The Master File Update Program
WMMM #103 - This week, I share how trust can be built in a most unexpected way.
Jeff Keplar Newsletter August 16, 2025 4 min read
They have to know us before they can trust us.
They have to trust us before they will do business with us.
Know Me?
19-year Oracle veteran.
Enterprise sales leader.
76 quarters responsible for delivering growth numbers with a public company.
Thousands of repetitions leading sales cycles with Fortune 500 accounts.
A kid from a working-class family in the Midwest.
Peoria, IL - center of the country.
Corn fields as far as the eye can see.
A one-horse town - Caterpillar Tractor Company.
Peoria has more in common with Iowa or Missouri than it does with Chicago.
One-story ranch-style homes built in the late 1950s, creating the suburbs.
An entire youth lived in the same home, a half-block from my elementary school.
A married couple with children lived in nearly every home on my block, and the next one over, and so on.
An abundance of playmates and pick-up games.
Plenty of playgrounds, basketball courts, and baseball diamonds.
Got a paper route in 5th grade. Became a paperboy.
I’ve had a job ever since.
Put myself through college.
Major Influences in My Life
My mother’s unconditional love and support.
My father’s work ethic.
A Christian upbringing.
Learning computer programming in college.
My first full-time adult job at Dr Pepper in Dallas, TX as a COBOL programmer.
My switch from technical to sales with Wang Laboratories.
Getting married and starting a family.
Taking a step back in my career progression to join Oracle.
What area of my background helps me today?
Advisor to Founders, investors, and sales leaders on selling technology to enterprise companies.
Coach to salespeople on how to compete better and accelerate growth.
What does one of my clients value?
My first full-time adult job at Dr Pepper in Dallas, TX as a COBOL programmer.
Not kidding.
He values it a great deal.
The Master File Update Program
When I was beginning my career, a “rite of passage” for COBOL programmers was the Master File Update program.
In that era, businesses relied heavily on COBOL to manage their core records.
One of the classic programming tests was to build a Customer Master File Update program, because customer data was the heart of operations—billing, credit, and sales all depended on it.
This program tested all the skills a COBOL programmer was expected to have:
File handling (sequential file I/O).
Control breaks and ordering logic.
Conditional processing (branching for add/change/delete).
Data validation (checking for missing IDs, duplicate adds, and invalid deletes).
Reporting (audit trail for business users).
If you could write a correct, efficient Customer Master File Update, you proved you had the fundamentals to work in real business environments.
The task required one to solve several little wrinkles that were not obvious at the outset.
Anyone who thought they could sit down and write a correct Customer Master File update program in a single sitting (first try) had a big surprise coming their way.
For starters, the Customer Master was a sequential access file.
That meant you couldn’t jump around randomly to find a customer record the way you can in a modern database — you had to read records in order, one after the other.
If you wanted to update record #645, you couldn’t “seek” directly to it.
You had to process records 1 through 644 first.
This minor detail introduced the concept of sorting your files before processing.
If the transaction file wasn’t sorted:
You might try to “change” a customer before you’d read their record.
You might insert new records out of order, breaking the sequential file structure.
You’d risk duplications, missed updates, or have to scan the entire master file repeatedly for each transaction (which was infeasible with tape storage).
Another wrinkle was the type of action requested.
A user could add a new Customer, change the attributes of an existing one, or delete a Customer.
So each record of the transaction file had to have a transaction code: A, C, or D.
If users submitted multiple actions for one Customer, it was a best practice to have a sequence number.
This allowed you to sort the transactions to keep them in the original order submitted by the end users.
This wrinkle likely doesn’t make sense to most of us today.
Why?
Because, in those days, we used batch processing.
Online updating was only in its infancy.
Why this Matters to the CEO of an Innovative Cybersecurity Company
He has built a company of key individuals with enterprise software and cybersecurity backgrounds.
While he has invited me to help them with enterprise clients, he has told me he trusts my systems approach to problem-solving.
He told me that I am joining a peer group that understands the origins of every enterprise application architecture found in the Fortune 1000.
Of course, he knows me well from my years in sales with Oracle.
And he values that experience.
But he says that my technical background sets me apart from others.
You could have knocked me over with a feather.
I would not have guessed that.
This is yet another example of the value of developing relationships with active listening skills.
Lessons Learned
1) Influence can originate from the most unlikely of sources.
2) Never underestimate the value of getting to know someone.
3) Being authentic can produce surprising outcomes.
Thank you for reading,
Jeff
When you think “sales leader,” I hope you think of me.
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I offer my help to investors, founders, sales leaders, and their teams.
I possess the skills identified in this article and share them as part of my service.
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