Zero-Rated Mobile Data Spreads, Despite Questions of Net Neutrality
Zero rating means that an operator does not charge its customers for network traffic when they use specific internet services. In their search for ways to build competitive differentiation in a mature market, mobile operators are increasingly attracted to zero rated data for popular services, despite concerns in some quarters about compatibility with net neutrality.
Several European mobile operators have announced such offerings, most recently:
- The UK’s Three, which introduced unlimited mobile usage of several services including Netflix, Deezer, Soundcloud and TVPlayer
- Portugal’s Nos, which launched a new bundle of services targeting young adults including unlimited usage of Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, and Viber
- The UK’s EE, which announced that its postpaid customers will be given six months’ free access to Apple Music, with zero rating of data usage associated with the service.
There is clear potential to construe zero rating of mobile data as a violation of net neutrality, if the provider of the zero-rated service is paying the mobile operator. “Sponsored data” offers have sometimes fallen foul of regulation on these grounds. But the conflict between zero rating and net neutrality is less clear if there is no direct payment involved. Other factors can also make the compatibility of zero rating with net neutrality more debatable, such as when the operator can claim it is being introduced for network management, or when zero rating is for a limited period.
By bringing zero-rated data offers to market, European operators are not only using a powerful differentiator, they are also pushing regulators to rule more clearly on what is not allowed regarding zero rating, so that anything else can be taken as permitted. It is instructive, for example, to consider UK regulator Ofcom’s explanation of its decision not to block the zero-rated Facebook Messenger/WhatsApp offer launched by Virgin Media in late 2016. Relevant factors included Virgin Media’s market share, the limited likelihood that the offer will stop people using non-Facebook messaging services, and assurances from Virgin that it is seeking similar arrangements with other messaging service providers. (For fuller details, see page 9 of the Ofcom report Monitoring Compliance With The EU Net Neutrality Regulation.) It seems reasonable to conclude that Three and EE were emboldened by Ofcom’s ruling when they decided to introduce their own zero-rated offerings. EE, for instance, referred during the launch announcement for its Apple Music offer to being “open to other service providers.”
IDC believes that although national regulators do not seem minded to block zero rating per se on net-neutrality grounds, mobile operators still need to exercise caution when introducing zero-rated data. The tactic has inherent limitations. In most cases, we advise operators to introduce zero rating clearly as a limited-period promotional offer. That way, not only are operators less likely to fall foul of regulation, but they are also able to gauge the impact of zero rating on their networks, customers, and revenues before considering whether to extend the offer, or to make it permanent.
If you want to learn more about this topic, or have any question on European Mobility, please contact John Delaney.
1.0 : What is Sales Enablement?
When Lee Levitt and I wrote IDC’s definition of sales enablement in 2009, it was a new term that would have yielded a lean set of results in response to a web query. Today, sales enablement has become a critical cornerstone of sales productivity (see Figure 1) with web queries yielding pages upon pages of discussion on the topic.
Given this growing importance and the investment companies large and small are making in this important function, I partnered with a current colleague, Rich Vancil, to revisit our definition and update is as necessary. Over the course of four posts, I will be sharing the output of that work.
IDC’s Five Key Competencies for the Modern Marketing Organization
IDC’s highest-level definition of sales enablement reads as follows:
“Sales Enablement is putting the right information into the hands of the right sales professional at the right time, in the right place, and in the right format to move a specific sales opportunity forward.”
The focus on “information” in our definition underscores the knowledge-intensive nature of sales for successful buyer engagement. The repeated use of the word “right” speaks to the goal of avoiding information overload by delivering not moreinformation, but less—and of a higher relevance. Finally, the reference to a “specific sales opportunity” notes that the outcome of effective sales enablement should be the improvement of sales conversations that have particular, opportunity-specific demands.
This definition has gained a great deal of traction in the marketplace and it’s not uncommon to find it cited, in whole or in part, on the Web sites of the many vendors now selling sales-enablement solutions. Other good and well-respected definitions exist, but I’m happy to stick with this one given its broad scope and focus on empowering effective sales conversations. That said, the changing nature of the IT buyer landscape necessitates a deeper dive into just how one goes about delivering the sales enablement today’s sales organizations need.
With this in mind, the macro definition cited above consists of three key, interrelated sales enablement activities:
- Education enablement
- Analytics enablement
- Asset enablement
In this post, I will be discussing Education enablement, with other posts addressing the other two components.
Education Enablement
Education enablement (a.k.a., sales training) is the ongoing training and education necessary to keep the salesperson as smart as possible about all facets of the buying environment. The goal of this education is to prepare sales professionals to engage buyers in conversations that they will find relevant (i.e., tuned to their perspective and interests) and compelling (valuable and persuasive).
