Oracle 'systematically denies' its sales reps their commissions, forces them to work to pay off 'debts', court told A former Oracle sales rep seeking to resolve a pay dispute has asked a California court to force the company to participate in arbitration over all wage claims against the database giant. Marcella Johnson, in her US district court filing [PDF] on Wednesday, claims Oracle "systematically denied her and other sales …
@AC
"If they all stopped, the products you help create would not get sold and you'd be out of a job. I'd laugh at that one."
The person you're responding to does have a point, albeit somewhat over simplified. In a world without salespeople, products would still be sold. People still need things and if there's nobody pushing them at you, you'd simply have to go looking for them. However, it wouldn't necessarily be your products they'd buy, but might be competitors. Depends on who they find first. Also, differences between products might not be understood, as it would be up to the buyer to determine and value them, rather than a salesperson tell them. Of course, this is an area where salespeople are often accused of overpromising etc. and getting a bad reputation. The reality is that unless you made it illegal to have salespeople, they would automatically spring up again, as companies naturally compete. Of course, in some economic systems, you only produce one type of each product and everybody buys that one. In that case, you don't need salespeople.
In any eventuality, whether it's salespeople or anybody else, the same principle applies to all jobs. They've signed a contract saying they'll get x for doing y. They do y and are then told they can't have x. Even worse, they may be fired if they don't agree to this. Whether it's salespeople or programmers or project managers or whoever, a company should be made to comply with their contract to them and pay what's due. Retrospective changes to contracts should in general be banned. It's too open to abuse, especially when the relationship is very lopsided, as in this case.
This always used to be the case with legislation, but over the last decade or so, governments have got very bad at introducing legislation that has a retrospective aspect. Take UK tax legislation as an example, where people are being pursued now for things that weren't illegal when they were done. It's all a very slippery slope with governments and corporations the only winners, as they have all the power.
Without sales people, the companies with the best brand recognition will take all the sales. Nobody will buy from the upstart without someone ready to persuade a customer of all the advantages of so doing. That someone is a "sales-person", and unless you work at a giant like Microsoft or IBM, is keeping you employed.
@Codysydney
While Sales isn't ever a field i'd work in, these people have bills, families, homes to pay for etc.
Read the article again.
Now imagine your employer refusing to continue to employ you unless you sign a new contract, stating that thye don't owe you your wages any more, and in some cases you'd owe them money and have to come to work to work off a "negative commission".
Try that phrase again.
Negative commission. They've sold products to make a living, then been told they need to sell more products to receive any money at all, or to not have a legal team chasing money they have already earned, and probably spent.
Scumbaggery of the highest order.
Sales is hard, and it's necessary. You go around being told "no" a hell of a lot of the time. Someone once described it to me as "collecting nos".
For every 100 calls you make, you might get one person to speak to you face-to-face. For every 100 meetings, you might get one good deal out of it. Referred business is a different game.
I once thought the same of sales, until I ended up having to do it. Then all your technical knowledge in almost worthless.
However, I will concede that some salespeople need kept on a lead to stop them promising the impossible...
However, I will concede that some salespeople need kept on a lead to stop them promising the impossible...
True, but that's a combination of company policy and decent HR. It's the first thing our reps get hammered into them: forget about making stuff up.
I've worked alongside sales people for years in pre-sales, it was a side effect of being the core architect of the products and services we sold. I liked it because it allowed me to coach the sales people in the ideas behind the service (which made them better able to articulate it to customers and sell more), and because it allowed me to get real feedback from actual potential customers but also from already established users who wanted changes.
Sales is a job in itself. Sure, it's been damaged by unscrupulous people who are either on irresponsible bonus schemes or just lying schemers personally, but maybe I was lucky to work with people who did their job and sought to do it well. I must admit it's not for me, but I respect the people who do the job - in general, they really earn their commission.
Last but not least, what Oracle does is beyond despicable. Sales people work for earnings, so suddenly changing the structure on them is unfair, especially if that is done AFTER they have done the work. It's like working for a month and then being told they've changed your contract and you're only getting half pay, oh, and that was as of last month so you ought to pay that half back as well.
Sales can be hard - it can also be incredibly easy - one famous salesman of the year was dossing in the office when someone phoned in wanting a few very expensive items.
I've worked in companies where the sales team has fought against on-line sales because they knew they were going to loose huge amounts of commission - largely 'earned' by simple getting in between the buyer and the seller. Higher level management getting a cut of their staffs sales really doesnt help either when 95% of business is repeat sales.I personally find it exasperating when I go on a website and have to request a quote for essentially an off the shelf item.
