John Linton ......which means for those of us whose knowledge of Latin and/or knowledge of catch phrases is less than stellar - sieze the carp.
There's a lot of uncertainty in many aspects of the Australian communications industry at the moment; at least based on the various actions and statements by the larger suppliers and the major carriers that seems to be true. I seldom hear from our suppliers on 'weekends' - perhaps once every six months or so but this weekend must have been different.....I was contacted by every supplier but one. All but one of those contacts was a request for a meeting or a request for my thoughts on a new 'initiative'. As I have met very recently with our three carrier suppliers and most of our other major suppliers I found this level of contact, astonishingly on a week end, more than bewildering. I have no doubts about where Exetel 'stands' in levels of importance to our suppliers (around tenth or lower in buying size and importance) with the size of purchases being miniscule compared to those of the top three (who buy from each other) and everyone buys from Telstra:
Telstra, Optus, AAPT, TPG, iinet, M2, Internode, Adam, Dodo, (perhaps Exetel) so it surprised me that Exetel would merit attention from our suppliers and not in these cases from our usual contacts within those suppliers.
I have commented many times on how tough the last three or so years have been with major future structural changes likely in some unknown future time and the massive shift by Telstra in its approaches to various markets. I have probably spoken too much about Exetel's planned moves away from the residential market places that currently dominate our operations and our desire to counter the changes we see happening by moving firstly to addressing medium /large businesses and, in this financial year, moving to address the SME markets. These 'ideas' are hardly incisive/shattering insights in to the current states of the various market places - or so I would have thought. However all of the contacts I had over the weekend, bar one, were based on 'working together' to make our ill defined plans to target 1,000,000 small businesses work better. While it's true that we have been building two quite successful sales forces; one to address medium/large businesses and have begun to develop a second very promising sales force to address SME businesses these are both only in the very early stages. At least one, possibly, two of the weekend approaches are well beyond our current capacities or even the capacities we plan to build towards over the coming year....but they did 'spark' some new concepts.
I had intended to do some 'serious' work on defining how we could accelerate our 'penetration' of the SME markets which are a massive opportunity for us (and, apparently, everyone else) over the balance of July but it would seem the amount of effort we need to put in to this are of our business is much more than I had originally planned. The major attraction of the SME markets are that there is no current provider that offers services to them that aren't simply residential products at more expensive prices with the same terrible support they provide to residential customers. (a cynical view but basically quite correct). The other major difference in this 1,000,000 potential customer market is that it can't be addressed by the ways the larger providers use. So the 'trick' is to find an explicable product set and, far more importantly, a new way of supporting that product set that will rapidly 'scale' if the business plans are successful. That is not an easy thing to do - if it was, it would already have been done.
So - we need a lot of new, good and most of all practical ideas, to take advantage of this opportunity. We have at least three major advantages over all of our competitors in addressing these opportunities which may have accounted for my weekend email receipts.
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9 - the number of elements in the annual event that always entrances me and has done since I attended a live 'performance' at, coincidentally, the age of nine.