John Linton ....and the largest container carrier I have ever seen is being gingerly guided away from its wharf to leave the harbour which, end to end as it is spun round, seems to almost touch the wharves on either side in the half light. I have completed 3 days of the review and should be able to complete the remaining items before lunch today - with a bit of luck. I think we have made some sensible decisions which should help us to achieve the SL company targets over the coming months but, as with all planning that involves human beings only time will tell what the actual results will be. During the review so far we have agreed to increase the staffing here by another nine people which will take the personnel establishment over 60 people for the first time.
The other significant change we have agreed to make is to turn the focus from being almost almost purely a support centre to becoming far more a sales operation by steadily building up an outbound sales force that will become an integral part of the process of selling business services to Australian companies working in conjunction with the Australian based personnel. We will continue to support residential sales enquirers in Columbo (and will increase the number of people doing that from 10 to 12) but our major personnel growth plans are to develop our outbound sales activities in Sri Lanka over the coming months.
We started to build an outbound sales force in Colombo in November of last year when one of our Australian corporate supervisors went to conduct the start up training for the first two people. Since then we have added a further three people who have been trained by the initial two. We will send one of the best corporate sales reps before the end of this month to teach them how the Sydney corporate sales staff cold call and qualify businesses for EOC and Fibre data links and how to sell smaller businesses our ADSL based business services (email and web hosting and VoIP, mobile and HSPA services). Before Clare arrives in Colombo we hope to have at least one more outbound sales person and may be two others either then or shortly after.
Our current plans are to 'twin' one SL based sales person with each of the Sydney based sales rep who will work in tandem identifying small and large businesses who might be able to buy Exetel's services - the small businesses initially being handled by the SL sales people and as they learn more handling the smaller bigger data services (EOC) with the Sydney based sales people only selling fibre services. That's the long term plan but, clearly, we are only at the very, very early stages and I have no view as to the time frame we could complete this sort of program or whether it is in fact actually possible.
What I do know is that the smaller business market place will not be able to be addressed via the very high cost processes that are in place today in Exetel's competitors and the current upheavals in the residential markets will plague the small and medium business markets in the not too distant future. As Exetel foresaw what has happened in the residential ADSL marketplaces over the past two years so we see similar changes in the small business and medium business markets this year and certainly next year. Almost all of the current suppliers to the business marketplaces have customer bases that are being charged ludicrously high prices for very basic services and are going to find themselves facing the problem that companies like Exetel will continue to offer faster services at half the price to those customers who will then turn round to their current suppliers to match or beat the Exetel offers.....
....and that will be just the start of their problems.....
...because they will have to use their equally high priced, vastly over paid, sales forces to 'waste time' trying to persuade their own customer base to stay with them at half of the revenue they are receiving today. Not a sensible business scenario but the 'reward' for ripping off their customers over the years and getting fat, dumb but happy on over charging for "business grade" simple data links.
At least we have addressed all of those sorts of issues in anticipation of sweeping changes in the business data link marketplaces.
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