John Linton ......in a year of interesting months.
despite the various and varied issues that continue to make life more difficult than I remember it being for quite a while the results reported at the weekly sales meeting we hold each Friday were all, and quite evenly across the 'product range' very positive. We split the responsibilities for obtaining our revenue targets across four 'groups':
1) Residential ADSL1 and ADSL2
2) Corporate services
3) Telephone services (including VoIP)
4) Wireless services and SMS
and each group has reached its, pretty tough, May revenue and new business targets. Of course, May is one of the 'best' months of the year for selling pretty much anything in Australia for reasons I have yet to fully understand. Anyway the May results were on or above the planned targets which is always heartening especially when you are finalising new targets for the coming financial year.
One of our key growth areas has been our corporate sales - we have doubled our revenue from corporate business over the past twelve months and are planning to double it again over the coming year. One of the reasons we have been able to do that has been via being the first (?) data provider to offer low cost Ethernet services that replace the aging SHDSL service used by most small and small/medium businesses. These new services are delivered by the carrier installing a 'box' in a local exchange (pretty similar to a non-Telstra provider installing an ADSL2 DSLAM in a Telstra exchange) and aggregating copper PSTN lines in 'groups' to provide Ethernet symmetrical services of up to 20 mbps (and in some circumstances up to 40 mbps) at prices that are, in Telstra and other suppliers cases) more than 50% lower cost than the 2x2 mnps services offered by those suppliers.
Exetel (courtesy of AAPT) have been providing these Ethernet services for the best part of a year now and other providers have also started to offer those services during that time - but they have all had a major problem - they have been ripping off their customers for so long charging prices that are a mark up of 600% to 800% on their costs that they have a problem offering something ten times as fast at 50% below wht their customer base is currently paying. This is clearly illustrated in Telstra's announced prices cited in this article:
http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/networking/39414-telstra-replaces-symmetric-dsl-offeings-with-ethernet
The prices are horrendously high compared to pricing for the identical services offered by Exetel:
http://www.exetel.com.au/large_xdsl_pricing.php
The bulk of Exetel's corporate new business sales each month is now Ethernet over PSTN services (with the remaining 25% coming from fibre services and the occasional SHDSL service where Ethernet is not available). In April we sold a record 60 new Ethernet services and will go close to that figure again by COB next Monday. One of my planning concerns for next year was what new pricing Telstra (and other providers) would offer for Ethernet services and Telstra's published pricing (which I understand they will discount heavily when faced with competitive offers) comes as a 'bonus' - it is so ridiculously high.
I feel more comfortable planning to double our business revenues with Telstra 'out of the game' and hopefully that pricing will encourage the other 'umbrella pricists' to follow the same path (all of them have current revenue bases to protect). To achieve 100% growth at any time is never easy and it will depend on how we can develop our corporate sales and engineering force over the coming months and, of course, how we can structure our 'product offerings' to meet what competitors continue to do.
However these are issues I understand much better than most people we will be competing with.
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