I’ll never forget. He wasn’t a schedule kind of guy. I think he was really enjoying himself. And, I don’t want to assume anything, but these technically brilliant people want to see their inventions become reality. It was meaningful to him that Oracle had done just that, by creating the first commercially available relational database. [Editor's note: Oracle founders used Codd's published description of a working prototype for a relational database as a model for the Oracle database.)
Q:What drives Oracle’s culture of innovation—does it come from the top?
A:Absolutely, it comes from Larry. Larry was a technical guy. He loved technical innovation, and he hired people that were really, really good. We didn’t necessarily follow the rules that other businesses follow. We’d hire people like me—who graduated with a degree in human biology from Stanford—and let them start a sales division with no sales background. The idea was to give smart people a project and let them figure it out. That’s the essence of the culture at Oracle. It started with technical innovation, and then it expanded to other parts of the business.
How is your company’s culture innovative? How are you transforming your business practices to be as innovative as your product or service offerings?
Lead Scoring 2.0: Measuring Prospect Behavior
Last month, I spoke to a group of Silicon Valley Chief Sales Officers about Sales 2.0. After my presentation, I invited the attendees to share some of their approaches to reinventing the way they are selling, given changes in customer preferences, the market and economy. Bill Binch, VP of Sales and Customer Success at Marketo, had a lot to offer. He is the first to admit that some of his practices are non-traditional, or in his words “edgy”, perhaps the ultimate of compliments to members of Generation Y. I asked him these questions:
Anneke: For context, tell us a little about your sales organization and how it is structured. Who do you sell to, what is your average sales price and average sales cycle, etc?
Bill: We use several Sales 2.0 concepts at Marketo. We’ve expanded the standard sales cycle into what we call the “Revenue Cycle,” which means we measure the combined sales AND marketing cycles to learn how our customers want to buy. By measuring from their first interaction, we understand how our prospects behave and how they want to be sold to, and deliver them timely, content-specific information based on their interests and activities. The result is that marketing provides the sales team with a nurtured, sales-ready leads, complete with their demographics, activities, and behaviors. Which is really what Marketo as a company is about – we help companies convert, nurture, and prioritize their leads, resulting in better alignment between sales and marketing and higher revenues. So we currently have Enterprise (field) reps who call on accounts with revenue greater than $500 million as well as Territory (inside) reps who are geographically organized that sell to the VP of Marketing and VP of Sales. Our typical Revenue Cycle runs about 100 days from identification to close with an annual subscription price of $40,000.
Anneke: You mention lead nurturing several times, which is a key concept in a Sales 2.0, marketing and sales aligned company in which measurement, tracking, and accountability are part of the sales culture. How do you distinguish between leads that your tele-qualification team calls and leads you simply nurture using Marketo. In other words, how do you determine who gets a follow-up call and when?
Bill: All leads are nurtured in Marketo, prior receiving a call from a tele-qualifcation rep. Leads are ranked by a score, according to best practices which are published on our web site, and once they reach a certain score, they go to tele-qualificiation for follow up. If tele-qualification determines a prospect to be “sales -ready,” that prospect is referred to sales. If prospects are not “sales-ready”, they are put into a new nurture program based on their needs and purchase timeframe.
Anneke: Tell me more about your innovative approach to scoring marketing-generated sales opportunities according to how likely prospects are to buy.
Bill: The 2.0 process requires the marketing team to provide greater detail and insight for their sales team — what influenced and drove the lead to your site, did they look at your pricing page, your videos, download whitepapers? Who is your prospect, what company are they from, what size company, what industry, what is their title and role? What assets are influencing the prospect to select your product and what is their propensity to buy? By having a closed loop process, we can measure what is influencing our customers, what programs are helping reinforce our message, and what does a typical buyer profile look like. We can then adjust our messaging and marketing spend to focus on the best sources and processes for gaining new customers.
Anneke: How does this lead scoring system compare to traditional approaches to prioritizing opportunities?
