John Linton We had a 'formal' meeting with AAPT yesterday at which we signed a partnership agreement under which Exetel will sell AAPT's small and mid range business services to Australian users via its Colombo based sales and support operations which will be vastly expanded to meet the agreed targets. The costs of doing this will be equally shared between the two companies and Exetel will increase the Colombo sales force to 100 sales consultants by December 2012 under these arrangements and, if the targets under this agreement are met, to 240 sales consultants by December 2013. Currently Exetel sells around 50 AAPT business services each month averaging around $700 per service and these numbers are planned to increase to around 400 new business services per month by December 2012.
We have been developing a business sales force in Colombo for just on a year now with Australian sales personnel visiting Colombo and managing the people that were being transferred to the new operation from residential sales and for the last few months being directly hired in to it. We have been following a slightly adapted 'Australian model' in terms of initial training but we have, obviously not been able to use the highly successful mentoring program that has been such a success in Australia - but a long distance version of it. To date that has worked well with there being no discernible difference in the times taken by the individual sales trainees in Colombo to make the first ten sales they need to get 'off probation'.
The key to the success of this partnership will be, as always, the selection of the correctly skilled and motivated personnel and then the quality of initial and then the ongoing training with the day to day management being the final determining requirement. Can we find 240 people of the right temperament and drive and, most importantly, can we find 25 high performing managers for those people? I don't know at this time. What I do know is that over the past year we have succeeded in meeting each of the targets we have set ourselves in building this operation from ground zero and throughout those early days we have anticipated and correctly dealt with the issues that have arisen. Whether we can continue do that - only time will tell.
Clarissa, Clare and I will go to Colombo to run a 'formal' sales school for the new recruits (plus the 'old hands') in which we will introduce the new ongoing technical and sales training processes that we have begun to put in place. Steve and Annette will also be in Sri Lanka at that time and we will see if we can generate some media coverage of this new program - not because we need any publicity for the program itself but because we need to ensure we get some greater exposure to possible new employees - which we see as being a major issue to be addressed - the number of new employees we need to attract over the coming year is one of the key challenges.
This is a major change for Exetel - both in market place direction and in working with a partner for the first time, in the full sense of that word, to enable us to develop the company much faster than we would be able to do using our own financial and personnel resources. However we have put a lot of thought in to this change and we have tested almost all of the assumptions it is based on.
A brave new world in several respects.
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