Not that I am ever going to get involved with Oracle - unless I get a job with a receiver.
I see the joke icon, but as one of those thar sales people who has at times also been a software architect, and engineer (essentially an engineer who can communicate) I'll bite.
The problem with no sales is no progress.
No one will buy the new unproven thing as no one will be pushing it, or leveraging their personal contacts to persuade people to try it.
Which means incumbent monopolies.
Countries without entrepreneurial sales led cultures (as a species we have experimented with this a fair bit) get left behind surprisingly fast.
Sometimes the military keeps up for a bit, but so far as a system it has failed to deliver progress.
Start a new business and you'll discover that the one important department is sales, which I learned by being in involved with an awesome startup that didn't have a sales department, and floundered until the Ceo stopped making the product better and started selling it.
"...On the other hand, who can't get behind bad things happening to salesmen :).."
WTF are you smoking?
1 - Show me a company, any company, that doesn't rely on sales people to bring in revenue and keep you in a job.
2 - Having done only pre-sales, let me tell you that the 80's car salesmen days are for the huge majority, long gone.
3 - You show a complete and utter lack of understanding that sometimes, often in fact, these high earners in sales are on a pittance of a wage and may have worked for months or even years before they get a "big win"
4 - On what planet can it be right and proper to do this kind of practice? Would you like it? Nope...thought not
Loads of companies.
We have a website, it was designed and specified by an internal tech team. It is updated by the internal tech team and it draws in over 90% of our business (many millions per year). Even the 10% that it doesn't draw in is mainly displacement (and no sold by a 'sales person')
In fact I can think of loads of companies that don't requires sales people (at least no tin the traditional sense) to sell their products. This isn't even including the NGOs, schools, charities, and plenty of others that are a company without a product or service as such to sell.
You're in a very small closed bubble that thinks *every* company has a sales team bringing in the wealth for their company.
I do, however, have to deal with rubbish sales people every day, calling me up. In fact it is probably 1 in 50 that I would say are any good, however I would also say that 99% of products I buy are down to me deciding to buy it and contacting the company giving a lucky deal to a sales person who collects their profit on top. probably about 30% of the products I buy are despite me not wanting to because the sales person has been so poor but the product was one that I really wanted or there was little competition around. The sales person still got their commision, despite it being the tech team and the marketing team that probably sold the product to me.
I'm not one of the previous poster's btw.
"..We have a website, it was designed and specified by an internal tech team. It is updated by the internal tech team and it draws in over 90% of our business (many millions per year). Even the 10% that it doesn't draw in is mainly displacement (and no sold by a 'sales person')
In fact I can think of loads of companies that don't requires sales people (at least no tin the traditional sense) to sell their products. This isn't even including the NGOs, schools, charities, and plenty of others that are a company without a product or service as such to sell..."
Name them. If you were so sure of yourself why hide behind anonymous commenting? Nope...thought not.
Even the public sector have sales.
"Name them. If you were so sure of yourself why hide behind anonymous commenting? Nope...thought not."
How about pretty much every independent hotel (and many chain hotels). Pubs Restaurants, Sports clubs, independent tradesmen, grocer stores, supermarkets, tree surgeons, land surveyors, anyone who doesn't do offline sales... etc etc etc.
Doesn't take much imagination to think of companies that don't rely on 'sales' people.
The sort of cold callers that everyone complains about are not salesmen, they're canvasers, and their "wages" are shit, so you'd have to be pretty desperate to be one. Been there, done that, couldn't afford the t-shirt.
Actual salesman only ever follow hot leads, which is to say you have explicitly expressed an interest and he's just responding to your request. You had to get past three other people to get that far: a lead generator, a canvaser and a confirmer, or in other words you ticked the "yes" box, answered a cold call, then accepted the follow-up. Decline any of those and you'll never hear from the salesman.
Canvassing is a shit job and I hated it, but you should pity us for having to prostitute ourselves out of desperation, don't hate us. Hate the companies that employ such spammy tactics then pay sub-minimum wages to those who actually generate all the profits but never see any of them.
The all-in-one roving salesman who generates his own leads, canvases door-to-door then closes and takes the commission is a relic from a bygone era, and that's probably just as well because in the present climate he'd probably get his head blown off by some trigger-happy "patriot" defending his "whatever-amendment" rights on his porch.
