How Data Center Sales Teams Identify Their Target Audience

Data center sales teams can identify their target market in various ways. However, there are three core aspects proven to produce real market success:

Product/market fit
Setting SMART goals
Building buyer personas

In a recent Q&A webinar on data center sales funnel acceleration, we addressed concerns of data center CEOs, Sales Directors, and CMOs relating to sales acceleration, discussing this topic in depth.

Product/Market Fit and Identifying Your Target Audience

Your data center needs to capture the concept of product/market fit. Product/market fit is a huge prerequisite your business must fulfill before setting SMART goals or building buyer personas.

Product/market fit needs to be the first step; it is painful when companies try to scale their marketing and sales resources but are oblivious to the following:

What are they selling?
How much it costs?
To whom are they selling?

Your business must have a deep understanding of what products and services it is selling and which have the highest demand within a particular market segment.

Data centers attempting to market everything to everyone in their industry are failing in today’s marketplace, proving the importance of having a crisp product/market focus definition.

If no one in your company holds the “Product Director” or “Product Manager” title, it is critical to assign someone those jobs roles and responsibilities. Once your job roles are in place, you need to identify your most profitable clients—whom you want more of. These clients are ones you would to copy and paste. These clients are:

Fantastic
A super fit
Gratifying to work with
A good margin in it
A high-growth area

SMART Goals

Setting smart goals is critical. We need to have:

Specific goals
Goals that you can measure
Attainable goals (relative to what you have done in the past)
Goals that are relevant to your company’s mission
Goals that are time-bound and tied to deadlines

For example, anyone could say, “I would love to run a marathon!” However, it would be more actionable if you said, “I would love to run a marathon,” and then calculate, “I have 18 months to work towards that. What are the interim steps I need to get to?”

The same goes for building out your sales funnel. All your goals must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant to your business, and time-bound with a deadline.

Buyer Personas for Data Center Sales Teams

After you have defined your product/market fit and set your SMART goals, then—and only then—focus on building buyer personas.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal clients. Buyer personas are based on research and educated speculation; it is important when you are building buyer personas to make sure you are not just guessing.

Personalize Your Message

It greatly affects how your buyers type “data center” in content and on social media. For instance, are they typing

data center
data centre
datacenter
#datacenter
DC (short for data center)

All of these things make a big difference. When you start getting into the problems, challenges, goals they are up against, and what keeps them up at 2 o’clock in the morning, getting their words exactly perfect is a really big deal.

Beware the HIPPO

It is not uncommon for egos to get in the way.

The highest-paid person in the organization—also known as The HIPPO—can easily discredit the data you need to identify to approach your market in the right way.

All too often, seasoned data center industry CEOs, sales directors, and marketers make mistakes by making assumptions. Their mentality is: “I have seen it all, done it all, and know it all. I do not need to ask people anything.” This mentality is absolute nonsense. You do need to ask people, get their words, and get a consensus.

The Takeaways

To get the targeting right:

Product/market fit is critical
SMART goals are critical
Buyer personas must be considered

Also, see

Does your sales team have difficulty identifying its target market? Let us know in the comments below.

B2B Sales Strategy