When you look at the sales teams at colocation companies, it’s often quite a diverse crowd. You often find some veterans with decades of experience in IT or telecommunications sales, some rookies, and quite a few in between.

However unless you have a very forward thinking sales director working hand in hand with a very forward-thinking chief marketing officer, your colocation company’s ability to compete may be a lot more in jeopardy than you realize – especially if there’s not close alignment between your sales and marketing teams. Here’s why.

Note: This blog post is excerpted from the Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Colocation Data Centers.

The Buyer’s Journey for Colocation Companies Within 3 Years (If Not Sooner)

Let’s fast forward now into what it’s going to look like one to three years out from now for colocation companies.

Sales and marketing “departments” as separate siloed departments will disappear. They will be forced to work together as one solid, revenue team. We’re already seeing this happen.

Even in my partner Joshua's own network of colo data centers and their sales and marketing professionals, we’ve seen two of these realignments happen just in the last couple of months.

Org Charts Being Redrawn to Stay Competitive

A marketing manager was promoted to director of sales and marketing.

And a sales professional was promoted to VP of sales and marketing.

You’re seeing that get unified so that there’s one person that’s totally responsible for revenue and making sure that marketing is working on activities that grow the revenue.

So everyone is aligned around the same revenue quotas.

Marketing, one to three years out from now, will own 70% to 90% of revenue generation.

70% to 90% of that buyer’s journey, of that sales cycle, will be over by the time your prospects are ready to engage with someone from your sales team.

More Funnel Disruption from Even More Empowered Buyers

Adding even more gasoline to that, podcasting is going to become a lot more mainstream. You’re going to see people listening to a lot more podcasts in cars much more easily as the technology in the big automakers is going to make cars more podcast-enabled.

Video is going to grow even faster than it is right now. Live video, Meerkat, and Periscope are going to continue to grow.

Personalization is going to become even more important.

And at this stage, one to three years out from now, the sales professionals that have survived as order takers and explainers are going to go away. The ones that are going to remain will have to be true consultants and thought leaders. And that is who will dominate the sales profession for colocation data center companies. 

Are your marketing and sales teams working together, closely aligned, to compete effectively in the very near and very inevitable future? And is your content strategy, talent, and technology keeping up and positioning you as the definitive go-to educational resources in your niche within the colocation industry? Let us know how this is going for you and your team in the Comments below.

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