John Linton .....something I have never done/participated in before now.
The month ended incredibly strongly for Exetel with new records, by a very long way, being set for residential ADSL and mobile telephone services on both days of the last weekend. It was also interesting to see the orders for the NBNCo trial services move past 40% of the total possible 'trialists' by Sunday evening - still not as high as I would have expected but 'getting there'. Corporate service charges continued to grow strongly and reached a significant milestone of 20% of total billings. So the August billing results earlier this morning were very solidly up on July (allowing for the promotional contributions offsetting the residential 'free months' which themselves were up on June) which is a comfortable way of beginning the new financial year. So a new month is already 8 hours old and the unrelenting targets shift a little higher with one day less in the month to achieve them.
I was interested to see that Exetel's NBNCo fibre pricing was reported by every National and State newspaper in a positive context by Saturday morning which was a great result from negligible effort and zero cost by Exetel. Timing is everything in such exercises but it is almost entirely courtesy of Internode's inept 'politics' that presented such a golden opportunity. How this wide positive coverage will work out in terms of dollars is yet to be seen but 'free editorial' always beats 'paid advertising' as a long term benefit. As Kerry Packer once so appositely said - "you only get one Alan Bond in your life time". Perhaps it will give some inspiration to those people within our company who want to waste money on advertising to realise that 'marketing' consists of more than spending a great deal of someone else's money in the unsupported hope that it may do some good.
The two Sri Lanka based sales reps who came to Australia for training in corporate data sales have completed their three week 'course' and have now returned home - both made their first corporate sales before they left from initial contact through proposal submission to getting the signed contracts. They will now continue their probation in Colombo with only telephone and email support from their Australian manager. Over the past 9 months or so we have built a formidable outbound sales force in Sri Lanka which has given a significant boost to Exetel's ability to make business and now corporate sales. A very notable achievement was this sales force signed up 200 new corporate VoIP customers in July - something that very few, if any, Australian communications companies would have done - in my estimation. We will bring two more SL based sales reps to Australia this month to 'make the conversion' from small business to corporate sales before assessing how successful this process is.
We will continue to bring SL based sales people to Australia over the remainder of this financial year and we will continue to send Sydney based sales managers to Colombo as we complete the program of integrating the two locations and build the current numbers from 50 to 100 business/corporate sales people over the next 11 months. It is an ambitious program but then building a 50 person business sales force plus the required engineering support capabilities over the past two plus years was also ambitious. The complete integration of our personnel based in Colombo and North Sydney is one of our major objectives for this financial year and we continue to make progress towards that goal.
The first month of this new financial year was slightly easier than any month of last year so perhaps my predictions will come true. I wish I hadn't said that.
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