John Linton The week since we returned from Sri Lanka has passed in the proverbial 'flash'....as I suppose it does for any busy person n any occupation.
The major activity of the week was the 'launch' of the change from providing mobile services to Exetel customers from Vodafone's network to the Optus network. This was a very complex set of processes and not all of them have been completed though the first 80 or so orders from existing Exetel customers have been processed and the first orders from new customers began to be processed on Friday afternoon when the first of nine order forms went live. Far too early to say how this difficult decision will work out but we will keep a close eye on what happens over the balance of October.
Another major time demand was the re-vamping of the smaller business services in terms of the individual services themselves and the pricing and support of them. This 'project' will take some weeks to complete particularly as to how the 'consulting' services are provided and how support is built in to the different products and services. We had several brief meetings and have begun on the changes to the web site in draft form and will make some of the more interesting decisions next week. In the mean time the first small business hosting 'package' was sold by one of the newly appointed 'out bound' business sales reps in Sri Lanka yesterday.
We also began the processes required to more rapidly develop the growth of our volume of VoIP business customers and we completed the development of the second version of the customer control facilities for the rapidly increasing in popularity Hosted PABX service we have been offering for the past few months - it is a beautiful and elegant piece of software. The marketplace for providing a whole range of VoIP services to small and medium sized businesses is immense - almost certainly the greatest opportunity in today's Australian communication marketplaces - and we need to move much faster than we are at the moment. We will begin the personnel recruiting process next week in Australia and also devise a new sales training program for VoIP services for all of our corporate sales personnel to be run in the new calendar year.
October is always a very good month for 'corporate' sales for many reasons. The first half of October has been stronger than any previous month this year and the qualified 'prospect lists' for sales by the end of the month are equally stronger than at any time in the current calendar year. Two of the sales people on lower quotas are already well over 200% for the month and sales are strong across all elements of the sales forces - always something that promotes a cheerful atmosphere around the office.nDepending on how sales go in October we will probably aim to break the record for the most sales made in a month in November......maybe reach three figures for the first time in a single month?
We are beginning to commence our build out of the next phase of the corporate network with orders placed for the first of the high end switches and routers signed off to be done next week - this is to duplicate the PoPs in Melbourne and Brisbanne. We also looked at the preliminary costings for new PoPs in New Zealand, the USA and the EU and will now get firm quotes and begin the process of developing the business plans for each of those locations.
So a lot of work was done which, as usual, just highlighted how much more work needs to be done. That's business life of course which like any other sort of 'life' never has enough time to complete all the required actions in any given day.
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