John Linton .....something that we have never done at Exetel.
It's the last weekend before Christmas and I have time to do my, limited, Christmas shopping instead of having to use the afternoon of Christmas Eve as has been my unvaried custom over the decades. I don't know whether that means I am more organised than in past years or whether I just have less to do as I become less relevant. Yesterday, as predicted by every similar day of every year that I can remember, was a very good sales day with a big 'surge' in corporate data orders and even residential ADSL being over 30% up on the previous Friday with above average results being achieved by most other services. There was even a significant increase in account payments from even the more dilatory of late paying business customers. So a very satisfactory 'last real' day before the Christmas holidays. We began our own Christmas preparations last night though we broke with 'tradition' this year and did not buy a 'real' Christmas tree - I am not sure whether that means anything in particular.
Over the past few days I have put some time into developing a 90 minute sales presentation to be given to our 36 sales reps in Colombo in early January. I cn't be sure but I think it must be over 30 years since I did any sort of 'formal' sales training and that was in the year of my life when I did nothing else - the original "Exetel" was a consulting company (of two people) and our major service was sales and sales management training for IT companies. It was a lot of fun and very lucrative but I eventually gave it up because it was deeply unsatisfying to spend a week or so training sales people knowing that they would go back to being managed by less than stellar sales management (or training sales managers that would go back to being crushed by dumb 'senior sales management' who would never permit them to manage sales forces humanely and effectively.
So I have got some quite disproportionate measures of pleasure from first sketching out and then adding the details of a ninety minute 'session' that aims to teach some rookie sales people everything they need to know and carry out to be more successful in selling than anyone else they will compete with (no matter how experienced they are, how knowledgeable they are or what company they work for) from day one of their 'selling career'. It is a useful intellectual challenge and, in these circumstances, something that we have to get exactly right to ensure that our new ventures in to corporate data services is as successful as we can make it from 'day one'. It is only the first part of a newly developed sales training program which, over the coming fifteen months, is aimed at training over 100, perhaps up to 200 new sales personnel.
I haven't 'done anything different' for well over three years now as we have been forced to fight through the Telstra induced changes to the residential data and telephony marketplaces. Since we first planned to change to developing our business services I have only been able to 'spare' very little of my own time to helping to build the sales and support personnel on which we will depend so heavily from now onwards. It is refreshing, not quite the right word, to be able to spend some time being involved in the training and planning of something new and exciting rather than spending endless hours trying to figure out how we can reduce our costs to allow us to reduce our residential prices in marketplaces where 'price', if it is not at or below cost, is a "rip off" according to the majority of people who buy residential services. I am not complaining - that's the way it is - but it's a dispiriting way of spending three years.
So I will finish preparing the backbone of the presentation over the next week or so and then plan the three follow up presentations before the end of January after I get some feed back from the first one. Exciting times.
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