John Linton Already half way through the current SL trip and still pretty much on schedule - Annette has done almost 50 reviews in the two days by working very long hours and I have done the parts of the review scheduled for the first two days. I also did my first sales training session in a very long time for the thirty five SL based sales personnel. This kicked off a four hour highly integrated 'sales school' that, from all feed back, was highly successful in achieving its objectives courtesy of Clare and Clarissa's excellent organisation and the two first corporate SL sales reps who ran separate Q and A sessions on how their first 4 months of being a corporate sales consultant had gone so well for them and how they made it all happen. It was all tightly focused and very precise in sticking to Exetel's methods.
We spent most of yesterday on engineering issues - how to improve our hiring, how to improve our knowledge dissemination and how to manage the myriad of new processes we now need to
put in place to successfully deliver the range of new services we
will begin to offer from this month onwards. When you sit down and do the planning for this sort of extension and growth of what you are currently doing you realise how far you have come since setting up the SL operation - immediately followed by how far there is to go and how much more difficult reaching even the lowest of the planned goals/targets it will be due to the ever greater dilution of management capabilities it will be necessary to deal with.
The new sales program for Sri Lanka got away to a good start with four sales being made on the 'first day' including the largest sale ($3,300 per month) being made by an SL sales person. All but one of the new sales people who have been with us for more than a month have now made at least on sale and altogether 72 new customers have been added since the first two SL personnel were 'trained' and all four of the SL sales people who have been with us for three months have 'graduated' form their probationary status by making ten sales (the highest numbers are now 18 and 16 set by the first two people to be trained. A remarkable and highly encouraging achievement. I look forward to the future.
I think today is the 'deadline' for ISPs to sign the new NBNCo contract with every indication, as far as I can make out from the Australian media, that the two largest ISPs (Telstra and Optus) as well as many others having no intention of signing it by today's deadline or at any other time because of "fundamental problems" with the contract as it stands:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/primus-seals-nbn-deal-amid-standoff-20120112-1pwnq.html
Exetel executed and returned the contract when the person responsible for that project returned from his annual holidays earlier this week. There is nothing in the contract that we can see that is not already in wholesale contracts from Telstra and Optus (who rigidly follow Telstra in such matters). Obviously Telstra are teed off that another entity is following its lead by writing contract clauses that it has imposed on its wholesale customers from time immemorial. Does Testra's refusal to sign the wholesale agreement affect anything? Well, yes - it means that there will never be an 'NBN2' - if that status were to be continued....Telstra will either give in or the NBNCo will revise its contract - either way makes absolutely no difference to anyone.
What children these 'executives' are.
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