It’s worth noting that, once upon a time, professionals who did sales training were referred to and titled as such (i.e., “Sales Trainers”). Over the last few years, the once independent function of sales training has largely been folded into/renamed sales enablement. This makes perfect sense given the overarching objectives of most sales enablement organizations, but I call it out here because I believe a robust sales enablement function should do more than just sales training.
When people think of sales training, one of two things typically comes to mind: product training or sales methodology training. The former ensures that salespeople understand what they are selling sufficiently to communicate features, benefits, and relevance to buyer needs in a compelling manner. The latter allows salespeople to leverage the best practices that have evolved over time regarding how to positively influence a buyer’s purchase decision.
A variety of good sales methodologies exist and, while I have a few favorites, I remain agnostic as to which one a company should choose—as long as they choose one. A single, consistent selling methodology is vital to keep a selling organization on the same page regarding how messaging is delivered, calls are conducted, and accounts developed.
Product training and sales methodology training are well-developed activities that virtually all sales organizations have well in hand. The former because it’s central to their existence, the latter because it’s a well-established part of building a quality team. Over the last few years, a third leg to the sales education stool has emerged. Referred to at IDC as Market and Buyer Education, this type of sales training focuses on knowledge of the buyer and the market forces that shape a purchase journey. I’ll dedicate the balance of this post to exploring this type of sales training.
Given the realities of today’s sales environment, Market and Buyer Education needs to consist of two subcategories: re-education and pre-education.
Re-Education
Technology buyers of today are very different from what they were just a few years ago. They are now largely self-educating (something I’ll discuss in more detail below) and, more often than not, are from outside the IT department—i.e., a line-of-business buyer. Given this new type of buyer, salespeople usually need to be re-educated about how best to initiate and develop a positive connection with prospects.
This connection is accomplished by initially engaging the prospect in conversations that speak to what’s on their mind and what’s going on in their industry, preferably without any reference to what is being sold. Demonstrating knowledge of the environments into which selling happens, and what’s of value to the buyer, is critical for establishing credibility and building trust.
The rise of the line-of-business (LOB) buyer is an excellent illustration of why this re-education is necessary. IDC finds that LOB buyers influence 80% of IT purchases and control 60% of the budgets (IDC’s 2015 line-of-business study). This new type of buyer offers a sharp contrast to the traditional IT professional, who views technology as a development platform upon which they can custom-build IT solutions.
Today’s LOB buyers view technology through the four pillars of the 3rd Platform: cloud, mobile, social media, and big data. These Web- and app-enabled buyers generally fall into one of two types:
The functional leader buyer.
With cloud- and mobility-based solutions having a significant impact on how many corporate functions run their business, department heads are now at the table as key decision makers and budget holders. While much more technically savvy than in the past, these line-of-business functional leaders (e.g., CMOs, CFOs, chief security officers [CSOs]) are not concerned about technology per se, but are focused on how it can produce desired business outcomes for their departments. Understanding what outcomes are top of mind for them and the purchase decision drivers for their departments is a critical knowledge set for today’s sales professionals.
The vertical industry buyer.
Frequently, technology is no longer generic across industries; today’s 3rd Platform solutions are often tailored to the needs of specific industries. Being able to demonstrate an understanding of these vertical markets, including the industry-specific personas that influence purchase decisions, the regulatory context within which decisions are made, and the trends affecting technology utilization, is a skill that allows sales professionals to bring value to the customer experience and create trusting relationships.
Connecting sellers to the modern buyer’s perspective requires education on market dynamics, technology trends, the competitive landscape, the psychology of the line-of-business buyer, and the unique perspectives of critical personas like the CMO or CSO.
Pre-Education
Because of their capacity to self-educate, buyers are engaging with sellers significantly later in their journey. IDC’s annual IT Buyer Experience Survey finds that the average IT buyer first engages with sales somewhere between 40% and 50% through their decision journey — and a hefty percentage of buyers are much further along than that. Meanwhile, these buyers have been busy learning in the digital channels, engaging with peers, gaining insights from experts, and even using the seller’s marketing content as a source of education, quite possibly for months.
No longer can sellers expect to gain a deep understanding of their buyers through a long, Q&A-intensive selling process, as I did starting out in sales many years ago. By the time the buyer makes contact with sales, they are already well on their journey and don’t have the patience for further background. To deal with a smaller selling window, today’s salespeople need to arrive pre-educated about typical selling opportunities as much as possible.
