The Sales Game Changers Podcast was recognized by YesWare as the top sales podcast. Read the announcement here.
Subscribe to the Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!
Register for the September 13 Women in Sales Leadership Elevation Conference here.
Register for the IES Women in Sales Leadership Development programs here.
Today’s show featured an interview with Kim Lynch, Executive Vice President, Government Intelligence and Defense at Oracle.
Find Kim on LinkedIn.
KIM’S ADVICE: “Be in the market, be with your customers. I’m out there all the time. It’s the best way to develop that customer trust, to be able to understand their challenges. Being with them, walking the hallways, it’s so important, for all of us, the engagement with customers. You can’t over engage. That’s critical.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m excited. We’re going to be talking to Kim Lynch. She’s the executive VP for government defense and intelligence at Oracle. Kim, we’ve had some great sales leaders from Oracle on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. We’ve had Tamara Greenspan on a couple of times, and she was the very, very first person that we had. She’s now a facilitator for the IES Women in Sales Leadership Forum, and she’s been doing that with us for a long time. She usually kicks off the forum.
We’re doing today’s interview in June of 2024. You recently moved to Oracle, it’s been over a year. Give us a little bit of an introduction. For people who are listening today, you’ve had a great career at Booz Allen, and to let people know, you made the move to Oracle just over a year ago. Give us a little bit of what got you to this moment and why did you make the move to Oracle at this stage of your career?
Kim Lynch: Fred, thank you very much for having me on today. It’s great to see you, great to have this conversation. I’m so glad you brought up Tamara too, because she has just been such a wonderful colleague. She is such a mentor for many across the community in terms of how she engages customers, how she thinks about sales, and she has been an amazing resource for me as I’ve recently joined Oracle, has just been such a great colleague. Wonderful to have her here at Oracle and to get to work with her every day. I’m thrilled about that.
But yes, after 24 years at Booz Allen, where I was focused on the federal sector, I had supported Department of Defense customers, Department of Homeland Security customers, ran a lot of our intelligence community businesses. I had a great opportunity there to grow from really an entry level position to leaving as a partner there and being able to work at all levels. You gain so many different skills when you get to work your way up, particularly in sales and working with customers, how you interact when you are more junior in your career, rather than when you’re running at scale. It’s a great way. But the core thing you always have to know is how to become a trusted advisor to your customers and be able to provide value.
The opportunity to come over to Oracle was one that I was really intrigued by because Oracle has been such a strong part of the federal sector and a technology innovator for decades in terms of being able to support government mission. What was particularly interesting to me was the fact that Oracle was transforming itself and pivoting into cloud in a very big way in terms of bringing a really exceptional approach to cloud technology in terms of being a next gen cloud. All of the price-to-performance it brought to market, all of that history of managing data and how that was unlocked in the cloud, it was a very exciting opportunity to be there at the forefront of the federal sector rollout of cloud. To see all of the momentum that Oracle was getting in the commercial business and think about how that could really impact our customer’s mission that I’ve dedicated my career to, and also many of us are so connected to the opportunity to really help the national security and defense mission with differentiated technology was just one I couldn’t pass up. Plus, the opportunity to work for Safra Catz, our CEO, was also just a true career opportunity that I did not want to pass up on.
Fred Diamond: We could make the argument that Oracle has probably been the most influential technology company in the history of federal IT. I’m not talking about integrators, I’m talking about pure technology. For people who are listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast, we’ve probably had at least three dozen sales leaders who are leading, Tamara’s still at Oracle of course, but other people who’ve gone on from Oracle to places like Red Hat, Salesforce, Cisco, other companies as well, and have had such an important role in achieving the mission of Department of Defense and other critical government agencies.
I’m just curious, a shift from Booz Allen, professional services consulting, to an IT company like Oracle. It’s been a year. What could you share, one or two things that have surprised you or that have pleased you going from that type of a company to the company you’re with now?
Kim Lynch: I think one thing that has pleased me is the fact that there is such a focus at Oracle on customer success and dedication to mission. That is something that I’ve always thrived in, and to come to a company that is a tech company all over the world, but it still has such a priority and focus on this market and dedication to service. That’s something that really I have felt like a duck to water in being part of a company that is so focused on national security defense and being able to be a good partner to those customers, and the ability of how we’ve been able to transform.
