How Data Center Sales Teams Improve Pipeline Activity

To really improve your pipeline activity and results, you and your data center sales team needs a strong grasp on product/market fit. Product/market fit describes how well products and services at the right price points fill market demand.   

People are doing tons of research upfront before they are ready to engage with your sales team. You want to make sure you learn how the buyer’s journey has changed.

You also want to customize your approach based on where your prospects are and what your sales team has learned from looking at their lead intelligence. For instance:

• How they came to your site
• All the blog posts they read
• Videos they have engaged with
• Surveys they filled out
• Webinars they attended
• Videos they watched

If they are in the contact timeline for leads, it gives a tremendous amount of information your sales team can use to understand what is going to make that sales qualified lead (SQL) get to the opportunity of closing.

For example, because you know your lead read six different things on VPN’s and twelve things on PCI compliance, you know what to zero in on because you have a strong idea of what their behavior is on your site, implicitly, not just what they explicitly told you.

“Smarketing”

Smarketing refers to the alignment of marketing and sales. Marketing and sales alignment is critical for determining:

• Who is qualified?
• Who is not qualified?
• When should leads be passed to sales?

These are all critical issues to look at to improve your pipeline and the results you are getting out of the bottom of it.

Most companies will end up with more granular deal stages than just lead, opportunity, and client; this is something that is typically determined by:

• How buyer personas begin their journey
• How sales teams are structured      

Closed-Loop Marketing

Closed-loop marketing is being able to tie your marketing activities to your sales outcome, so you understand what is working well.

When you can determine what is working, you can do more of those successful marketing tactics. If you can analyze what is absolutely not working, you can stop those tactics and get smarter and smarter over time.

Closed-loop marketing and the CRM integration are highly important.

How has your data center been able to improve pipeline activity? Let us know in the Comments below.

To learn more about data center sales acceleration, download the webinar recording Data Center Sales Funnel Acceleration Q&A Webinar.