4 Months of intense work in a single image

Today, we push into production EmployPlan 3.0, culminating a 4 month journey since my trip to Poland and investing in the team and then working daily with them to build a breakthrough in project bench management for services companies.

I'm super excited about the launch, as it's the start of our sharing with the public what we have built, but it also represents a milestone for the start of the next build and the roadmap for the next 2 months of sprints is really a breakthrough in how companies can partner together, deliver together and coordinate their work jointly.

The team in Poland has been an amazing discovery and their work product and effort second to none. As an investors, I am excited to see what they are bringing to market, as a technologist, I'm deeply humbled and inspired by their work.

The myth of the technical sale

I wanted to address a topic that I run into a lot with the transition from product-based selling (software licensing, hardware products, etc) to services-based selling (cloud platforms, data platforms, AI services, etc). One of the common discussions with salespeople is a high-level comment of "It's a very technical sale" and I'm always interested in what that means to people.

To a fair number of folks, it comes across where the emphasis is on the word "sale" and the modifier is "technical", so to some people this lands as "This is a sales pitch with very technical concepts in it". On some level, this is correct - there is a message that is constructed that highlights the benefits of the platform in solving problems, but this school of thought often thinks of this like a magic spell - "If I can only get the right words in the right order, it will unlock the sale" like a misguided tech Harry Potter, but they are missing a deeper fundamental truth about what it means to conduct a technical sale.

Technical selling, at its heart, is about building the confidence in the customer that you and your team have the skills and capabilities in the platform to build the solution; this puts the focus for the sales effort first and foremost at conducting a real, deep technical understanding of the problem the customer is facing, then building a solution for the problem. This follows the edict of "platforms are built, not bought" at its core, but it also conveys a larger role for the salesperson - your job is to build confidence in the customer in the team, either your professional services or the partners professional services. The customer has to know that you can understand, solve and deliver, which is more about the delivery team than the platform and at the sales process, more about technical fit than technical pitch.

Here is a quick logic test on the above and why it's important to build confidence in the delivery team as the core role of a salesperson in a technical sale - which do you think is more likely?

• A cloud platform has a compute infrastructure that is prone to failure and is a significant risk to the application operations.

• One of the 2500 decisions the services team needs to make on implementing your ERP is going to be critically wrong and harm your business.
  

Logically, it's fairly easy to mitigate and manage the platform risk with technology and tools, but the delivery risk is really about raising the customers confidence in the solution and why it's the best fit for the problem. And, at the core, this isn't about magic words you say, a technical sale is about building confidence in the solution, which requires understanding it at a deeper level.

Ending a joyful journey and starting a new one

So today is the wrapup of my a little over four years at Oracle and helping launch yet another public cloud into the marketplace, first by leading product marketing, and then by helping scale our partnerships, with some of the biggest global integrators in the market.

Today is also the start a journey with Joyful Brands, the investment company that my wife Melody and I created. In this new journey, we will be helping our portfolio companies scale their go to market across product management, pricing and packaging, sales development and marketing scale operations.

But first, a toast to closing the chapter at Oracle and starting a new one with my bride!