First and foremost, let’s quantify—regarding your sales team's ability to attract prospects in a small market—what small is.
To attract the right buyers to data centers, you must have:
When researching buyer personas, part of your due diligence is coming up with your industry's addressable market size.
- Product/market fit
- A deep understanding of your competition
- Content creation
- Distribution.
You want to ensure your content reaches the right data center prospects.
Product/Market Fit
Do you have product market fit yet?
Ensure you define that addressable market versus the desired percentage of market share. In other words, if you find your market size is only thirty, even if you have fifty percent market share, owning half of the market share can get you to your growth goals; this type of stuff is what you should be looking at early on when thinking through strategy issues.
Understand Your Competition Among Other Data Centers
When analyzing your competition, you want to have a deep understanding of:
- Your ideal buyers
- What your competition is doing right
- What your competition is doing wrong
Do not just look at your competitor's products and services. Look at how your competitors conduct themselves in the Awareness and Consideration stages of the buyer's journey—the first 70% of the decision-making process.
Make sure you are laser-focused with:
- Your content
- The promotion of your content
- The distribution of your content
Content Creation
Creating awesome, helpful, and remarkable content is only half the battle. The other half of the battle is about getting that content in front of the right eyes. Make sure you consider both. Otherwise, it is exactly like opening an awesome restaurant in the middle of nowhere that no one knows about. The restaurant will inevitably go out of business a couple of months later.
You must strategize how to get your content in front of the right eyes who value it most. For small markets, you may need to integrate some offline content with your online content even more, things like:
- Lunch and learns
- Tech expos
- Open house events
- Technology showcases
We even see data center providers that take people to sports events and rent suites to do networking with prospects, part educational and part fun.
How does your data center focus on smaller markets? Are you using content to generate leads? Let us know in the comments below.
Learn more about Colocation Data Center Providers and Go-to-Market Strategy (GTM) for Growth.
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