Most sales managers and executives in the data center industry focus on generating revenue and client retention. However, before new clients can come on board, you must first have leads for potential clients.
Now that potential clients make as much as 90% of the decision before they’re ready to talk to your sales team, how can you make sure that your wholesale data center gets found early enough in the sales cycle to be relevant and in the mix?
And how do you get people -- especially qualified prospects that are in the market for wholesale data center services -- to provide their business card information to gain access to your content, so they can become leads for your company?
Get Website Visitors to Trade Their “Business Card” for Access
Why should ideal, potential clients basically enter the information on their business card into your contacts database through a landing page form?
So let’s talk about how you’re going to generate those leads and what benefit you’ll provide to website visitors that you wish to convert to leads.
In order to effectively generate highly-qualified leads from your website, the content that you’re offering can’t be focused on your needs. The premium content that you publish on your website must be all about their needs and their problems, not yours.
Identify When Someone is Ready to Talk With Sales
Unless your prospects are already at least in the middle of sales cycle, none will be truly ready for a conversation with a sales rep.
So, what can you do prior to that? How can you generate leads from website visitors who are highly-qualified, but aren’t yet in the consideration or decision making stage?
The answer: Build a persona-driven strategy to attract strangers and convert visitors through premium content. This offer must be just plain irresistible – so irresistible that visitors from that buyer persona feel like they have to get access to what’s on the other side of the landing page.
Develop Buyer Personas
What is irresistible? Your ideal buyers will tell you when you do your persona research.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal buyer of your wholesale data center services based on research, analysis, and educated speculation.
To create buyer personas, start by researching your clients and prospects.
Then summarize the commonalities, so you know the content needs of your ideal buyers and what they’ll find most helpful and remarkable.
When building buyer personas, you can use surveys, analysis of search and social footprint, and individual one-on-one conversations.
Once you’ve established your SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time bound), your well thought-out, full sales funnel, marketing and sales campaign must be grounded in buyer persona research.
Those who skip persona research – or take shortcuts based on their own assumptions – can really louse up everything they do going forward with product development, marketing, sales, and services delivery.
Beware of Marketing Firms That Can’t, or Won’t, Create Buyer Personas
And a word of caution: many low-cost digital marketing solutions are able to keep their price points low because there are no buyer personas developed.
When marketing firms fail to conduct buyer persona research, they are saying:
- They don’t have the skillset to develop remarkable content.
- They’re hoping that no one figures out they’ve cut corners.
- They mistakenly believe that all clients’ ideal buyers are the same.
- They don’t care if their client’s companies are differentiated enough to gain pricing power and improve their profit margins.
The bottom line: Without investing in buyer persona research, it will be your results that miss the mark – to say the least.
Ask the Right Questions
When developing buyer personas for your data center, you need to find out from the standpoint of one ideal buyer at a time:
- How do they spend their day?
- What challenges do they face?
- What goals are they striving for?
- What could get them a career promotion?
- What could get them fired?
- What are they up worried about at 2 o’clock in the morning?
- How do they find and vet data center services?
- What are their favorite online and offline communities?
- What are they searching for?
Create Irresistible Offers
Once you know the commonalities and consensus about each of your ideal buyers, and these have been formalized into buyer persona documents, you can develop premium content that addresses the most urgent and challenging needs of your ideal buyers.
This allows you to know exactly which kinds of lead generation offers will most efficiently convert visitors to your website into marketing qualified leads.
In this post, you’ve been introduced to how you can attract great leads from your wholesale data center’s website.
What’s most effectively generating qualified leads on your website? Where is your firm falling short? Share your take in the Comments.
And to continue learning more about how data center providers can develop a scalable, data-driven, marketing and sales funnel that powers growth, download your free copy of the guide to Lead Generation Best Practices for Colocation Data Centers.
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