One of the things that has surprised me too about that legacy is sometimes I’ll meet with customers and they’ll say, “Well, yes, our Oracle technology, we’ve had it for 20 years and we still like it, but there’s these things we’d like them to do.” I’m like, “Well, we do do that.” We actually have amazing technology in the newer versions. Our stuff is so good, it still works 20 years later, so you didn’t have to modernize. But with our cloud, now it’s much easier to modernize and that’s a great opportunity for us to get our government customers onto the latest technology that our commercial customers have benefited from over the last several years in that transition.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about the changing perception. Even I, when I think about Oracle, I think about Oracle as a database and apps company, and sometimes I have to remind myself about the applications which have been around for 30 years, which is such a huge legacy and it has been so critical in so many different government activities. Now we’re going from database and apps to a cloud provider.
Talk about some of the things that you’ve had to do. You could talk about things you’ve had to do internally, things that you’ve had to do with the customer. One thing we talk a lot about on the Sales Game Changers Podcast is sometimes you have to tell customers 40 times a message, through multiple means, not just through the sales professional, because they’re thinking about themselves and their business and their mission and their lives. Then I’ve had customers who’ve said to me 30 times after I’ve met with them, “Oh, okay, now I understand exactly what the value is for our women in sales, or for our sales leaders.” Talk about that process of working through the transformation to get the customer to understand that.
Kim Lynch: One of the things I always remind my team is our customers are incredibly busy. Their mission and the pace of what they have to do every day consumes their day because they are dealing with such important mission challenges all over the world. Their ability to learn about what we’re doing and what’s differentiating us, they just don’t have the time to do that. I always work with my team to say, we have to go in and really succinctly and impactfully show how we’ve transformed and what the value we bring is, because they don’t have time to research Oracle or what new innovations that we’re very aware of that we’re talking about. That’s a really important thing for us to do.
My whole first year here was really about engaging in different events and meetings, senior engagements. In the beginning, a lot of times I would get the question, “Oh, you have a cloud?” I knew that I had some work to do, that I had to not only explain to the customers that we had a cloud, but we had one of the fastest growing AI-capable price-to-performance clouds most secure out there. Not only do we have a cloud, but we have an exceptional cloud. A lot of things that I needed to do engagement on, and we had this history of apps and database, but that’s actually a benefit. Sometimes I would also get the question, “Why should we think of you as more than a database company?” I would explain, “I want you to think of Oracle as one of the most powerful data companies in the world. That’s what we do and that’s your biggest challenge. We know how to manage data better than anyone, and we’ve built our cloud with that knowledge and that experience,” and that’s pretty exciting.
We also work with our team to also say, “It’s really more than a database,” as people would say that it’s a data platform with exceptional capabilities, AI embedded in our latest version. Things that people are going out and acquiring separately, it’s all in there. It’s just a matter of awareness and letting people understand what really you get in our apps and our database, and then how that works so well in our cloud because it was built for it. We talk a lot about Oracle on Oracle. When you take what that footprint is from decades and you run it in our cloud, it’s an exceptional product and it’s much easier. We’ve got all these sales incentives around it in terms of bring your own license and other things that we’ve built for the sales force to have at their fingertips to be able to talk to customers about.
To your earlier point though, really the challenge is we have this great story to tell. Now we just have to get out there and make sure the customers are hearing it, because again, they are busy and that’s not the first thing on their to-do list of the day, which is research what’s going on at Oracle today.
Fred Diamond: Before I ask you about some of the organizational transformation, some of the organizational changes that you’ve had to make, it took 12 minutes to say AI. We track how quickly AI is uttered on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. 12 minutes is actually pretty good. Talk a little bit about you as the leader. Tell us about AI from two perspectives, from how you’re having to communicate it to the customer because of what they need to know and what they’re asking for and what they’re expecting from you. Then secondly, as a business leader, how are you using AI to make your organization, your salespeople better?
