Jean-Pierre, the one, two things that work really well, frequently and in many countries are remote device and security management. Content does attract business customers a lot less and international assurance and device exchange are in high demand, but are rare due to unavailable players offering such services with truly rapid SLAs (anywhere in the world, that is).
Are you looking specifically into fixed, mobile or both? There are a range of products and services available to offer B2B customers that can be developed in-house or licensed from 3rd parties.
There are a lot of VAS in both fixed and mobile, and also segmented by diff vertical sectors. Security services in different forms feature highly, LAN-WAN integration, unified messaging etc
Key examples of this are: Gadget Care (Globe telecom), Vivo Brasil (Vivo Seguro Viagem) - International Travel Insurance, LgUplus (Door Lock and IoT Platform).
Parental control/Monitoring/Digital wellbeing - See Qustodio and its partnerships with the Telefonica group, Softbank, etc.
Jean-Pierre, happy to help. I ran the strategy and execution for Verizon in the 1-19 employee Business space for a decade. The first thing you do is find out what the priorities are for your customers. In this space there were three top priorities: 1)how can you help me grow my business, 2)secure my business and 3)make it more productive. VAS services we bundled and offered individually were: 1)website hosting and design. We partnered with Intuit and found we increased business growth over 20% for our customers, 2)anti viral security packages were bundled with our broadband services (this protected our customers CPNI, hardware and business continuity), 3) we sold our FiOS broadband service as a value add because it is the only solution that has synched upload and download high speeds. Cooper networks are only capable of high download speeds not upload. If you need any further help, please contact me on michael.t.mclaughlin@verizon.net or 914-907-7705
Over the top managed utm with automated canned reports - scale from soho to smb easily- value proposition quite attractive
Dear Jean-Pierre,
first of all, I think it depends on which B2B customer you are trying to reach. SoHo, SME or Large enterprises. The needs of these different customer groups differ a lot and hence also the VAS that would work. On top, SoHo and SME needs and hence the VAS that they would value will differ per country.
For SoHo it would probably be VAS that also worked for B2C customers and than some additional services on top such as a higher SLA of the Service (hence e.g. a promise that the service would work 99.9% of the time or the promise to have a waiting time when calling the service line of less than 3 minutes). Some topics such as Online security, IoT or online services such as online file hosting services could add value, but would need to be integrated well in order to make an impact as they otherwise can just use Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox. Good examples of IoT can for example be seen with Deutsche Telekom in Germany. Other things they may value are Fixed IP adresses, WiFi coverage promise, setting up their WiFi also for guests, VoIP telephone central, etc. - you can for example look at Ziggo in the Netherlands as one example.
For SME you really need to identify what VAS are relevant to each customer segment and become an integrator of these VAS. The needs will also differ per industry, as a restaurant chain probably will have other needs than an automobile supplier. Here, you need to understand how the customer works and what their challenges are. For example for a Retail company guests WiFi, Payment support of card payments and VPN connections are more important. For a housing company for example that rents homes to students a community are WiFi but also the flexibility to bill directly to the students (or not) or flexibility in starting and ending contracts (as students move a lot) may be more important.
For large enterprises, it really becomes a global coverage question.
In order to identify the right customer need to focus on, I would hardly recommend you to perform a Value Map customer research exercise. Please find here a good McKinsey article about this topic. BCG, Bain, Simon Kucher are also using this in a similar way in their projects.
If you’d like to chat about how this could be set-up for your company, please don’t hesitate reaching out.
Best regards,
Marc Andre
Hi Jean-Pierre, It really does depend on the market segment you are looking too supply and what are the available product type within your region.
for small SMEs this is usually more of a transformation service from legacy services to to more platform based services (VOIP) , infrastructure services (Broadband to fiber etc) and potentially data center hosting, domain name/website hosting.
As you progress through the market segments, you need to offer more solutions and managed service type products, such as WAN services nationally or internationally with increased VDC (virtual data centre) and security services..
Inbound services, such as freephone and DDI numbers are required for many of these products and you will need to partner with a good global supplier to remain cost efficient.
Please reach out if you would like to discuss further as I have assisted many companies in sourcing vendors and partners in this area.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sylvestercullen/
Hi,
I developed several products and launched them successfully in the B2B market space. We started with extensive market research. The service most customers wanted was a managed LAN service. We would buy the LAN equipment and rent it on a per box basis incl. a support service on top. This immediately led to additional services, like managed firewall, managed security, etc. At the same time, we also launched managed voice services which sold quite nicely as well.
The key is to extend these services to additional services, like hosted Exchange (Office 365), that will create significant lock in of your customers.
One of the learnings was that customers expect a decent service from you, e.g. if you run their firewall service, a new rule has to be put in within hours, at the latest on the next working day. At the same time, they are very willing to pay for these services.
Be aware that growth with VAS for B2B customers is slow as adoption is slow and requires a lot of convincing. Not only towards customers but also towards in house. Sales and pre-sales support have proven to be significant barriers to entry. The main challenge always is having the support organization up and running (and costing you opex) while at the same time, you do not yet generate sufficient revenue to support this opex. Also bear in mind that depending on your sales channels, you will need to have sufficient margin to support one time as well as recurring commissions.
In case you want to discuss in more detail, please contact me at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/norbertsteinhauser/
Regards,
Norbert
Jean-Pierre,
building up on previous answers, in case you are targeting SMEs, you could consider reselling MS Office 365 (or similarly, Google’s G Suite) as it provides a good way for sales reps to “put a foot in the door”.
Be advised that you need to convert your sales reps to the selling of “solutions” (a different mindset from selling just “products”), and to use pre-sales for configuration and troubleshooting.
You also need to manage the partnership, for example with Microsoft in my case, and implement the type of programatic marketing that they use. It is another universe compared to usual telco offerings and that requires training in Marketing and Sales teams. Microsoft provides training modules, collaterals, web-based resources, promotional offers, etc. But leveraging those does take take time and effort.
The business model is based on a revenue share (actually, more like a retail minus pricing model). But the main benefit for the telco is to acquire new customers and/or to increase stickiness.
Then, I would also mention IoT-related services, typically vertical solutions packaging connectivity and a SIM management platform with devices and software applications. This usually involves partnering on a revenue share basis with app developers or industrial players in each vertical.
The array of solutions is very wide and very often custom-designed, therefore difficult to scale. Main verticals are automotive, logistics (asset tracking), local government (e.g. smart lighting), health, utilities (smart metering), industry (e.g. remote maintenance), oil&gas in producing countries, etc. This, also, is a whole new world with many challenges.
Hope it helps.
¿No has encontrado una solución?
Esto marcará este comentario como mejor respuesta y cerrará tu pregunta.
¿Estás seguro?
Esto cerrará tu pregunta sin una respuesta Mejor.
¿Estás seguro?
Esto informará a los moderadores de que se trata de contenido inapropiado.
¿Estás seguro?