John Linton It seems that Telstra Retail is using the last month of the financial year to improve the gloss on their already impressive ADSL 'win back' figures based on what I can see from the daily churn away destinations and the receipt of my ninth call from a Telstra Retail cold caller. You have to wonder what sort of data base Telstra's contractors are using that doesn't inform the latest caller that eight other people had called and been unsuccessful. I wonder if they will continue these campaigns into FY2012? No reason why not if they really do make a net financial gain from these activities. Exetel had its best residential ADSL sales week for some time which, hopefully, is an indication that the actions we have taken are producing positive effects.
The week continued very strongly for corporate sales with a new record number of sales made in a single week. This is a good indication of how June will go and will complete a very strong growth year for our corporate business both in terms of the Australian sales force and the increasing contributions by the Sri Lankan outbound sales force who are making rapidly increasing contributions to corporate VoIP sales and small business 'package' sales as well as making their 20th large business data sale this week. As they develop more and more experience and the ongoing technical training continues it will be reasonable to expect that this 'symbiosis' will produce better and better results. Our plans for FY2012 are not yet finalised but we are looking for an accelerated growth in the contributions to corporate and business sales from the Sri Lankan outbound sales teams. For the people who told me, in no uncertain terms, that selling to corporate and business buyers using Sri Lankan personnel would be impossible, you were totally wrong.
We had meetings with each of our major suppliers during the week with, mainly, positive results from at least two of the meetings with the third being a frank exchange of views that may, or may not, result in a more positive relationship in the future. As we shift more and more of our resources into corporate and business sales the arrangements we make to ensure we can provide the best possible offerings to current and new business customers become crucially important to any level of success we may enjoy in FY2012. So we were quite pleased with the accommodations we received and it will be a true test of how competent our SL outbound sales force has become as we move to more 'pin point' corporate sales 'campaigns' starting this month and continuing into the first six months of the new financial year.
Our generalistic approach has worked very well for the 27 months of its existence and has been an essential learning process to firmly establish our first three Australian based sales team and that approach will continue especially for new graduate hires. It has been successful in producing the 'new' type of corporate sales person we thought would be successful in being better regarded than the sorts of sales people employed by our competitors and, with some minor 'tweaks' it should continue to be successful for the remaining months of calendar 2011. However we need to further develop these approaches by extending them to the Sri Lankan outbound corporate teams and refining the approaches for the established sales reps in Sydney. It is an exciting set of concepts.
We made some progress with developing the 'skeleton' of next year's operating plan but it has a long, long way to go. However we do have almost all the key assumptions included and all of the product paths defined so we only have the seemingly endless iterations of 'number crunching' to do over the remaining three weeks we have allowed to complete this exercise - one more time. I have had many less productive weeks.
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