Data center companies face a lot of different pressures – from industry compliance requirements to utility costs to staffing challenges to appeasing community leaders.

One of the bigger challenges is for data center providers to stand out from the crowd…to differentiate in a meaningful way to prospects – basically strangers – that don’t yet know about your company.

Why Most Data Center Companies Miss the Boat on Early–Stage Differentiation

Most leaders of data centers can point to at least a handful of differentiators that their clients experience once onboard.

But in a world where influencers and decisions makers are 60% to 90% of the way through the buyer’s journey before they’re even ready for a conversation with your sales team, it’s critical to get found early and often, by the right people, and in the right context.

We talked about this issue at length during the “Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Colocation Data Centers.” You’ll find a short excerpt from the webinar recording in this blog post.

How Can You Differentiate Your Products, Which are Seen as Commodities These Days?

That’s an awesome slide. You can see a picture here from a national supermarket and a shelf featuring a dairy manufacturer.

And there are actually two different promotions running on that shelf.

So if the cups of Greek yogurt alone weren’t enough of a commodity, on top of that, the yogurt is on sale 10 for $10.00 this week. And if you scrounge around and find a coupon, for every three that you buy you can get another $1.00 off.

The message here is that if your home page looks like the data center equivalent of this, you’re doing something wrong. Now wrong is all in the eye of the beholder and subjective.

But there is a much better way – if you want to take price off the table as one of the main factors that are going to motivate your prospects to make a decision – one way or another – on whether they choose to go with your data center or the competition.

Getting found early, and being able to be perceived as a helpful, trusted advisor, and providing educational resources that teach how to evaluate the alternatives that are on the market, is hugely important to making sure that you never get to the stage where you have to put a price tag, and then another “coupon” – discount or signing incentive.

If your home page looks like the Greek yogurt sale shelf in the supermarket, go back and think hard about the concepts that we’re talking about here and how you can correct this for your colocation data center. You don’t want to back yourself into this corner of being forced to discount and compete on price.

What do you do to make sure that your data center services aren’t seen as commodities? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments below.

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