John Linton ...a very promising start.
We sent one of our business sales supervisors to Colombo for a few weeks last weekend and yesterday was her fourth day 'on the job'. I guess you can pretty much discount Monday which was a 'familiarisation day' so there has been three days to agree and demonstrate the concepts and become familiar with the new software that has been developed. We appointed two of the most successful inbound residential sales people to be trained as supervisors for this new venture with the plan for each of those two to have 6 to 9 out bound sales people by early 2011. If these two teams worked out we would add a third outbound team in April 2011 while retaining the current inbound team.
Wednesday of this week was the first day of 'cold calling' and to make it as painless as possible in this start up phase we have decided the first task is to contact our own customer base and offer them the opportunity of resigning with Exetel for a further 12 month contract on one of our new ADSL2 plans. The objective was to counter the Telstra Retail campaigns that have produced a constant churn away that is higher than we would like although Optus tell us the 'loyalty level' of Exetel ADSL customers is higher than all other Optus wholesale ADSL2 customers.....whatever....it is too high for us to continue to 'endure'. Wednesday saw 8 and 10 'sales' made by each of the trainee supervisors with some changes needed to be made to the software. These changes were rapidly made and Thursday saw the sales per person double to 19 and 22 per person.....with the changes to the software making the difference together with a slightly refined approach.
So progress has been rapid with the target, once everything is fully in place, of 50 upgrades per day per person plus 5 add on new sales of mobiles or VoIP. Clarissa will begin the training for the second two people on Monday with two more starting the following Monday with the aim of having two 'teams' of 3 people each by the time she leaves at the end of November. The trainee supervisors will then continue to add reps as quickly as new personnel can be found for the replacement of the current inbound sales people. So the theory is to have ten people resigning 500 current ADSL customers a day (10,000 per month) by the end of January....and reaching a figure of 20,000 re-contracts per month by the end of March 2011. After that the, by then, very experienced outbound sales personnel will begin to be transferred to other programs.
That's the plan and like all plans the numbers on the spreadsheet look just fine. Acquiring the required number of people of the required standards and training them and integrating them in to the current teams remains a difficult set of issues. However the start of doing something never done by Exetel before is very positive and it's something that cannot be easily copied by our competitors for financial and other reasons. At least that's the theory.
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