John Linton
....with the highest amount of business activities due to IT managers around the country starting to spend their 'new' year's budgets with the impetus of looming Christmas breaks and the new install embargos by the carriers lending urgency to the drawn out decision processes.
Ever since I 'fell into' the "data processing" industry and first heard the comment that 25% of all orders are received in a six week period of October/November in business categories it has almost never varied. So the first three days of November this year show all the same indications with data links aachieving a new first week of the month reaching a record high after only three days (really two days as nothing happens in business land on Cup Day). Even ADSL2 sales have had their best start to a month for 2010 and the number of enquiries has more than doubled over last month.
Of course three days do not a month make but as I noted a few days ago - the endless discount wars in the ADSL2 residential markets seem to have taken a breather for some reason - perhaps the heavy price reductions have begun to reach the stage where more and more companies are not only cannibalising their revenues but they are reaching dangerous levels in profit margins.....maybe that's just wishful thing though. We will begin the process of changing the way we 'sell' to the residential marketplaces next Monday when we begin to put in place outbound selling for the first time having, since we began in business, relied upon our web site to generate all our residential revenues and it was only a year ago that we put in place an inbound residential sales line number and dedicated inbound sales personnel.
We will send one of our North Sydney based business sales supervisors to Colombo next Saturday and she will help our two best inbound sales people in Sri Lanka make the transition from inbound sales to outbound sales over the balance of November. While she is there she will participate in the selection of a further two personnel to be mentored by the two people she trains with the aim of building two outbound sales teams by the end of January 2011. The objectives of these sales teams have been set in broad terms but will need to be constantly adjusted based on what we discover. In principle we will use the same techniques and processes that have been so relatively successful in building our corporate sales business in Australia. Same calibre people, same easy to understand offers, same growth via mentoring and same 'collegiate' ethos.
If we are successful in this new venture then we will create a third team in Colombo in the second quarter of 2011 and then see what more may be possible in terms of this new, for us, direction. It is part of the roughly planned process of moving Exetel from being essentially an engineering company (overwhelmingly 'populated' by engineers) to a sales company (with a very strong engineering core personnel base). This change began in February 2009 and has slowly grown to the point where 30% of all Exetel personnel are sales people. Assuming that we continue to be successful in building successful sales teams that percentage is aimed to become around 60% by the end of 2011 - though that remains totally dependent on how the various Australian markets develop and just how successful we are in selecting, training and retaining the best possible sales people.
It's an exciting project.
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