Before your data center's marketing and sales teams can start working on promoting and selling your products and services, you will need to find and contact potential clients. In other words, prospecting.
Identifying prospective clients requires understanding your market and industry, which involves research and the ability to draft buyer personas.
There are two types of prospecting methods, the direct method and the indirect method.
- Direct prospecting methods include direct mail, telemarketing, advertising, cold calls, trade shows, etc.
- Indirect prospecting methods include referrals, speaking panels, social networking, etc.
Prospecting can be extremely time-consuming as you are trying to attract new clients to your data center. Below are a couple of ways Joshua Feinberg, Vice President and Co-founder of SP Home Run, recommends you can improve standard prospecting.
Develop a Segmented Contact List
The first step to improving standard prospecting is by creating a targeted list for each buyer persona. Each of your lists should contain a minimum of ten contacts so that you can focus exclusively on your specific audience. You should always attract new leads and add fresh contacts to your lists.
Focus Prospecting on Core Buyer Personas
When promoting your business to your buyer personas, you must create premium content that will spark their attention and, more importantly, impress them.
You want them to say, "Wow, where can I get more of this amazing information," and show an interest in your company's work; this is a great example of adding value to your audience.
A good way to attract new clients is by developing content that answers their questions. What your clients care about is what you should care about. Joshua Feinberg says, “You must be able to answer their biggest questions in your content.”
Become an Educational Resource on Data Centers
The best way to improve standard prospecting is by using educational content to build a reputation as a trusted advisor.
Truthfully, standard prospecting methods are outdated; people focus their efforts on online lead-generation methods instead. For instance, people don’t pick up the phone these days without checking who it is, and irrelevant emails tend to go into SPAM. As consumer habits have changed, so do we as marketers.
Joshua Feinberg says, “One of the most important ways to improve standard prospecting, and the results you get from standard prospecting is to be really deliberate about who you want to attract. Be a helpful and educated resource all around that brings the right people to your doorstep instead of the other way around.”
Does your data center come across as an educational resource? Let us know in the comments below.
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