John Linton
......to achieve 'impossible' objectives.
We reached a 'mile stone' yesterday in our project to develop a business sales force to build our business revenue to 50% of total revenue by December 2010. When we commenced this project in February 2009 we knew it would be unbelievably difficult to get anywhere close to our target because, as everyone in this industry who has been involved in building sales forces would know, it takes 'forever' to acquire and train 40 top performing business sales people and find the management and engineering and marketing support that such a sales force requires - let alone having the products that would allow even a 'super sales force' to take to a set of intensely competitive markets. The magnitude of the difficulty of that objective is difficult to over state.
However, like all major objectives, it is really only a matter of deciding that it is in fact possible (no matter how difficult) and then to plan in detail how to achieve it before you start. Once you start then it is only a matter of time as to whether you are going to achieve the objective by having sensible measurements in place to see if your progress is tracking to plan. Very simple when described like that. Or the simple numbers were that it would 'only' take 40 sales people selling an average of 20 new business connections each per month to develop a customer base of 10,000 customers which if the average spend was $A1,000 per month it would mean that you would have a business revenue of $A10,000,000 a month which is comfortably far larger than our planned monthly revenue from residential customers would be in 13 months time.
We recruited our first, straight from university, 'trainee' in February and we recruited our ninth trainee in September. In October these nine people (whose average time in the data communications industry is 5 months and whose average age is 23) sold 54 Ethernet or SHDSL connections - an average of 6 per sales person with every one of them making a contribution to those results roughly in line with their time with Exetel). Our first major 'mile stone' was to sell 50 services in the month of October which was achieved shortly after 4 pm yesterday.
It is, of course, just the first small step along an incredibly difficult path but it is simply that the first step has been achieved that is the key deeply satisfying aspect of yesterdays result.
In my career in IT (that seems now to stretch back through the mists of technology time to the primeval ooze of the first computers ever seen in Australia) I have been a part of such a program as the one now being undertaken by Exetel 5 times in different ways. The first stretches back to the early 1970s when I built what was then regarded as the best new business sales team that IBM Australia had seen up to that time - of course I had no part in selecting the members of that team - that was a function of 'Personnel" as HR was called in those long ago days. However it was my first experience of developing a team from 'scratch' that outperformed, by far, every other sales team within IBM Australia three years in a row. My second and subsequent experiences built on that first experience gradually developing what I had learned and with the first major challenge in that I selected all personnel from my next position onwards and continued to participate in one on one training and development and, of course, learned to appoint successful 'sales managers' and then branch managers to make it possible to handle multiple sales teams and the support and engineering services necessary in multiple locations. Over that time I think I have learned the 'secret' of recruiting effectively and the 'secret' of training people effectively with a 100% success rate.
Each of those achievements, in their very different ways, gave me a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction at the time and each one of them taught me a great deal about managing sales personnel. The current 'project' is of infinitely greater importance to me because it will be the last time I attempt something of this nature and magnitude and a great deal of any future success enjoyed by Exetel in the residential markets we address depends on it being done perfectly and on time. Achieving the first mile stone was therefore a very significant event for me personally as well as to the members of the sales team and their manager who performed so well, both individually and as a team, to make it happen.
Whether we can continue to recruit and train as effectively as we have over the past eight months is, of course, unknown and the group dynamics of the sales team will now begin to change more rapidly and will, by necessity, have to become in almost every way quite different in the second year than they have been so far over the first 8 months of the first year. But that is what generates the excitement of participating in ambitious projects and the satisfaction if the ambitions are met.
It will be difficult to reach the next significant mile stone of 150 monthly sales at an average of ten sales per person in March 2010 with the December/January 'slow down' but anything planned and executed well enough is always possible.