Data Center Website Mistakes That Cost You Millions!
https://www.dcsmi.com/newsletter Subscribe to the Data Center Sales and Marketing Newsletter (DCSMI)
How should you generate leads and obtain clients for your data center?
Well, I don't want to take anything for granted. So, I still see a certain number of people in the data center space, in the colo space, buying leads from lead brokers, lead services, and things like that.
And the problem with that approach is that those "leads," with air quotes around leads, are not expecting to hear from you. So when they do hear from you, do they find it helpful? Or is it harassing? Or do they just hit the spam button?
It's a big one, too. Did they hit the spam button? Twitter has a block function.
There's an equivalent to that on LinkedIn.
We're not very far away from our smartphones, having a button, just like that, where you're not only rejecting the call. But putting them on a Shi* list, putting them on a bad dude list of people, as we see that already happening on the web, where you go to Google, and you put in a phone number, and you can see all the reports of annoying, harassing calls.
So this is a cultural shift. This is a mindset shift. Unless your company is going to pretend like it's still 2005 and harass the heck out of people and interrupt the heck out of people and hope to get a very small sliver of a decreasingly small pie of people that put up with that nonsense and engage.
But it's not the right context in most cases to get trusted advisor status.
So, the first thing to recognize is that buying leads and spamming people are vastly different from creating your own proprietary thought leadership content and generating your own leads.
Suppose it's a given that we want to generate our own highly qualified leads and do the right things by setting SMART goals, and we're building our buyer personas. In that case, we're being smart about our keyword research and realistic about the competition.
For the basics of generating leads, you want to ensure that you have landing pages and premium content different for each buyer persona. The CFO of a financial services company grapples with issues different from those of a SaaS company's sales director or the media company's chief operations officer.
Depending on who you're targeting, you want to make sure that you have lead generation and premium content specific to that buyer persona.
Second: Make sure you have lead generation premium content offers that are relevant to where they are in the buyer's journey.
The awareness stage. The consideration stage. The decision-making stage.
It's also entirely inappropriate to offer a request, a quote, or a tour offer to someone on their first visit to your website because less than five to 10% of the people who visit your website are ready to buy immediately.
If you're not sure why that would put someone off, think about going in to test drive a car. Imagine walking into a showroom, seeing the car salesperson, and saying, "I'd like to see some of your models, maybe go out for a test drive. "
And the salesperson's responses. "That's awesome. Are we buying or leasing today?"
And you're saying, no, no, no, you don't understand. This is the first time out. "I'm looking. I just want to compare some models and maybe test drive one or two of these."
"Oh, that is so cool. Are we buying or leasing today?"
And they just, they're not listening to you at all.
So, it's essential to understand the length of the sales cycle, the milestones, and the journey that your qualified leads take from qualified leads to sales-ready opportunities and ultimately to clients.
Make sure that you have premium content appropriate for that stage; things like white papers, checklists, and eBooks are great early on when they're doing research. In the middle, maybe ROI calculators, case studies, comparisons, and webinars similar to this.
Toward the end, where you'd have more intimate one-on-one conversations, tours, needs assessments, consultations, and other similar services, request a quote. If you only have offers for the late decision-making stage, you're leaving a ton of money on the table.
One of the most powerful ways to generate more leads and highly qualified leads is to make sure that you have premium content and landing pages for each buyer persona and each stage of the journey.
#cloud #cloudservices #colocation #colocationmarketing #colocationsales #datacenter #datacentergtm #datacentermarketing #datacenters #datacentersales #datacentersolutions #datacentre #dcsmi #itprovider #managedservices #networkservices