John Linton
Well, Christmas is almost on the horizon and the second week of November proved to be a very positive one with sales across all products and services increasing over the first week in November - always a good sign. November is usually one of the best three months of the year for 'business sales' and this November is showing no sign of being any different to previous years.
Business sales were, again very strong, with significant contributions from many of the newer people which was very good to see. We continue to bring in business from larger and larger companies who require larger links and more of them which also has increased the average revenue per link quite substantially over the last six months or so. Our business sales teams are becoming more adept in the sales processes of winning new business and their technical knowledge is being enhanced by more team and individual 'one on one' technical education sessions to assist them bid for and win larger and more complex services. I think the more stupid of our competitors in business markets who refer to our corporate sale teams as "a bunch of silly little girls" are in for an even tougher time in 2011 than they have had in 2010 to date.
Residential ADSL sales also saw a continuation of the turnaround with sales for the week up 20% over the previous week and churn aways almost halved. New pricing has almost certainly played a big part in this over the past two weeks as has the introduction of the ability to bundle the new mobile services and achieve substantial discounts from ADSL pricing. Bundling mobile with ADSL has certainly been a major issue with Optus mobile sales achieving double the number of new mobile connections compared to the Vodafone services we have been selling since June 2004.
Probably the major highlight of the sales week was receiving an order for 1,000 wireless broadband services from a company who has been doing extensive tests of various wireless broadband offerings over many months. Their testing showed that the Exetel version of the Optus wireless broadband service was at least equivalent to the Telstra wireless broadband services they currently use and was substantially better than other Optus wireless broadband services they tested. Every so often it pays to be honest and truthful in business. Assuming that the first 1,000 services perform as well as the trial services then the initial order could be trebled over the not too distant future.....depending on how Telstra react when they notice they are no longer getting orders from this customer. Nevertheless it was a major 'mile stone' in our strategy (if that's the right word) to put our faith in providing honest wireless broadband services rather than using underhand tactics to con the stupider residential users.
One indication of how difficult the current markets are for all sorts of people has been the number of supplier reps who have visited Exetel's offices over the last five days - it must surely be a new record. There were so many that it was hard to find a time to use the two 'meeting rooms' we have in North Sydney. The most bizarre visit was from two TPG sales people trying to make a case for Exetel to buy residential ADSL and business fibre connections. I'm not sure why TPG would think a company like Exetel would buy from them but they must be smoking something pretty strong or, alternatively, they must be very uninformed on the current pricing of those services in today's markets.
A good week overall.
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