John Linton ....one way - then find a totally different way.
It's going to be a busy week with the finalisation of the remaining ADSL2 plans for the next month and putting some real work into the 'total' small business offerings as well as adding the 'dummy' portals for the various offerings to the web site. Then there's the first major work on the business plan for the second half of FY2011 and the decisions on how 'brave' we are going to be in terms of re-vamping our management structure. There is enough work in those aspects of the business to keep the people involved in it fully occupied except for the fact that this is the last week of the month and we need to ensure we reach our overall targets for this fourth month of the new planning year.
As the rain pours down outside (so much for last night's weather forecast) and it seems to be even colder outside than it was yesterday there is a great temptation to delay the start of the day with a second cup of something and an even greater temptation to turn on the TV and watch the rest of the Man C/Arsenal replay which I fell asleep watching last night. However I will resist that sensible temptation and go to the office to do my share of the work needed to try and make sure Exetel has the best product and service line up possible in these difficult times and that we make the best possible use of our personnel and web resources to present them to possible customers.
We have spent a considerable amount of time over the years building 'back end' user facilities for our residential and business customers and now the customers of our 'Hosted VoIP' service. From the feed back we get these facilities are far better than those offered by other providers (both residential and business) and for that reason we have never made them 'publicly available' on the web site as a 'marketing tool' - I used to get annoyed when our FAQs and other help tools on our web site and forums "suddenly appeared" word for word on other ISP's web sites.....often with some of the original minor typos. However our less experienced personnel think we would benefit from having these key aspects of our services available for interested customers to see and we will make final decisions on how best to do that this morning.
The other 'can't wait' set of decisions are pricing the ADSL2 plans. With multiple terabyte or unlimited download ADSL2 plans the choice de jour of the crazier side of the market we will have to find something else - another direction to take. "Unlimited" is a powerful word in "marketing". However the MOST powerful word in marketing has always been FREE.......especially if it can be shown that the offer is actually genuine and usable. So what effect do you think selling ADSL2 with, say 10 - 15 gbytes for FREE will have on a marketplace that has over 50% of users that don't use more than 5 gbytes per month? I have no idea but I think it has more promise for Exetel than pursuing the zillion terabytes for $50.00 path all of our competitors (other than perhaps Telstra) seem to be going down.
Perhaps a free ADSL2 service with a reasonable download allowance, or set of allowances, will be a new direction in ADSL 'marketing'. I mean Telstra has pretty much made ADSL2 a 'free' service with its multiple 'multi-product discounts' so why not take that as the new base price for ADSL2? It makes a lot more sense. There would be 99.9% of the market that would prefer a free ADSL2 service with 10 or 20 gigabytes rather than a terabyte service for $50 or $60 I would have thought?
Anyway it will be an interesting set of discussions.
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