Kim Lynch: It goes back to what I said about us being a data company. AI is really the ability to use data faster and more effectively, which really goes back to structuring your data. If you don’t have your data funds structured ready for use, you can’t do AI. That’s where we come into play because there’s no better tool than our Oracle data platform to structure and ready your data for AI. Then we also take the approach to AI that we’re not prescribing one way to do it or one product. We have an integration point with all different products so that there isn’t one solution for AI. We also work with our customers to understand what their data challenges are and then identify the best AI for that problem.
I just recently brought in several AI leaders from across the government space, from different companies that are here to actually go work with our customers on what their AI strategy is and what’s the right implementation. There is no one size fits all, particularly not in the government space. It’s really about understanding the challenges you’re trying to solve and working with them to apply the right type of AI or the right type of data strategy to get to AI depending on where people are at this point.
For me personally, one of the things we’re doing is we actually just did some recent demos on how some of the day-to-day tasks that we’re doing in terms of identifying leads, performance assessments. We’re using AI all the time, it’s already built into our tools and it really helps us get to the decision better. You never take the human out of the loop. Particularly in the federal sector space. It just makes the human be able to have better decision making and better predictive analytics. That’s what I’m really excited about in terms of how we’re approaching AI in the market.
Fred Diamond: Kim, you had just mentioned that you brought some people on from other parts of the industry. I want to let people know that one of the designations that the Institute for Excellence in Sales is proud of is our Premier Women in Sales Employer designation. Oracle achieved that in 2023. Congratulations. Give a pitch, if you don’t mind. If you were pitching somebody on coming to Oracle right now, someone at a senior level and someone at a junior level, maybe somebody out of school or maybe first job out of school, what would be your message to them to come to Oracle at this particular time to be in sales?
Kim Lynch: Being in sales at Oracle, particularly in my business area right now, is like being at a startup with decades of history supporting you and infrastructure behind you. You get to really put your fingerprints on how we’re going to market, what those strategies are, the partnering opportunities, and how we really are engaging with customers differently around cloud. Being at the forefront of this wave is a pretty exciting time. It’s a great learning experience too because as we all know, when you’re starting up a new product line and you have a lot of challenges to get the market open, once you get it open, it’s just the most exciting time because you’ve seen all of the hard work that you’ve done working through, especially in the government business where we have not only ATOs but onboarding. We’re right at that point now where we’re out there being able to sell our cloud, seeing the impact it’s having in the mission, and it’s a pretty exciting time, and everything’s just white space at this point. That’s a good place to be.
Fred Diamond: Is there some resistance that you’re facing internally with people who’ve been with the company for a long time? Oracle’s one of the companies in the IT world that’s been around, I don’t know, is it 50 years now Oracle’s been around? There’s probably been some people who’ve been there for multiple decades, maybe even scores. There’s this shift, has that been a challenge? There must be a lot of gravity within Oracle to be who we were kind of a thing. Talk about that from a cultural perspective and you coming in as the fresh leader, how have you seen that as your challenge to get people unstuck if they’re stuck?
Kim Lynch: Well, as we know, change is always hard. Changes to the status quo can sometimes be seen as uncertain and we as humans like certainty. But I’ve worked for many leaders who always said, if you’re not evolving, you’re not growing. You have to change to be able to evolve and grow. The most important thing in our business is to be able to get customer impact and grow, and change gets us ahead of that. The opposite of change is actually much scarier. That’s when you stagnate, if you’re not doing new things or you’re not changing the business. That’s actually more of a threat. But as humans, we perceive change as a threat, which is interesting.
One of the things I did do is reorganize, as Safra has done across the company, really around a customer-centric approach to the business, where we weren’t selling product lines to the same customer. We were organized around the customer and using our different products to support them in their mission. Coming at it as a customer mission set problem first, and then finding the solution based on our products instead of taking our products and just trying to fit each of them individually to solve a challenge. We are coming with a much more layered and integrated approach.
I think getting everyone on board with customer success at the root of everything we do, is a much easier way to get people on board with, yes, it’s not that we aren’t focusing on one particular product line, it’s not that there’s winners and losers in how we’re going to market. It’s that we’re evolving for the future, we’re evolving to keep pace, and we’re evolving to really grow in new ways. I think that is the way to make it less scary for everyone who doesn’t necessarily like change.
