edotco 360: Localising sales and product innovation to meet the needs of each market

Wan Zainal Adileen Wan Puteh is the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of edotco Group. He is responsible for managing and setting the various key strategies for the overall spectrum of regional sales & marketing, corporate communications and branding for edotco Group.

TowerXchange: Please could you introduce yourself to TowerXchange’s readers – what is your background, what is your role, and what attracted you to join the edotco team?

I have vast experience in telecommunications and IT industry having served in leadership positions in various multinational conglomerate over the last 20 years. My successful milestones include the deliverance of multimillion complex projects; setting up and operationalised country businesses in Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. I was also instrumental in delivering record breaking sales orders and closing of key projects in South East Asia, Australia and Japan.

Throughout my career, I’ve had significant involvement in corporate exercises in the areas of Project Management, Business Development and Sales and Country Management for companies - namely Maxis, Logica CMG, IBM and Tekelec (now known as Oracle).

My philosophy in building edotco’s regional sales organisation has always been to embed the aforementioned standard best practices across the organisation, whilst creating a sales structure that adapts to local requirements and is scalable whether we’re in five, six, seven, eight or more countries.

TowerXchange: Let’s talk about the marketing side of your role. How do you market ‘enabling connectivity’? How do you promote an intangible concept to your unique target market?

‘Enabling connectivity’ is deliberately a very broad concept. We wanted our name to be generic so as not to focus on a hard sell on the tower itself, but rather to position ourselves with social responsibility, environmental conscience and a broader portfolio of infrastructure solutions. Ultimately our goal is to ensure our customers and subscribers receive a better service, and how we support the end user in having that better service is through the delivery of a solid base for the deployment and management of passive infrastructure.

While our main focus may be on towers, we want to expand into energy management, the improvement of tower structures and provision of special structures, remote monitoring, and other ways to monetise infrastructure not only limited to telcos.

TowerXchange: I understand edotco are currently marketing 6,300 towers in Bangladesh. Can you share some insights from your initial months of serving the market?

Robi is one of the top three operators in Bangladesh. A division within Robi itself has been established as a forum to promote co-locations.

As an independent infrastructure business, edotco is marketing around a fifth on Bangladesh’s towers (our most recent estimates suggest there are 25,858 towers in the country).

Reducing costs for our customers is a key objective in Bangladesh, but so is ensuring safety. There are a lot of rooftop structures in Bangladesh, and unfortunately some challenges with the architecture of buildings, so we have to be mindful of the weight of rooftop structures, which can in some cases limit co-location capacity.

TowerXchange: How does your business change in the more build to suit focused environment in Pakistan?

We plan to develop excellent relationship with Pakistan’s local operators and to build 200 towers in the next 12 months – to build best in class sites, leveraging new products and enhancements as a showcase for the country and edotco.

The concept of an independent towerco is relatively new in Pakistan, hence edotco is committed to establish its operations and points of contact in the country.

TowerXchange: How do you sell co-locations? Is it a proactive or a reactive sale?

Relationships and knowledge about our assets and our customers’ assets are crucial.

Our sales team are equipped with comprehensive, reliable data on our assets, combined with market data so they know where the high yield sites are, where we know competitors have found it difficult acquiring a permit to build.

Our target customers are typically network planners within the CTO’s organisation, although initially we need to convince the CTO and CFO to lease not build, to move from capex to opex, but this is all hypothetical if we don’t have the sites they need, so the endorsement of the network planner is essential.

Planning new sites has to be driven to an extent by marketing. Site planning is effectively a funnel for us.

While we are proactive in forming relationships with our customers, co-location sales can to an extent be a reactive sale – it is real estate; either we have the location or we don’t. It’s a more proactive sale when we’re doing build to suit, both in terms of promoting the service to anchor tenants, and proactively selling site that are built to other operators to ensure they know what’s coming up.

TowerXchange: Talk to us about the relationship between your sales and marketing team and R&D when it comes to new product innovations.

It is a task for me and my team to package edotco products and services, combined with innovations and bring them to market.

Special structures, such as new tower designs, are an important part of our offerings in  urban cities where we must meet local regulations concerning to the visibility of towers.

edotco is more than a towerco. We offer energy management, remote monitoring, special structures and we’re looking into provision of O&M for active infrastructure. It’s all driven by the needs of our customers and integrated under our vision to ‘enable connectivity.’