Original features: Oracle's Most Egregious Terms No. 2, Financial Services Security and Supply Chain, and the latest in Multicloud strategy.
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The NET(net) Newsletter: November 2019
Picture above: Sunrise over Plymouth Harbor and Plymouth Rock pavilion, Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA.
November 2019 - In This Issue:
Steven Zolman: Countdown of Oracle's 12 Most Egregious Terms and Conditions: Part II - Auto Install
Tjeerd Edelman: Financial Services Series: If You Read It in the Newspaper, It's Too Late
Dave Young: Multicloud Series, Part III - Application Portability
ICYMI: Supplier Profits and Fiscal Year-End Tactics They Use Against You
C-Suite on the Move in November: GE, Aflac, Accenture, Tallgrass and more
News from the 'Other Side': Here we will highlight articles that cater to 'technology sales' and the strategies they use against 'buyers'. This month from the Sales Readiness Group: Five Sales Negotiation Tactics to Use With Procurement
Oracle's 12 Most Egregious Terms and Conditions Part 2: Auto Install
Auto-Install is an executable file in the Oracle software kit that activates when a customer installs certain software and automatically loads various options that may or may not be included in the purchase price of the acquired software.
Click below to read why it's important. If you'd like to download the entire series in eBook format - click here.
Financial Services Blog Series: If You Read It in the Newspaper, It's Too Late
You may know the parable “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” and the moral behind it:
It is a story of a group of blind men, who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualize what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant's body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest, and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is thathumans tend to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.
Teams are not unlike the blind men – every member comes in with a different specialty and role and with it a different perspective of what needs to be done in addition to how and what the result should be. This is especially true in today’s world with matrix organizations and virtual teams comprised of people in different continents, having disparate cultural backgrounds, and coming together to form a singular entity.
To see why up to 80% of security breaches begin in the supply chain, please click 'Read More' below:
NET(net) Multicloud Series Part III: Application Portability
In Part I we discussed consideration of a multicloud strategy. Pricing and product transparency were the theme for Part II. In Part III we address the last in this series: Application Portability. To see all three in our Multicloud eBook, please visit here.
The enterprise’s application processing workloads must be compatible to portability between Cloud providers, including technology stacks that are common across all Cloud provider platforms, such as the use of application microservices and open stack services such as containers and Kubernetes. It is also important to consider how you'll integrate data and applications residing in different Clouds.
ICYMI: Supplier Profits and Fiscal Year-End Sales Tactics They Use Against You (Updated for 2019!)
The end-of-year mania is underway as sales professionals from some of the largest tech companies on the planet try to capture and fill their Q4 quota.
When such a substantial portion of a sales rep’s income rests on their ability to separate company dollars from your budget, it’s no wonder we often witness such unbridled aggression this time of year.
It can be personally traumatic for salespeople as they sit in their weekly (sometimes daily) sales meetings with their respective teams, while management tears apart their sales opportunities and deals often in front of their peers with sales pipeline questions.
“Working for an organization that drives revenue through technology, and having created the procurement and technology operations support functions, my team tends to have a chip on its shoulder regarding having the expertise to optimize technology agreements. Believe me when I say that it was not easy to introduce NET(net) to the team.Specifically,since NET(net) would basically perform our same role and responsibilities! Well, the team was quick to discover that we can learn a ton from NET(net) around performing a detailed approach to a potential transaction, creating leverage with vendors through improved market analysis, performing an unbiased review of the project and simply asking the right questions to both our internal customers and external providers.The end resultis a fantastic complement to our team’s services and a reduction in annual operating costs. I would like to thank NET(net) for its continued support, and I look forward to saving more money and optimizing our services!”
Five Sales Negotiation Tactics to Use With Procurement
Sales Readiness Group, by Ray Makela
This is an article by a sales consulting group that outlines (in video and print), their five strategies for negotiating with procurement teams. We often say that sales organizations spend millions to hone their sales strategies, and this is just some evidence of it. Have you been the target of one of these five?