How to Generate Leads for Data Center Clients (Colocation or Wholesale)

This video introduces you to a go-to-market strategy for generating leads in the data center space.

1) Start by understanding exactly who the stakeholders are that you're trying to reach

What kind of company they're from?

What kind of roles they're in? (and building out buyer personas)

So you not only understand their demographics but their behaviors, their motivations, their goals, their plans, and their challenges.

• What's keeping them up at two o'clock in the morning?
• What if they get it right? Will it get them a big promotion?
• What if they mess up will get them the opposite of a promotion?

2) Develop a strategy that attracts, engages, and delights

Once you have consensus on that, it's much easier to develop a strategy that attracts, engages, and delights those stakeholders. 

That will also help drive your segmentation, figuring out who the most important economic stakeholder is and who will be on the decision-by-committee that you need to influence.

But start with the individuals and then fold that together into an ideal client profile (an ICP).

So you understand at the company level which company you're trying to attract.

So once you have those two items together, you'll be in a much better position to consider what it will take to attract the right strangers in the right places at the right time.

And most of all, in the proper context.

3) Be seen as the go-to experts in the data center space

So you and your team are seen as the go-to experts in the data center space and not just another data center vendor.

Get out of the vendor box as rapidly as possible.

So you're seen in a differentiated way.

So you're not seen as a commoditized provider of bandwidth, space, power, and everything that people will use against you.

You want to ensure they have good leverage on the sales process by being seen as a trusted advisor, an educator, and a subject matter expert.

In that kind of context, the marketing and sales development team, sales team, customer success team, and product team should be working together to make sure that there's great, helpful, educational content on your blog, a good podcasting kind of content that you're talking about the right kinds of topics, that you're growing your reach on social in the right way. 

So now we've attracted the right kind of strangers as visitors.

But so far, they're just anonymous leads circling around your content and website.

4) Convert more anonymous visitors into leads

What can you do to get more of those anonymous visitors to convert into leads?

Give them a compelling reason to step out from anonymity and tell you who they are to convert more of those visitors into leads.

Then we typically do that by premium content, content that's so good that people are willing to tell us a little bit about themselves, like exchanging essential business card information for what's on the other side of the landing page.

So you need good downloadable content.

You need good webinars, webinar recordings, similar things where you have forms, landing pages, thank you pages, and email workflow automation.

More than likely, there may be, like, some lead flow pop-ups on your site. They're either in the middle or coming down from the top or the bottom, maybe using chatbots to do similar kinds of things, chat flows to engage with that.

But again, those will be able to take many of your anonymous visitors and convert them into known leads, so you can build a relationship with them over time and continue educating and building trust with them.

5) Convert leads into opportunities and customers

This is especially important in the data center space, where we know most people have a pretty long, considered sales process. 

So anything that you can do to accelerate the sales cycle is generally a good thing.

This brings us to our next step: how we're going to convert leads into marketing-qualified, sales-qualified/sales-accepted opportunities and, then, a percentage of those into customers.

6) Get really good at segmentation and personalization

So once you know who they are, like their persona, and understand where they are in their journey, whether they're at the awareness stage, consideration stage, decision stage, and want one of the more common lifecycle stages that you'll see in a CRM.

Then send them helpful educational content by email nurturing, social nurturing, and retargeting. 

One of the essential playbooks that continues to be in the data center space is webinars, and there are many different ways to approach webinars.

But at the end of the day, it's about inviting people where you're looking at your CRM. You're like,

“Wow, we're generating some really good leads, but why don't they want to talk to our sales team?

Okay, well, we need to figure out a way to give them a compelling reason to want to interact with us.”

One of the most effective ways to do that is to invite people to webinars to continue educating, building trust, and inspiring them.

And many people, when they start to learn a little bit more about who you are and what you do, a lot of them will engage with your polls and surveys, and it'll become a much more natural like,

“Oh, Yeah. Okay. Now I get what you guys do. Okay. Yeah, we definitely should talk at some point.”

7) Embrace that "closed won" is just the beginning

So that will help you with the sales cycle acceleration and in any business based on retention and expansion revenue.

Of course, the deal is done when it gets to closed-won, but not really. 

We need to ensure we have a fantastic onboarding process and we do an incredible job of delighting our clients so there's no retention risk and they stick around.

They write great reviews. All that stuff is super important.

So on the customer success side, being able to deploy surveys, being able to have great onboarding, having excellent customer success teams in place, being able to keep track of NPS and other kinds of indicators that tell us whether we're doing a great job and doing what they signed up for, giving them their first value, initial value, intended value, all those typical things that usually define whether we have a healthy client relationship.

In this video, you've been given some food for thought on go-to-market strategy for generating leads for data center clients, both on the colocation and the wholesale side.

What do you do in your data center company to make lead generation work? Let me know in the comments below.