John Linton It's a quarter to six in the morning and our plane leaves at seven. We have spent most of a day in Singapore due to our flight from Colombo missing the 7 am flight by half an hour despite leaving at 1 am in the morning. It is never unpleasant to spend a day in Singapore which, next to Tokyo, must be the cleanest and brightest city in the world. We didn't do much except walk to the new casino with the ship on top of its three towers and do a bit of shopping. Due some quirk of fate/undeserved reward the hotel allocated us a huge suite (and I mean huge) with a full sized lounge room, huge dining room, bedroom as large as I've ever seen plus two bathrooms, dressing room and kitchen!
We will get back to Australia in today's early evening and 'digest' what we have planned for Sri Lanka over the coming months - to improve the way the Australian residential 'marketing' works and to begin a new approach to the SME marketplaces we have acquired without any real effort. We have some 4,000 SME customers and we have not really attempted to provide those users with the obvious facilities for a small business user other than by default. We will now make a much greater effort because it seems simpler to provide more facilities that our competitors would find it difficult to do than to continue trying to compete with 'terabyte' plans for $A30.00 a month or whatever they will become before Christmas.
I was informed yesterday that we had sold our 500th EOC business service (in addition to the fibre and SHDL services we sell where EOC is not available - only 120 or so exchanges). That is a pretty remarkable effort for a company of our size and, subject to checking with our supplier, I would think that's more than anyone else has accomplished including the supplier's own business sales teams.....I must find out for sure. It's a very solid example of what can be accomplished when you see the writing on the wall for a major aspect of your business and plan to address that issue. If we hadn't attempted, and largely succeeded in building a corporate sales force things wouldn't look too bright for Exetel right now. Corporate sales, although it's in its 'infancy' for Exetel is now producing more 'profit' than residential sales and is in fact supporting the pricing of the very low/unprofitable depths residential pricing has reached - without corporate sales we possibly wouldn't still be in the residential business.
Some things to further consider on the flight home are just how we will now build our SME business in similar ways to which we we built our corporate business. We can't do it in the same way but we can attempt to do it it in different ways.....using the Sri Lanka company personnel and the knowledge we have built up over the past few years in both 'marketing' and the services that are valuable to small businesses - VoIP, SMoIP, FoIP, SMS via keyboard etc - which our competitors aren't able to supply as seamlessly as we can. Food for thought as to just how to make this happen......
....then again I have an awful habit of just sleeping through any length flight.
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