I know there is a ton of anxiety in the air right now, this is true for Redmond as well as other locations. People don’t know how deep the cuts will be and the overall impact of the reorg may be significant. In my group, EPG Azure Sales, we are adding folks on all levels – this trend will continue as we are literally drowning in work.
I have friends that work for both IBM and Oracle, they went through a similar reorg a few months back – look at both companies here on layoffs.com and you’ll notice a major spike in sales layoffs over last 12 months – as always, we are lagging, it’s the nature of the beast, we move slowly but when we move things get pretty big.
I can tell you that Oracle basically annihilated all legacy sales (on prem) positions, I’d probably say at least 50% of all sales folks for on-prem were cut – they are simplifying the sales process and there is a ton of positions for junior level sales folks as you do not need that deep relationship / sales savvy team any more – that’s not how our customers buy any more – things are changing and we have to change too.
IBM did a very similar thing in November and back in April, again check out what they write here – it’s the same thing all over again.
Finally, we need to ask the following questions today:
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When is the hit going to happen?
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What Microsoft sales groups will be affected the most? Also, is this Sales only?
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What levels will be affected the most (are we going after tenured talent)
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What’s the overall game plan…
Way too many questions, again I am happy that I was able to transfer to EPG Azure Sales but, let’s see what happens now…