John Linton It was the most remarkable day for Exetel corporate sales with 14 new sales being made after successive days of 9, 7, 8 and 6 on the previous four days - 44 for the 'week'. Let's hope it's a true sign that our plans to build a highly successful business sales and support force are coming to fruition. Building any kind of sales force, let alone one capable of selling technically complex products to corporate MIS managers, is a very difficult thing to as anyone who has tried to do it would know. Building one of 54 people in three years is something that verges on the 'too difficult'.....but we are one third of the way there now with the last of the current personnel looking like they will successfully complete their probationary period tomorrow (we define probation as making 10 new sales in 3 - 4 months from joining). It was also good to see the 8th of our young sales force make her 50th sale this month with two other already having gone on to make their 100th personal sale.
It is such a remarkable result that it almost convinces me to recommend that we take the extra floor below our current floor to ensure we have no problems in continuing to build the sales force in each month of the coming year. We will run out of space on both Level 5 and Level 9 in the not too distant future. At our recent board meeting mine was the dissenting vote on proceeding with the additional burdens of signing up for and fitting out enough space to double the number of people we employ in North Sydney (almost all of it for additional corporate sales and corporate sales support). I had suggested that we wait and see what the first months of the new calendar year brought in terms of what impact the new sales director would bring and how accurate our sales predictions would be but now I'm not so sure that was the correct decision.
I, along with several other people, spent most of yesterday 'wrestling' with the various issues that are involved with developing new plans and simultaneously 'teaching' more people how to derive the information from our internal sources and to 'research' the external sources to provide sensible base data on which to make decisions. With the ever growing complexity of the different carrier offerings and the historicity they bring to even understanding the bases of the pricing issues with the 'old' plans let alone the new conditions of supply that will affect any new plans that particular task is more difficult to explain than actually carry out. We made some progress even if that progress was that some of the information we were using was wrong and that our decisions to date were invalid.
By the end of today we should have most, if not all, of the work completed on the new plans and then the really hard work on what we need to do regarding the 'old' plans needs to commence 'in earnest' given there is so little time now left before the end of 2010. I have come up with no 'bright' ideas so I hope other people bring more creativity to the meetings today. It is a very difficult thing to do and by leaving old plans from four years ago, and longer, the task is not made any easier. We still have almost 300 (out of a little over 550) of our earliest users on Pioneer Discounts which is very, very good to see - that this very large percentage of our earliest customers are still with us for coming up to seven years in February/March 2011. It may well be time to create a new category of discount for one level down from the original 'pioneers' which seems an odd thing to do when you are try to increase the non-existent profit on those old plans.
It will be a very interesting day.
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