As for Oracle's salesmen, I'm sure they're on very good money, but it'll still be a small fraction of what they're making for the firm, so stiffing their salesmen is pretty low even for Larry's mob.
Appears to be a fairly common tactic for Oracle - screwing people out of their commissions - things like this were happening when I worked there 10+ years ago. Sales people would spend years putting together a multi-million dollar deal, and then get kicked to the curb a month or two before the contract got signed.
My employer did something like that after some acquisitions, hired a new graduate sales team (no experience and at a cheap location (UK)) and management offered no improvement for the sales guys who have been in the company for many years and knew the products and customer base inside and out. So they left in droves and the newbies didn't have a lot of decent veterans to learn from and our sales are in the shit yay!
"It seems really stupid to piss off the very people that bring money into the business via sales."
Yes, it DOES.
And that 'keep working until you pay off your debt' stuff reminds me of an old song:
"Ya move 16 tons, what'da get? Another day older, and deeper in debt! St. Peter don't ya call me cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store..."
(Tennessee Ernie Ford and Sam Cooke both did this one, I think)
Oracle needs to re-organize their sales management, and make sure their sales force gets PAID, ON TIME, before all of the good sales people stop working for them.
Silly Valley and their anti-honest-business attitudes. Maybe they should just move to another state where average wages are lower because LIVING EXPENSES (and taxes, etc.) aren't INSANE...
So being a Solaris fan myself I have to admit that this is funny to read (note: right now my Unix-like OS of choice is FreeBSD, but it all started on Soalris for me, so that OS will always be my all-time favorite)...
But just when you thought your disrespect for whOracle couldn't get any worse (especially reading the massive layoffs on the Solaris departments) and all of a sudden this happens.
It does make me happy that Java is mostly open source based these days. So even in the (probably unlikely) event that Oracle goes titsup (which I definitely see happening some time in the future) then the good stuff (Java, ZFS, Solaris) wouldn't have to go to total waste.
"You just need to read more Pratchett - million to one chances are bound to happen..."
"No-one pronounces 'Oracle' as 'OR acle' or 'whore' as 'horr' so it doesn't work."
huh? my brain just froze for a minute... illogical... illogical... obligatory Star Trek reference in progress... illogical... illogical...
'whOracle' works for me. yeah, whatever.
(I still can't figure out how NOT to prounounce them 'OR acle' and 'horr')
"No-one pronounces "Oracle" as "OR acle" or "whore" as "horr" so it doesn't work."
Shouldn't that be an AND clause, not an OR?
As in, a person who might say "OR acle" may be unlikely to say "whore" as "horr". I do the latter, but not the former, but then I'm OldPondian not NewPondian.
Yeah, yeah, coat...
"So even in the (probably unlikely) event that Oracle goes titsup (which I definitely see happening some time in the future) then the good stuff (Java, ZFS, Solaris) wouldn't have to go to total waste."
No, they'll be sold off as independent 'business groups' to others, like Google, Micro-shaft, and IBM. Precedents have already been set, for a very, very, long time.
"There's always a bigger fish" (fun Star Wars quote from Episode I)
In any case, "Big Data" is highly overrated. It's a fair bet that IBM's 'Watson' division wants Oracle's data business.
Icon, because, FreeBSD
that the longer that this goes on and the more widespread its effects become then the harder it will be for Oracle to hire Sales Droids. That may in turn lead to a downward spiral in profits.
Will this lead to old Leisure Suite Larry taking to the road again (Steppenwolf's 'On the road again' springs to mind)?
With this going on why would any business want to sign up for a new deal with Oracle? Their (oracle's) ethics suck. And to think that I almost took a job there once. shudder.
... Oracle "systematically denies" etc. etc. to American sales reps (allegedly) because there is no way in hell this sort of nonsense could survive under UK employment law or most likely anywhere else in the EU. In fact, you don't even need to invoke employment law to shoot this down in the UK: Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 would almost certainly suffice.
(NB: The 1977 Act applies to employment contracts as well as per: Brigden v American Express Banks Ltd [2000] IRLR 94 High Court which was another example of an American company thinking they could vary any term of employment "at will")
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Ask any salesperson in the insurance industry about a little policy called clawback,
That's entirely different - that's about recovering commission paid for sales (insurance contracts in that case) that were then cancelled. This Oracle case isn't about cancelled sales, it's about unilaterally changing the commission scheme after the fact to reduce the amount due to the employee.
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