If you’re like most sales directors or CEOs at colocation companies, you often struggle with or strive for greater clarity about reaching the right prospects to fuel your business development pipeline.
We addressed this question in our recent Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Colocation Data Centers, which this blog post is excerpted from.
The #1 Mindset That Sets Colocation Companies Up for Failure
Reaching the right prospects starts with understanding who those prospects are – and making sure that you understand those prospects better than any other direct or indirect competitor on the planet.
When discussing creating helpful resources and content that attract people to your website, the obvious competitors may not be the only competitors.
In other words, if you’re creating content about topics that are also covered in trade publications, at trade shows, or in channel programs -- or you’re developing content around certain brands, your direct competitors are not the only ones that you’re competing with to capture the attention and the eyeballs of your best prospects.
So it’s really important to be super-specific about the kinds of ideal buyers that you want to attract.
Why Buyer Personas Must Be Your Foundation
The solution to this starts with developing buyer personas. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal clients, or one or more ideal clients one at a time -- and their goals, plans, challenges, and pain points.
What’s keeping them up at 2 o’clock in the morning? What are some of the things that can get them promoted at work? What are some of the things that, if they screw up, could get them fired at work?
Where do they hang out online? Where do they hang out offline?
What do they secretly desire the most from a colocation company like yours?
What do they look for on search engines? What are they doing on social media?
When you start to see commonalities among the people you look at, you realize that they can be bucketed together into a single buyer persona.
So reaching the right prospects starts by investing in doing some serious, well-thought-out, research-based, buyer persona development.
And then that will fuel things like keyword research, your editorial calendar, and what kinds of premium content to develop that goes behind landing pages.
How is your colocation company doing with reaching the right business development prospects? What’s been most effective? What’s been most frustrating? Let us know in the Comments box below.
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