John Linton ......despite what the naysayers continue to aver.
We continue to make progress in building our corporate sales operations in both North Sydney and Colombo adding five new sales trainees in Australia over the past month and six in Sri Lanka. Despite the ongoing insistence of various companies we compete with (made known to us via our major suppliers) that "you can't use silly young girls to deal with corporate IT decision makers" the success our, anything but silly, sales trainees achieve has remained constant throughout the duration of this initiative over the last two years. Of the latest new hires, three of the five have signed their first corporate customers well within their first month of working with Exetel and there is no reason not to believe that they, like 100% of their predecessors, will not achieve their probationary target of ten sales within their first four months of being taught how to present quite complex data communication services to 'old' male IT Managers of quite large Australian companies.
As with every 'new' initiative in commercial life, you have to take a leap of faith and commit to major investment (comparatively) when you do something new and do it differently to what 'accepted practice dictates' is the 'only' way to do things. Such views are nonsensical of course. Progress can never be made in any area of human existence by doing everything in the same ways that were done in the past. If a new 'entrant' to any marketplace tried to do things in the same ways as the established suppliers then they would not even begin to succeed.....all that would happen is that they would waste a great deal of money in achieving nothing. We have a very, very long way to go before I could realistically say that our new approaches to providing data and voice services to business customers is going to meet our very, very ambitious objectives but what I can say is - so far so good.
We had an amazingly strong business customer sales month in December 2010 when we received over 80 new orders for data services - a new record for the business sales teams. We may well go past that 'record' of sales in March if they continue the way they have gone so far with 60 sales made by COB yesterday. However numbers are just a way of 'keeping score' and the reality of growing any business is continually doing things better than the people with whom you are competing. Whether Exetel can do that is only sensibly measured over years - not months. But the 'laws' of sales success haven't changed in over 4,000 years so it is not that difficult to understand what is required to be done - only doing it consistently over a long period of time.
After two years we can consider that the first phase of building a corporate sales and support operation is almost 'complete' if such a word can be applied to any commercial venture in ever changing competitive marketplaces. Our second phase is to develop a parallel sales and support operation in Sri Lanka that becomes ever more closely integrated in to the North Sydney based sales and support teams. This was begun in November 2010 and is making some faster than expected progress. If we can make this work in the ways we envisage over the coming months then that will make a massive difference to what we will be able to achieve over the balance of this calendar year. The investments in personnel, time and money to try and make this happen are very large in our terms but in developing the concepts of providing corporate communications services it seemed the most logical way to go.
It will continue to be very exciting to see if the progress made so far can not just be sustained but accelerated.
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