Bill: The 1.0 process was to qualify leads as A, B, or C leads, or at best case a static numeric basis. In the 2.0 world, sales reps need to understand the demographics, behaviors, and activities of their prospect. They need to understand their urgency level. These can be delivered as individual scores that move up or down dynamically — if a prospect is very active, their urgency is greater and and the sales rep should be alerted to react. It is the combination of activity level -which shows readiness to engage – and demographic fit that determines the best qualified leads.
Anneke: What is the difference in the results you’ve seen since implementing the new approach?
Bill: The big result is in productivity – our sales team sells. Instead of burning time researching, prospecting, and back office work, they are focused on engaging with qualified leads that want to speak with them. By using Marketo and our tele-qualification team, we are able to keep the sales team highly utilized and the majority of their time is customer facing. The “Revenue Cycle” process has yielded us over 200 customers since launching the product in March 2008.
Anneke: What are some of your biggest selling challenges today and how are you addressing them?
Bill: In the mid 90’s, many companies didn’t have CRM (Customer Relationship Management applications) and didn’t think they had a need, yet today it’s hard to imagine any company not using CRM to run their sales business. The marketing side is similar – it’s been under-served and not optimized as well as it could be. So our challenge is redefining how sales AND marketing can work more closely together to have a greater impact on revenues. SaaS (Software as a Service) has been an enabling paradigm to get software into the marketer’s hands, but similar to what Siebel Systems (now Oracle) and salesforce.com experienced, we need more than technology. We need to educate customers on new best practices and strategies to help solve today’s sales and marketing challenges. So we’ve focused on hiring people with that DNA in their background, and that skill has really helped fuel our growth.
Anneke: Are you implementing or testing Sales 2.0 strategies, practices, or technologies in addition to your own product?
Bill: Yes, there are many great technologies out there that are helping us. We use Zuora for integrated order configuration, order entry, and billing, which is critical in a subscription business. Echosign is an electronic signature tool integrated to salesforce.com, which speeds up the contract process and reduces redlines and legal changes. And we use Jigsaw and Tippit for research and industry expertise.
Anneke: And what are the results?
Bill: I think the biggest result is the adoption of the Marketo platform by our customers. There had been several offerings in this category, but in 3 years we’ve gone from start-up to the 2nd largest player in our space. Our technology, combined with usability, domain knowledge, and execution has put us on the trajectory to be the leader in the next 18 months. Customers have been wanting a product that is usable today but also offered the sophistication and growth path for the future, and we’re uniquely positioned to provide that solution.
Anneke: Your web site describes Marketo as “marketing automation that helps B2B marketing and sales drive revenue and improve accountability”. Can you give me some examples of results your customers are seeing?
Bill: A recent example is a manufacturer who within 30 days of starting with us, launched a campaign that yielded 500% improvement of their click through rates. A 5X improvement is going to fill the funnel with more opportunities, which will lead to more at-bats for their sales reps. And that’s just the first 30 days! We have another customer, Plexus Systems who saw pretty tremendous results, which they documented on their VP of Marketing’s blog. Their results include better understanding of their buyer, better sales productivity and prioritization, and of course more leads, more deals, more revenue.
What lead scoring system do you use? How has it helped your sales productivity and results?
Making Webinars and Presentations Sales 2.0
Since my book was released a few months ago, I’ve had many opportunities to participate in Web and speaking events on the topic of Sales 2.0. While I am grateful for the invitations to spread the important message of reinventing sales to achieve better results, something has been troubling me: the typical approach many of us take to presentations is best described as Sales 1.0. Sales 2.0 is about collaborative, two-way communication and sharing of ideas with prospects and customers. Sales 1.0 describes the traditional feature/benefit-oriented pitches or presentations that we often make in one direction – to our customer or audience – without engaging them and letting them tell us about themselves and their business objectives.
Isn’t the PowerPoint presentation the ultimate Sales 1.0 offender, whether given face-to-face or online?
Robin Carey, CEO of Social Media Today, and I discussed this dilemma, in preparation for the upcoming March 31 webinar she asked me to join, along with Mark Woolen from Oracle and Christopher Carfi from Cerado. Robin, being immersed in the world of social media and not one to take a traditional approach, explained that the webinar would be a highly interactive Q&A Panel. She would encourage participants to live chat their questions during the event. These approaches are right in line with Sales 2.0 philosophy. Robin emphasized that she expects the conversation to be lively and for the speakers to talk over one another at times, like in real life. I thought immediately of David Mamet’s plays.
