John Linton
From 'Day One' Exetel has based and grown its business on using a web site for all aspects of selling its products and services. While we have had, for much of the past four years, a 'sales' number that people could call that number was always answered by engineers who were part of the support structure - we have never had 'sales personnel' nor, Heaven forbid, a 'sales manager' and absolutely no 'marketing manager' or marketing personnel.
We get around 200 'residential sales' enquiries each day at the moment which is about a 30% increase over previous months due to the recent release of naked ADSL (which we obviously haven't explained well enough on the web site). The majority of sales calls usually consist of someone reading the details from one of the web pages and then saying "is that right". However we worked out over time that our residential sales increased by approximately 15% if we had a sales number than when we took away that facility for 9 months.
We built our 'corporate' business without having any 'sales people' with all contacts from prospective and then actual customers being dealt with by the network engineers who did the installation and maintenance of the corporate services. As our larger business customer base grew we did assign a person who wasn't an engineer (but had been a part time support person during university vacations for us since our early days) to look after those customer's requests and to provide prospective customers with information and we have recently added a second person as we increase the emphasis on accelerating the speed at which we grow our corporate business and the diversity of services we offer.
As someone who has been in sales as a rep for ten years then as a manager of increasing 'seniority' for most of the rest of the time I've been in this industry I have been fascinated and then amazed at just how well a web site based sales program can perform versus a 'feet on the street' sales force. While millions of other people around the globe have seen the potential and then implemented a web based sales operation long before I did, I first began to see the potential for this amazing resource only in the late 1990s. It has been an eye opening experience for me to see how Exetel has grown from ground zero to over $A3 million a month based on a web site and some associated web based processes.
I was reminded of another benefit of web based marketing over the past ten days as I've had some 'catch up with you for Christmas' conversations with people I've known in 'past lives'. As Exetel is planning to now make a significant investment in rapidly building the percentage of 'corporate' customers to total customers over the next two years we have to put a 'sales force' in place for the first time.
I have no reservations about doing that having built sales forces from the ground up several times in my working life to date but one thing I never liked (and have been forcibly reminded of during recent conversations with old 'colleagues') is the problem of saying goodbye (firing/dismissing/showing the door/giving the heave ho) to the one category of working personnel in commercial enterprises who have glaringly obvious targets that even the most hard working and competent person can miss.
Perhaps I've grown too used to only dealing with making changes to web pages and text and pricing that produce the order streams that Exetel needs to survive and grow to remember the very real pain of advising a sales person that they're no longer required. I don't recall having to do that very often but I very vividly recall that I really hated the process and never came close to getting used to those situations. According to the people I've been talking with over the past week or so it is something that occurs more often than it used to with many sales forces having 'attrition rates' in excess of 30% a year even after very rigorous selection processes.
Apart from the disruption caused each time any employee is asked to leave a commercial organisation the waste of money and loss of 'momentum' in the 'territory' affected are very expensive.
So I need to find a sales force of around 8 - 10 people over the coming months and, more importantly, find ways of not having to hire and then having to fire any of them. My conversations with people I've known who are still managing all or some aspects of sales forces in the technology marketplaces are not very encouraging. While I could take some comfort in the arrogant assumption that I was always better at developing and managing sales forces that achieved really good results than anyone else I ever knew - I won't be doing that; partly because I haven't managed a sales force for a while (losing much of the required in depth up to date knowledge and skills) and partly because I think times have changed a great deal.
Maybe its old age manifesting itself in yet another way - at least when I 'terminated' a non-performing web page there was no personal or collateral damage.