John Linton .....to the end of this very challenging fourth month of this financial year. It is some sort of sign of the difficulties of the times when you start looking at business life a day at a time. Yesterday was a very productive day with all aspects of the business, even ADSL2, making more progress than at any time this month and business data services powering towards its best monthly result in 2010 to date. We should reach our planned October overall revenue target either late today or early tomorrow which will be an excellent achievement after the 'slow' start to the month and the current situation in many of the markets in which we operate.
We even started to put the initial parts of our planning for the second six months of this financial year in place yesterday. That was determining just how we would re-organise our sales operations in 2011 moving further from our inbound web based sales approaches to a multiple outbound sales organisation in residential, small business and corporate markets. Of course, it's one thing to make decisions on structures and quite a different proposition to then put the people in place who will make that work in the ways you want it to let alone then acquire the additional people required to meet the new, much higher, sales targets. However every new initiative begins with the plan and then the people and then the training and finally the delivery - so we have made the first of the many decisions that will be required to make the planned progress in the coming new calendar year.
One of the decisions we have yet to make is whether we continue with our, to date very successful, policy of hiring university graduates and undertaking the 'burdens' of helping them develop from their 'tabla rasa' state of understanding and knowledge of working in a profession or whether we 'leaven' that intake with some experienced sales people. We are getting an increasing number of unsolicited resumes from 'experienced' people who work in the industry who give various reasons for seeking a job with Exetel - the two most recent ones from people who work for competitors who continue to lose their clients to us. (I suppose they don't see the irony that their experience and knowledge hasn't been of much help in losing accounts to people who have been in the work force for less than a year and who had zero knowledge of the industry before they joined Exetel). It's a difficult decision to make and one that becomes totally dependent on the individual person who applies - I don't think we will go down the pro-active advertising/head hunting paths.
I think the most difficult thing we have to do is to more closely integrate our Sri Lankan sales personnel into the overall selling of services in Australia. There has been very impressive progress in inbound sales results achieved in Colombo with strong quarter by quarter growth in overall sales made by the in bound sales personnel there.....especially considering the difficulties experienced in the ADSL markets over the past year - number of sales per sales employee have increased impressively throughout 2010. However outbound sales is a very different process to inbound sales and just how we get that to work in the ways we envisage is going to be a true test of planning and training. I look forward to seeing how well we can accomplish this very important set of tasks over the coming 2 - 3 months.
So, a lot to do today including finding ways to re-build ADSL2 sales to the required levels and to straighten out just where we stand with various suppliers in those endeavours.
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