The “Maximizing Customer Relationships through Technology and Social Media” panel I’m sharing with Jim Calhoun, CEO of PopularMedia, this Thursday, March 26 for MENG (Marketing Executives’ Networking Group) will follow a similar format, with moderator David Schneider asking us questions rather than us giving slide shows. David emphasized, “in an effort to encourage as much audience interaction as possible and evolve to topics that interest them, I will try to initiate discussions and turn to the folks in the crowd for their questions frequently.” Chris Kenton, founder of the Social Media Breakfast San Francisco and his own startup, SocialRep, came to the same conclusion about the event he organized last month. He interviewed me Michael Krasny-style, inviting audience members to chime in after he posed some of the most thought-provoking questions I’ve been asked since Larry Ellison interviewed me for my first job at Oracle in 1980. I have to admit that our decision to do an interview was influenced by the fact that the venue for the event – a hip bar in downtown San Francisco – didn’t have much in the way of audio/visual equipment, making a slide presentation problematic, but we turned this “bug” into a “feature”. Chris went a step further into Sales 2.0-thinking by inviting a professional videographer to tape the interview, which he later posted online.
As I look forward to future speaking opportunities, I am still searching for ways to re-think the standard and expected method of communicating a message to a group audience. When I was approached to to be part of InsideView’s Sales 2.0 webinar series, I balked at the idea of a giving a traditional pitch. As we explored ideas, I had a Sales 2.0 suggestion: let’s include a customer, who would describe a personal experience accelerating sales with Sales 2.0 practices. We are now in the process of planning a program for April 21 that will be more in line with another key Sales 2.0 message: be customer-focused.
My first Bay Area bookstore appearance is coming up April 2. Any thoughts on how to prepare for Author Appearance 2.0?
What Sales 2.0 practices have you been incorporating into your presentations and webinars? What results have you seen?
Twitter: Friend or Foe of Sales?
Last week I attended the oversold (500 people plus) Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco and was invited to participate on the panel discussion, “Accelerating Productivity: New Sales 2.0 Tools”. A week earlier, I was the guest speaker at the inaugural Social Media Breakfast San Francisco meeting (see online video), during which I was interviewed, Fresh Air style, by social media guru, Chris Kenton. There was a common theme between these two events: the most engaging (or should I say heated?) discussion topic was the use of twitter in the sales process.
People are passionate about twitter, whether they love it or hate it. To the majority of sales executives I know, twitter is seen as perhaps only second to Facebook as a major distraction for the sales force and drain on its productivity. Garth Moulton, cofounder and VP of Community at Jigsaw, sums it up in his recent blog post, “Not Digging on Twitter” that “for a working professional Twitter is totally stupid.”
He might be right. But I’m not willing to accept that until I give it a chance.
Like my dermatologist who tries out every new procedure on herself before subjecting her patients to it, I have immersed myself in the twitter community and am experimenting with it. A few weeks ago, I didn’t know what a hashtag, retweet, or @reply meant, but I’m enjoying learning about a new communications medium that so may people (some sources say 2,000 new user accounts are created on average per day) are flocking to. During the opening session of the Sales 2.0 conference, I tried my hand at “live tweeting” the content: broadcasting it out to an audience of twitter users who were following the conference online in real time. You can read some of these “tweets” in several blogs written by members of the Sales 2.0 community: Michael Damphousse’s Smashmouth Marketing, Parker Trewin’s B2B Marketing for Faster Sales, and Andrew Lennon’s The Daily Anchor, among others.
My theory is that when new technologies are adopted enthusiastically by the mainstream, they may just have a place in the buying cycle. In B2B sales, that might not be the end of that cycle – it’s hard to imagine someone placing a million dollar deal via twitter – but never say never. Twenty-four years ago, I was told I was crazy to expect the sophisticated customers of Oracle Corporation to buy its complex products by phone. 
How are YOU using twitter in the sales process? Is it improving or decreasing sales productivity in your company? And most importantly, what revenue has resulted from a twitter interaction with a prospect?
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