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

How to Generate Leads for Data Center Clients, regardless of whether they’re colocation or wholesale data center clients

Generating leads in the data center space

In this short video, I want to introduce you to how I approach the go-to-market strategy for generating leads in the data center space.

It first starts 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, their challenges.

What's keeping them up at two o'clock in the morning?

What if they get right will get them a big promotion.?

What if they mess up will get them the opposite of a promotion?

Develop a strategy that attracts, engages, and delights

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

And that will help to drive your segmentation as well, figuring out who the most important kind of economic stakeholders are, who's going to 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 think about what it's going to take to attract the right strangers in the right places at the right time.

And most of all, in the proper context.

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.

We want to get you 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, and power, and all that stuff that people will use against you.

You want to make sure 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, 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 taken strangers, the right kind of strangers, and we've attracted them into visitors.

But so far, they're just anonymous leads that are circling around our content, circling around our website.

Get more anonymous visitors converted into leads

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

We need to give them a compelling reason to step out from anonymity and tell us who they are to convert more of those visitors into leads.

Then the way we typically do that is 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 kind of information for what's on the other side of the landing page.

So we need good downloadable content.

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

More than likely, there may be, like, some lead flow pop-up 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 are going to be able to take a lot 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.

Converting 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 we can do to accelerate the sales cycle is generally a good thing.

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

And the way we'll typically do that and make sure we get really good about the segmentation and personalization.

So once we know who they are, like their persona, and we 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 we want to send them helpful educational content by email nurturing, use some social nurturing, use some retargeting. 

And 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.”

And one of the most effective ways to do that is to invite people to webinars to continue to educate, build trust, inspire 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.”

Closed won 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 make sure 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, I've been giving you some food for thought to be thinking about your go-to-market strategy for generating leads for data center clients, both on the colocation and the wholesale side.

I'd love to know what you do in your organization to make lead generation work.

Let me know in the comments below.

Feel free to leave a question.

Any questions that you have as well.