John Linton
Most weeks in business are interesting but this one was particularly so. While nothing 'Earth Shattering' occurred a whole raft of different things either changed or showed signs of changing. The most obvious thing that happened was that we finished making most of the changes to the ADSL plans which we began at the start of this month. There are still a couple of considerations but all of the major re-positioning work has been done. It is obviously too early to tell exactly what these changes will bring about but the signs over the first three weeks being very positive with a likely record month of ADSL applications and new connections.
The strange growth in ADSL1 applications/connections continues and will be a record of its own if the last week of the month continues to be as strong as the first three weeks - I have no explanation for this very odd phenomena and I have not spent any more time looking in to it since the first week I noticed it. It doesn't appear to be caused by other ISPs "abandoning the market" as the overwhelming majority of the ADSL1 applications are from 'new' users not churns and the one obvious thing is they are mainly from NSW country which could be the answer - that our HSPA advertising has spilled over to making people in NSW regional areas aware of Exetel for the first time. As I said - I simply don't know.
We got new offers for bandwidth during the week from two different companies which were 'Christmas Promotions' but we won't be doing anything about those offers as we have already placed orders for the additional bandwidth needed between now and the end of January and the 'promotional pricing' was only marginally better than the new pricing we have in place. It was interesting to see that our new 'rock bottom pricing' has lasted less than a month before slightly lower pricing becoming avaialable. It makes you wonder what the prices will do throughout 2010 though I do accept that the most recent big price drops were a combination of idle capacity and the big move of the $A against the $US.
There were also signs that there might be some reductions in costs of ADSL2 ports but the information came in at the end of Friday afternoon and I didn't have time to work out what was really being offered so I'll look at that again on Monday.
The 'interesting thing of the week' were some pretty exciting 'promotional offers' from two of our business service suppliers which, unlike most 'promotional offers' were very, very exciting and, although my memory can't be trusted these days, were probably the best 'promotions' I have ever seen - certainly in my Exetel days but probably at any time in my 'career'. Those offers should make our very young business sales force very, very happy between now and the end of January and I know if i was a sales person I would be very sure that Christmas had come very early this year. Of course the offers will also have been made to the two suppliers other wholesale customers and it will be interesting to see what they do with them so we will have to be very quick off the mark to make the most of these amazing discounts - and without being boring they really are amazing. I can only wonder what has lead to this, in some cases, almost 50% price cuts on a service that is already very easy to 'sell'.
I have been delighted with the rapid development of the business sales force over the past 8 months and hired a tenth graduate last week. Of the nine graduates already hired six have already passed their probation period quickly and one more is within shouting distance of doing the same while the other two show every sign of doing so before Christmas......this latest amazing offer should make that a certainty. Our plan is to grow the business sales force to around 42 by this time next year but that plan was heavily dependent on the innovative recruiting and training processes proving to be successful and the very aggressive sales success benchmarks being achieved which everyone I spoke to telling me they were impossible. (to pass probation for instance the trainee had to make ten business data sales; 1 in the first month, 2 in the second, three in the third and four in the fourth). Totally unrealistic I was told - the first 6 trainees all made that target in around three months with the quickest being 2 months.
Whether we can produce the same sort of results another 32 times is of course an unknown quantity but I am more confident of being able to achieve this having seen the novel selection and training program we put in place work so effectively to date. It is in fact essential that we do get it right and make the targets we have set happen because, as I said yesterday (and so many tmes before) the current actions of the Labor government have caused chaos in the residential marketplaces already and will cause even more as Labor gets ever more desperate over the coming months leading up to the next Federal election.
So an interesting week. I'm going to finish breakfast and head of to Canberra now - I'm not sure I will be able to post a blog tomorrow as I'm not sure I will have access to the internet.