John Linton ....than offering undeliverable terabyte ADSL plans.....(personally I have never understood that simile/metaphor but it will do).
When we started Exetel we had no sales capability except for our web site. That remained the case for well over five years. While we certainly took 'sales enquiry calls' and replied to sales enquiry emails we only employed engineers in telephone support to carry out those functions. When we opened the Exetel operation in Colombo we changed that methodology and began to employ people specifically to answer residential sales telephone and email enquiries and gradually built up that function to the point that today we have nine people (spread over the three shifts) and will probably increase that number over the coming months as the current sales personnel each make a considerable number of sales each month with several selling over 100 connections this month.
Similarly, in Australia, we had only one 'corporate' sales person for the first five years of our existence plus the corporate section of the web site to 'tell our story'. Even when we were totally unknown (and we are still not very well known today) we managed to sell several 'business circuits' each month and in some good months the 'several' reached double figures. As with the Sri Lankan operation we changed that methodology in March 2009 when we began building a corporate sales force that was based on outbound selling methods using very bright graduates. That has been as successful in its different way as the Sri Lankan inbound residential sales program (though it hasn't developed as fast as I had hoped) and has now averaged above fifty new sales per month for the past 12 months including some surprisingly large sales to surprisingly large companies.
We also have a 'business section' of our web site that has ADSL1 and ADSL2 plans aimed specifically at business users (including in the price a range of hosting services) as well as some attractive business mobile plans and the SMS and FAX via IP services. With no promotional effort on our part these services are slowly growing in numbers each month with many of the buyers using the full range of services. It seems logical that we should make more effort in 'selling' to this small business market which accounts for such a large proportion of all Australian business (by number if not by turnover) as we now have a full range of fully integrated services for small businesses and, subject to review, each service is much better priced than any competitors and far better integrated with a really good 'back end control panel'.
As we already have a 'qualified' data base of some 20,000 companies that we have called and found to be too small for our 'corporate' services it seems logical to call them again and see if they would be interested in our 'small business' services. We have a logical source of sales people who have spent up to 18 months familiarising themselves with our residential services and it wouldn't take much to train them in the business specific services. All we need is a competent sales supervisor and we probably can build a small business customer base much faster than we are, currently, building the corporate customer base.
So we will 'go down this road' as it seems to me that it allows us to use many of the advantages we have created over the years we have been operating to better effect than we can in the purely residential marketplaces that have allowed us to build the capabilities we now have 'at our disposal'. From the little I've seen to date the suppliers of 'small business' communication services rip off that sector of the marketplace to the same extent they rip off the corporate markets - mega high pricing for not very much at all.The key to its success, as with everything else in business, will be the person who creates and manages the venture.
It will be an interesting and almost certainly exciting new initiative.
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