John Linton The week finished on a high with good contributions by some of our newer sales people allowing us to 'sail past' the corporate August quota with a full three days to go and some hope of setting a new record for monthly new corporate sales. Mobile sales will also pass the pretty tough targets set for them which for a company that has never made more than a few hundred net new sales in any month over the past seven years is really good to see.Surprisingly, residential ADSL sales will reach a post Telstra win back campaign high and our other smaller revenue contributing services are all above the August targets set for them. So with the week end plus three full 'working days' to go we will have a record August - following a record July - a good way to start the year particularly when you are planning to take the vast majority of September off.
I had a pleasant end to the week being invited to lunch by the CEO of one of Exetel's major suppliers. As expected the major topic of conversation was how we could do more business together in these strange days of a possible new government residential telecommunications monopoly and how that might affect 'corporate' business assuming it lasts in its currently proposed form beyond the next election (whenever that might be). Neither of us thought the impact of the 'NBN2' would have any effect at all on corporate business even assuming the current Labor government gained some sort of legitimacy after the next federal election and stumbled on with its announced plans. The only issue that has to be seriously considered is what sort of time frame might exist in physically closing down Telstra capital city exchanges and/or removing the copper infrastructures on which business/corporate EOC services depend.
Exetel has done quite well over the past two years in selling business customers 10/20/30/40 mbps services using multiple copper pairs and our sales of these services increases month on month. It will be three years this December that Exetel made the decision to build a business/corporate sales force and we hired the first four sales trainees in early March 2009. Since that time we have gradually built the business sales force to 24 people in North Sydney and a further 12 people in Colombo who between them sell over 100 medium/medium large business services a month and have now begun to sell small business services with the objective of achieving 1,000 sales per month by Q1 in 2012.
We discussed how our supplier could help us speed up the growth in monthly sales of larger data connections - something they and Exetel are anxious to do over the coming year. We agreed that we would work together to sign off on a joint investment plan with the aim of increasing medium/medium large corporate data sales from the current levels to 500 sales per month by Q3 2012 and then to 1,000 a month by Q3 2013. Exetel is almost two and a half years into 'proofing' the 'blue print' of how this could be achieved but we lack the financial resources to make it happen in such a time frame. If a much larger supplier actually was prepared to make the financial investments required via a joint venture then the possible time frames could be made to happen.
As with all ambitious plans there are many quite difficult scenarios to be dealt with. However, like all plans that are based on clearly defined, and realistic, opportunities and are also based on executable processes that can't be copied by current or future competitors it is only a matter of adequate funding and management skills to make them happen. Exetel, has demonstrated that it can sell these sorts of services better than any other company in the medium/medium large business marketplace out selling, in terms of orders placed per month, the much larger wholesale customers of two of three of our current major providers and being told we are growing faster in selling these services than all other customers of the third.
Perhaps it is too ambitious to think that a company of Exetel's size could become a very large, perhaps the largest, supplier of communications services to Australian business but I really don't see any major difficulty in doing that (the current suppliers are so truly awful) if the financing costs can be put in place....and of course if we can continue to grow the required management capabilities
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