This education must include market-specific knowledge (e.g., purchase decision drivers particular to an industry), company-specific information (e.g., budgeting process and buying team composition), and persona-specific information (e.g., mindset and perspective of key personas on the buying team). Because this information quickly becomes opportunity specific, the need for pre-education should also inform strategy in the other two areas of enablement that I’ll discuss in separate posts: analytics enablement and asset enablement.
A final note on education enablement. The knowledge transfer necessary to properly educate salespeople is a process, not an event. As such, it is important to reinforce and extend any training initiative (e.g., live training event or virtual training delivery) with materials that bridge the gap between the educational event and the application of desired skills in front of a customer. This includes general enablement assets like vertical industry overviews and more focused assets like persona-specific buyer conversation guides.
What Sales Enablement Is NOT
Finally, some thoughts on what I’m excluding from the scope of sales enablement as I’m describing it here.
To facilitate the development of best practices and efficient processes that support effective sales enablement, I consider it distinct from other types of sales education, analytics, and asset delivery. For example, sales training focused on the specific functional skills or the structure of the sales job is not considered sales enablement, nor is training conducted in association with a particular sales methodology. This type of training is important and should definitely inform one’s sales enablement strategy, but these types of education do not give salespeople the information needed to support specific selling opportunities.
Similarly, quantitative analysis that results in quota assignment and tracking or territory management, while important sales analytics, fall outside the realm of sales enablement as we discuss it at IDC. A convenient test we use for when to include a person, process, or thing in one’s sales enablement framework is the question, “Does this serve the goal of improving the quality of sales conversations?”
Though just part way into discussing IDC’s definition of sales enablement, I have little doubt that I’ve made points that illicit strong reactions, either positive or negative. If you’re interested in discussing any of these points, or learning more about IDC’s perspective on sales enablement, please reach out to me through LinkedIn. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts and get the conversation going.
GDPR is More Than a Security Issue: Think Governance!
The EU’s far-reaching GDPR legislation will start to apply from May 25, 2018 – less than a year away. IDC surveys reveal that a surprising number of companies do not expect to be ready on the day, let alone in advance. As of March this year, fully 57% had not yet begun to prepare.
Given the swingeing penalties that are proposed for contravening the regulation, this is not a good thing.
But IDC is also concerned that companies are not looking at compliance in the right way. For many companies – both solutions vendors and solutions buyers – GDPR compliance is seen a security issue: avoiding unauthorized access to, or loss of data. It’s a job for the security professionals. And so, the answer revolves around having the right password policies, up to date versions of all your software to prevent hacks, and so forth. But that’s wrong. Or, rather, it’s only part of the story.
IDC has a three-layer model for GDPR technology and associated processes. And at the top layer, there’s governance.
For, at heart, GDPR compliance is about protecting citizens’ data privacy rights. This raises key data governance issues, including: Who can access personal data that we hold? How is the data being used? Where is it being stored? Are we tracking people’s permission to use their data? Can we inform them of the processing we’re doing on their data? Indeed, which data – raw and derived – that we hold or process comes under the legislation? Sensitive data might relate to customers, employees, or your partners’ employees. Bringing together linked pieces of data that alone are not generally considered ‘personal’ data, for example location data or IP addresses, can help generate data items that identify an individual and then are considered personal.
GDPR then is an issue then for data and analytics professionals, as much as security staff: the Chief Data Officer organization, or its equivalent inside or outside the IT department – in alliance with compliance, risk and IT security staff, and possibly with a Data Protection Officer in place. Even companies who are aware of these different aspects are often approaching these issues in silos rather than coordinating efforts.
CISOs and CDOs need to look at processes, people and tools across these two domains of security and governance. The latter have often been overlooked in GDPR discussions, but they are crucial.
For instance:
- Tools to track all consents granted – or revoked – to use personal data
- Tools to identify and document which data is being held could that be considered as personal data, and track where it is stored – across your data siloes and functional boundaries
- Tools to track the lineage of data assets – where did they come from? Are they derived from other data internally or externally? What calculations/transformations are we performing – and do we have permission to do so? And where is the data going to go next?
- Tools to anonymize or ‘pseudonymize’ data for consumption by individuals who are should not see personal data, or before passing it outside the organization – ‘privacy by design‘ is a key plank of the regulation.
- Archival tools and policies – to make sure data is deleted when it should be/if it should be – and retained if not. The right to be forgotten is no longer just an issue for search engines.
