One of the challenges data centers face 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 often get this question about closing deals with bigger clients.
First, define the top markets where your data center company is located to get bigger deals. The top markets will vary depending on whether your data center company is local, regional, or national.
There are five or six core markets and many secondary markets. In the data center industry, you might discuss Northern California, Dallas, Chicago, Northern Virginia, or New York.
What you consider the “top market” depends on your company's location.
However, when you are doing your buyer persona research, there are going to be geo-specific things that come up. For example:
By creating hyper-relevant content, you are not looking to create content that will create thousands or tens of thousands of leads – in these niches and buyer personas.
You are looking to attract visitors and leads that are most likely to create sales opportunities and materialize into revenue. Having tons of visitors to 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 them will be sales-ready and that a significant percentage of those sales-ready leads will progress on to opportunities.
Many of these opportunities progress to profitable clients; unprofitable clients are not the goal.
All too often, when we do workshops for colocation data centers, we hear the frustration that their client roster is; well, many 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 discount 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 do your executive and sales team do to attract bigger data center deals? Share your thoughts in the Comments section below.
Learn more about Colocation Data Center Providers and Go-to-Market Strategy (GTM) for Growth.