They’re up to it again!
Oracle continues to confuse people with their insistence on talking about social CRM while they keep on flogging a decidedly “unsocial” (but very profitable) product.
Below is the presentation they prepared to demonstrate their vision and roadmp, but I can highlight the most interesting concepts in just a couple of bullet points:
- 52% of companies (remember, this is Oracle reporting this) are failing to populate and maintain data. This means that half of all companies fail to even use the primary function of CRM!
- “Non-engaged” Employees are “costing companies” 382 Billion dollars in the US alone! I think “not engaging” in this sense means not providing an application that the employees willingly use!
- Oracle’s brief history of the internet is represented by an arrow that starts at the beginning and ends yesterday (and gets progressively redder). I don’t know what it means. Seriously.
- “A fully-loaded sales rep, averaged across industries, costs $500,000“. Wholly crap! If that’s the average… Half a million dollars? If you add in salespeople who are “unengaged” that’s like $382.5 billion dollars!
- I think the executives at Oracle could have saved a lot of time and money on their social CRM strategy by just putting a big Linkedin button in the application so salespeople can more easily update their resumes – which is the only social networking they’ll be doing as long as their company is using Oracle CRM.
Great Post Scott. I really wonder if companies like Oracle can even understand the social web and the implications that it has to their current business models.
Hey – I used to work at a company that will remain nameless, but they hired Oracle several years ago to implement their CRM, and apparently it was vaporware (they found that out about $21 million too late).
So what you are saying here doesn’t surprise me. I love it.