In the age of Big Data, a widespread view has arisen that, as storage cost is so low, all data should be retained ‘just in case’ it may be needed – even if it has no real value today. But the more data you have, the more likely it is that it can be combined in ways that need to be tracked for compliance. So GDPR can fundamentally change the data cost equation by factoring in a risk/compliance element – creating a paradox at the heart of Big Data: does more data bring more value or just more risk?
Of course this covers unstructured data (textual information, pictures, audio and video) as well as more easily managed structured data – social media data can be as important to cover as data in your HR and finance systems, for instance.
The good news is that GDPR compliance will drive you to do things you always wanted to anyway. For instance, getting all your customer data in order will help to create strong foundations for building a true 360 view of your customers. Setting up a self-service portal for data subjects can, in effect, outsource the effort of keeping some data current. Exhibiting GPDR compliance early will help to build valuable trust amongst your customers.
So, CDOs, CISOs and CIOs: do you have the data governance tools, processes and people to tackle GDPR? If not, then you have just months to get all three in place.
For more information and advice on GDPR compliance implications – processes and tools – you can contact IDC’s Data Privacy and Security Practice via www.idc.com
Delivering 'Contextual and Value-Centric Insurance'
Traditional business models of insurance carriers and intermediaries (agents/brokers) across the globe are challenged due to the change in expectations of customers and partners, technology innovations, regulatory demands, and sociopolitical and economic disruptions.
The advent of semi-autonomous or autonomous vehicles, connected vehicles and homes, sharing and on-demand economies, and peer-to-peer insurance models are adding a new dimension to the competitive landscape.
To tackle the challenges and stay relevant in an ever-evolving market, many insurance organizations are embarking on a transformation journey. IDC believes that to succeed in their initiatives, the insurance technology buyers need to identify where and how to craft a winning Digital Transformation (DX) business strategy and execution roadmap. The technology suppliers that serve the industry needs to have a contextualized understanding of how and where key software, hardware, and IT services enable DX business outcomes and success. Keeping this in mind, IDC has built a DX use case taxonomy research that outlines the digital mission of Contextual and Value-Centric Insurance, strategic priorities that support the mission, programs that help meet priorities, and use cases that help realize the overall goals and objectives of the organization.
The digital mission of ‘contextual and value-centric insurance’ is to create simple, transparent, and unique experiences that are rooted on the principles of proactive risk management and secure, seamless and contextual engagements across the customer journey. To achieve this and align to the changing expectations of customers, partners, and markets, the industry needs to transform from a traditional, product-centric mindset to a customer-centric mindset enabled by digital technologies and the power of data and analytics.
This digital mission of ‘contextual and value-centric insurance’ is supported by 4 strategic priorities:
- Omni-Experience Engagement that enables customer connect through multiple channels and deliver personalized products, services and communication through customer’s channel(s) of choice in a frictionless manner.
- Usage and Value-Oriented Offerings that involves the launch of usage-based insurance (UBI) products powered by sensor-based technologies and to bundle them with value-added offerings in partnership with other industries. The priority is to meet the customer expectation to receive true value for the premiums they pay, above and beyond the traditional products and services delivered. It also involves investing in evidence-based loss prevention powered by sensor based technologies in different lines of business for the company’s benefit as well as improving customer retention and brand loyalty.
- Speed, Scale and Agility that addresses the need for insurance carriers and intermediaries to transform digitally to respond quickly to market changes, but achieving this in a controlled, secure, and agile fashion. It deals with modernization or replacement of their core functions such as policy admin, claims, and underwriting; modernizing infrastructure systems; going paperless, enabling connected workforce and automating their channel operations.
- Building Cognitive Competencies which focuses on leveraging a combination of data from internal and external data sources to build a complete picture of customers and risks to mitigate risks and handle fraud in the digital world. The insights drawn from the data is vital to respond better to incidents and meet the regulatory requirements more accurately and effectively. The use of analytics and cognitive technologies will enable to price risks in real time, more accurately as well as help build new revenue streams by sharing data with other insurers or non-insurance industries.
These strategic priorities, and the programs that help meet these priorities and the use cases (individually funded projects) are detailed in the Worldwide Digital Transformation Use Case Taxonomy, 2017: Insurance.This study forms the basis of IDC’s insurance DX research in the coming years.
We recently published a research titled Connected Cars: An Exciting Convergence Point for Insurers and Automakers to Monetize Data to Deliver Great Customer Experience that aligns with the strategic priorities of ‘Omni-Experience Engagement’ and ‘Usage and Value-Oriented Offerings’.
We will be continuing the discussions on DX priorities of the banking and the insurance industry at our upcoming IDC Financial Services Forum on 28th September, 2017 in London.