How can your data center attract mid-size cloud prospects?
First, we need to be much more specific about what mid-size means.
Typically, there is a geographic area that matches up with a company’s size.
- Is it the United States?
- Is it a region?
- Is it a metro area?
- Is it international?
Next, we must be hyper-specific about:
- Job titles
- The kind of decision-maker we want to attract
- The best person to get in front of
- The second best person to get in front of
- Who the natural influencer is
- Who the natural evaluator is
Attracting Data Center Decision Makers from Cloud Competition
Decision-makers must be rigorously studied. The buyer persona framework is a big deal and stems from the product management world.
During buyer persona research, your data center should determine its personas':
- Goals
- Plans
- Challenges
- What keeps them up at night
- What they are responsible for at work
- What can get them promoted
- What can get them fired
- Where they hang out (online and offline)
- What are they doing on social media
- What they desire most from their data center provider
- What type of sales experience they are looking for
- What do they look for when evaluating different data centers
Understanding Your Buyer Personas
Think about the portable music player industry twenty years ago. Back then, walkmans largely dominated the market, and you could hardly go anywhere without seeing someone with a Sony Walkman. Sony dominated the personal music business in the heyday of cassettes and the early days of CDs until one day when the market changed in a profound way. A little over a decade ago, Apple interrupted big time and decimated Sony’s market share.
Apple took control of the market because they better understood their buyer personas. Apple dramatically simplified the experience of getting music onto a portable music player. Buyers went from having a dozen songs on a cassette or a CD to having access to thousands of songs for a mere $0.99 cents per song.
The market continuously evolves (as shown in the above example), demonstrating the importance of paying attention to product management and buyer personas.
Think about the big picture for these mid-size and mid-market cloud targets. Executives buy the cloud to solve specific problems. If you can be the teacher who helps them solve their business problems and get found early enough in the buyer's journey, you will earn a seat as a trusted business advisor.
The Bottom Line
What is tricky for some to wrap their minds around is that being a trusted advisor often means talking about topics tangentially related to your core products and services but may not be selling them.
It is important to understand the kinds of problems your buyers are experiencing. Sometimes, it can take gathering other subject matter experts together to conduct interviews. At the end of the day, your main focus should be the problems that they need help solving ahead of your problems.
How is your data center attracting mid-size cloud prospects? Let us know in the comments below.
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