John Linton .....possibly even more so than the fictional Hannibal Smith. This particular plan has been three plus years in the making and everybody I talked to about it said it would never work.
We achieved a small, but very important mile stone yesterday. We made the first corporate sale (to a very large Australian business icon) from our new methodology of 'pairing' a Colombo based sales person with a Sydney based sales person. The Colombo based sales person does the cold calling to find Australian businesses who are out of contract for their data links and passes it to a Sydney based person to follow up the lead and submit the proposal and the required clarifications. We did the initial training earlier in February by sending a Sydney based sales person to Colombo to show the people there how to use the data base and how to make the approach calls. She obviously did a very good job and the success of her training and the quality/skills of the Sri Lankan sales personnel who were trained have borne out the decision to take this approach very, very quickly.
Of course, one sale does not mean that the program is now successful - but every program has to have a start and this 'start' has been achieved very, very quickly. We have currently trained ten SL sales people to contact a 60,000 company data base in the initial phase of this program which is aimed at, eventually, contacting 1,000,000 Australian businesses (from BHP/CBA type size down to home based start ups) and selling the full range of Exetel's business services either, as in this case by 'partnering' with an Australian corporate sales person or directly when they become more knowledgeable and the circumstances make direct selling achievable.
Exetel's most knowledgeable VoIP person is in Colombo at the moment doing two weeks of intensive training on Exetel's low end VoIP services so that the SL sales people can sell such services directly when they call smaller companies. To those smaller companies who would never consider a corporate EOC or fibre data link they will also sell Exetel's business ADSL and hosting services. At least that's the plan. As the majority of the current out bound sales personnel have developed their skills and knowledge via spending time in the inbound sales operation they have a very high level of knowledge of Exetel's ADSL services and also quite considerable knowledge of other Australian ISP's ADSL offerings.
There is nothing really 'new' in what Exetel is now trying to do in Sri Lanka other than the quality of the people being trained, the target marketplaces and the sophistication of the services - perhaps. However the overall approach is somewhat different and, if it successful on an ongoing basis, the size of the operation will be very large. I don't think a sales force aiming at signing some relatively significant percentage of Australia's business data users has been attempted before, though I could be wrong, and if it has it doesn't seem to have been very successful in making itself evident.
I am under no illusion as to how difficult it is going to be to make this happen over the coming three years but if every journey has to start with the first step then yesterday we made the first step - 1 down - 999,999 to go.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
ABN 350 979 865 46