One of the challenges faced by data centers as they look to create 
more scalable, predictable revenue growth, is product/market fit.
Defined by Wikipedia as the degree to which a product (or service) satisfies strong market demand, product/market fit is something product managers wrestle with at both midsize and large data centers.
Who are the ideal clients that your company can most profitably serve? Moreover, what services should you sell to them and at what price points? However, since CEOs and sales directors at smaller data centers often have client-envy – or ‘the grass must be greener on the other side of the fence’ syndrome – we get this question a lot about closing deals with bigger clients.
This topic came up at the Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Colocation Data Centers, and you will find an excerpt from the webinar recording in this blog post.
How Can You Land Bigger Data Center Deals in Top Markets?
To get the bigger data center deals in top markets, first, define what those top markets are. They are going to vary depending on whether your data center company is local, regional, or national.
There are five or six core markets, and there are a lot of secondary markets. In the data center industry, you might be talking about Northern California, Dallas, Chicago, Northern Virginia, or New York.
What you consider the “top market” is going to vary depending on your company location.
Nail Your Buyer Personas
However, when you are doing your buyer persona research, there are going to be things that come up that are geo-specific. For example:
- There are going to be certain conferences that your ideal clients attend.
- There are certain closed LinkedIn Groups where they hang out that are specific and unique to their location.
- There might be certain things that your ideal clients in a specific geographic area are talking about on Twitter.
- There may be certain things that they tend to search.
By creating hyper-relevant content, you are not looking to create content that is going to create thousands or tens of thousands of leads – in these niches, in these buyer personas.
Focus on Goals and THEIR Problems, Not Yours
You are looking to attract visitors and leads that are most likely to create sales opportunities and materialize into revenue. Having tons of visitors on your website should not be the goal. Having tons of leads generated on your website should not be the goal.
Ideally, these need to be marketing qualified leads (MQLs) with a very high likelihood that a significant percentage of these leads are going to be sales-ready, and a significant percentage of those sales-ready leads progressing on to opportunities.
A significant amount of these opportunities progresses on to be profitable clients; unprofitable clients are not the goal.
Avoid the Money-Losing Data Center Clients
All too often when we do workshops for colocation data centers, we hear the frustration that their client roster is, well, a lot of bad words are thrown around at this point with how they feel about their client roster.
However, the number one problem is many of their clients are money-losing deals. They end up discounting like crazy and back themselves into a corner, an accidental non-profit with part of their client list. You do not want to do that. Make sure that you are focusing on profitable clients.
Attracting and closing the bigger clients from top markets comes down to understanding those buyer personas and doing a fantastic job creating and distributing content that is helpful to them in their own eyes.
What does your executive and sales team do to attract bigger data center deals? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.
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