Fred Diamond: How has the customer response been? You’re in the federal government space. One of the VPs of sales that I once interviewed on the Sales Game Changers Podcast called selling into the federal space the NFL. Every company of technology that’s of any purport is selling to the government. As a matter of fact, I’m doing today’s interview in Northern Virginia, Oracle’s about two miles from my house, and IBM and Salesforce, and Microsoft, every other company of purport is competing on this space. It’s a great space for a couple reasons.
One, obviously there’s a huge budget to spend for technology. The mission is huge with the government. But talk about some of the long-term customers, how’s the response been? Are they embracing everything you’re telling them? It’s a challenging customer because there’s so much risk on the line. Again, military, defense, health and human services, infrastructure. Give us a little bit of insight on that.
Kim Lynch: Because of that risk and because of those challenges, we know that the sales cycle in the government business is much longer than what our commercial colleagues operate in. We know that all of our products need to be rigorously tested and accredited and follow through the government processes, which is not always the quickest in terms of getting the latest technologies in our customer’s hands. But those of us that are in this business know the importance of doing all of that and understanding that timeline so that we are not talking about months in terms of our sales cycle. We’re talking years and you work through the processes and what you’re shaping today, the seeds you’re planting will be what you grow in the next several quarters, if not next fiscal year. That’s how it operates.
But to your other point, it’s very important because you’re supporting this most critical mission. Once you are supporting the government and you’re through those processes and you’re accredited, then you have a great market to be in and you can continue to sell and continue to work through those customer engagements to get more users. There’s a real benefit to being in this business, but there is a much longer sales cycle. It is great when you have people who move from the commercial sector into the public sector government business because they can really bring some of the latest and greatest, and we’d like to rotate our folks through to get that. But then they also have to understand, this is a marathon, not a sprint in terms of the sales cycle that we go after.
Fred Diamond: What would be your advice right now for sales professionals, maybe three to four years into their career? You’re also a champion for women in sales. I mentioned that Oracle is an IES Premier Women in Sales Employer. Just give us a couple bits of advice that you would give our listeners. What would be your guidance to them to have a successful career in sales?
Kim Lynch: I think one of the most important things is to continually work on a growth mindset and the art of the possible. I think all of us have moments of self-doubt where we think, “Oh my gosh, can I pull this off? Can I do this?” Really that growth mindset, the believing in yourself, that is one of the most important building blocks in a successful career in sales. Because if you believe that you can achieve it, and you set a plan, and you work really hard, you will. But if you focus on all of the things that could go wrong, or have moments of self-doubt that you don’t want to take action because you’re afraid of failure, then it won’t be successful. You have to work through that and make sure you believe in yourself, believe in your ideas, work hard, but also really focus on the positive outcome and not let the noise of self-doubt or other distractions get in the way of success. I think that’s one of the critical things to focus on.
Fred Diamond: The IES has a big award event every year, and we give out a Lifetime Achievement Award. Our second recipient was a guy named Jay Nussbaum, who actually ran Oracle public sector a couple decades ago. He’s best of memory, may he rest in peace. But one thing we talk a lot about is a lot of the people who worked for him at Oracle would always say that his mantra was be bold. It fits in exactly with what you just said. There may be fear, but you got to keep moving. I think what Oracle’s done to make the transformation, and I really appreciate your laying it out for us, from database and apps into the cloud has been quite remarkable, and the market’s shown it, and the customer base has proven that. I know it’s going to be an exciting couple years for you moving forward.
I want to thank Kim Lynch for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. I want to thank Oracle, of course, for being a IES Premier Women in Sales Employer. Kim, give us an action step. You’ve given us so many great ideas. Give us something specific listeners should do right now after listening to today’s show to take their sales career to the next level.
Kim Lynch: Be in the market, be with your customers. I’m going to a customer foundation event tonight. I’m out there all the time. It’s the best way to develop that customer trust, to be able to understand their challenges. Being with them, walking the hallways, it’s so important. I think for all of us, the engagement with customers, you can’t over engage. That’s critical.
Fred Diamond: That is great advice. Once again, I want to thank Kim Lynch for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo