Many colocation providers are growing slower than they ought to be due misguided trust in outdated marketing and sales playbooks.

Over the past three to five years, we’ve seen dramatic changes in how IT evaluators and decision makers navigate the buyer’s journey from prospect to paying client.

The colocation providers that still market and sell the way they have for the past decade are leaving a ton of opportunity on the table. Here’s why.

Note: This blog post is excerpted from the Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Colocation Data Centers.

Today’s Buyer’s Journey for Colocation Providers

Fast forward to today.

Marketing’s still doing a fair amount of trade shows and still doing a teeny amount of print ads. That (spending on print ads) has largely fizzled away. A lot of the trade publications either disappeared or are a skeleton of what they once were.

Direct mail is still kind of, sort of still there.

The idea of renting mailing lists and spamming the heck out of people is still alive and well. It’s amazing that it’s still alive and well. Google just filed a patent a couple of weeks ago that puts another nail in the coffin with email spam – being able to tie email sender reputation to your ability to rank in search engines. But it (spamming) still is, in the colocation data center space, a practice that’s being done.

Meet the Empowered Buyer – Your New Boss

However what’s very different about today is that your prospects are no longer going to speak with your sales team early on.

They’re much more empowered. They have a lot more research ability and access to a lot more information.

So when you look at prospects being ready to speak with your sales team, when anywhere from 57% to 70% -- sometimes as much as 80% or 90% of the buyer’s journey is over, it’s a completely different ball game.

What’s caused the disruption of this traditional playbook?

We see huge, huge disruption from the rise of search, the rise of social, the explosion in mobile, and cloud. These four factors alone change the entire dynamics of the sales process.

So sales needs to get found much earlier in the buyer’s journey so that it can plant its seed in the ground and plant its flag in the ground.

Marketing Now Controls Sales’ Paychecks

Marketing has a lot more control over sales’ paychecks than a lot of sales professionals realize, because so much of the education, so much of the resources, and so much of that thought leadership is happening during the first 70% of the buyer’s journey.

So the way this is changing, sales professionals need to get found much earlier and be perceived as trusted advisors.

It’s a very buyer-centric sales process that’s completely turned the whole funnel on its head.

The sales monopoly on information is long gone.

And now most of your prospects expect that sales professionals can deliver a highly personalized, highly customized conversation – more of a consultation than a static pitch.

This is a complete game-changer and it’s really, really important to realize that this is not the future. It’s the present. And this is the present that’s existed for the past two or three years.

Are your marketing and sales teams working together, in close alignment, to team-up on the modern buyer’s journey? Do you position your company as the best, world-class communicators in the world when it comes to explaining and educating your prospects about relevant IT, business, and data center challenges? Or do your marketing and sales teams still trash-talk each other behind each others’ backs? Let us know where you are with these challenges in the Comments section below.

And to learn how colocation providers can close sales faster in today’s buyer’s journey, make sure that you watch the replay of the “Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Colocation Data Centers.”