To a great extent, average client lifetime value (LTV) dictates what kinds of marketing and sales activities you can afford. Often, many companies have business model problems that need to be addressed before they can undertake an inbound initiative.

What happens if you start doing SEO, social media, or Google AdWords advertising, but you have no content? Or context?

Usually very little. Here’s why.

In the past, various kinds of influencers and decision makers would be involved in intense conversations and vendor evaluations very early in the buyer’s journey.

Today, these same prospects and clients are doing tons of self-directed research on search engines and social media -- so much so, that as much as 70% of their mind is already made up before you are even looped into the conversation.

This shift in buyer behavior presents a big challenge for colocation businesses, but it is also a big opportunity if you can get in front of the right people, at the right time, in the right places, and most of all, in the right context. 

The colocation market is steadily changing, as entities such as colocation, enterprise hosting, private cloud, and managed services begin to merge and intertwine.

Where each enterprise once held different markets, clients, business models, and offerings, the line continues to blur as each competitor strives to hold their stake in the market.

This competitive atmosphere makes it essential for colocation providers to stay on task, identify the right clients and partners, and maintain their pricing power.

Managed service providers and colocation providers once operated in unrelated markets, targeted different clients, and performed separate services. Today, the lines continue to blur as colocation, enterprise hosting, private cloud, and managed services serve the same/similar markets.

Many colocation providers express difficulty staying on task, identifying the right clients and partners, and maintaining pricing power.

As companies add more cloud-based services, there will be an increased demand for cloud identity management.

There’s a catch, though: three years from now, these buyers will have different expectations that define their purchasing habits, and it will change both the vendor corporate structure and the way that they turn prospects into qualified leads.

Measuring ROI on marketing initiatives is always a challenge.

It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how much business mileage a data center is getting out of the time its marketing team spends on social media posts, blog entries, and other forms of digital media.

It’s easy enough to track how many people use and interact with those assets, but how many of them contribute to the data center’s bottom line by becoming a client?

All sustainable growth starts with a plan. Happy accidents are just that: anomalies. For identity and access management vendors’ sales teams, growing a company’s revenue is a task that calls for two important steps:

• Establishing objectives
• Devising a strategy for accomplishing each one