Data Center Sales & Marketing Institute (DCSMI) @[email protected]
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The Data Center Sales & Marketing Institute (DCSMI) is a bou
[New Podcast Episode]
“Make sure that you're not using the word lead and
opportunity interchangeably. Why?
Because in the self-driven buyer's journey,
which is the predominant buyer's journey that
people are going through today that are buyers of
data center infrastructure and colocation.
Most of your best prospects and clients don't want
to spend time with your sales team until they're
almost ready to buy.
Like 83% of their research and decision -making process
is over before you get to meet them.
And that's a huge problem.
And a huge competitive vulnerability.
If you don't have a good plan for getting in there early and
often in that first 83% of the journey.
And the way you typically can get in there early and
often Is to have a really strong understanding of
who your ideal clients are and what they care about.
Your buyer personas: their biggest goals and challenges,
and having strong empathy about what's going on in their world.
And then taking those insights to create amazingly helpful,
educational resources; learning resources and
educational events experiences.”
Via Joshua Feinberg at DCSMI
Watch the full episode:
Ep. 141 Joshua Feinberg, CEO of DCSMI | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast
www.dcsmi.com/podcast/ep-141-joshua-feinberg-ceo-o…
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[New Podcast Episode]
"Where we've worked with logistics teams,
I've seen this in one of my clients and
where we were brought in late because
they thought they could do it on their own.
And then by that time, it was a bit of a mess.
But now, there was an issue because
they were getting heat from the CEO and the COO
because they couldn't actually get go to market
and they couldn't open up their site.
And at that point, they got involved to say,
‘What's going on? Can't we get the fit? What's happening?’
And so, you never want that to happen because
that's always kind of reacting to a situation.
We want to proactively really de-risk
before a server's even shipped --
and see what are going to be the obstacles
before you necessarily even purchase the equipment."
Via Noa Sussman at TecEx
Watch the full episode:
Ep. 140 Noa Sussman, Director of Global Solutions of TecEx | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast
www.dcsmi.com/podcast/noa-sussman-director-of-glob…
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[New Podcast Episode]
“The self-driven buyer's journey is a really, really big deal.
And I think that's what's throwing most companies
in this segment for a curveball.
What is the self-driven buyer's journey all about?
The self-driven buyer's journey means, essentially,
that your prospects and clients are doing
so much research on their own before they ever get
to an initial meeting with someone from your team
that their research and decision- making process
is almost over before you meet a potential client.
Almost, almost over.
Gartner found 83% of a typical journey is
now over before someone is meeting
with a member of your sales team for the first time.
83%. It didn't used to be this far over.
It used to be 10 years ago that about half of
that research and decision-making process
was over before vendor contact or sales contact.
At the time, CEB (Corporate Executive Board) did research
with SiriusDecisions (now Forrester) and Salesforce,
and found that 56% of a typical journey was over
before vendor contact and sales contact.
We're now at 83% and it's only shifting more and
more to the right.
So if you sell to highly technical IT professionals,
facilities professionals, developers,
very, very highly educated, skeptical, cynical,
not big fans of marketing and sales,
you need to work extra hard to earn your way in early and often
-- in the right places, at the right time, with the right people,
and most of all in the right context.
So that you and your client-facing team members are seen as
the be-all, end-all experts when it comes to
anything and everything having to do with...”
Via Joshua Feinberg at DCSMI
Watch the full episode:
Ep. 139 Joshua Feinberg, CEO of DCSMI | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast
www.dcsmi.com/podcast/ep-139-joshua-feinberg-ceo-a…
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[New Podcast Episode]
“Really, the traditional way you could even
run these power flow studies is you
usually have to hire very complex and expensive consultancies
to run even a single POI.
But, traditionally before solutions like ours existed,
there really was no way to analyze the power grid at scale
for this capacity.
Because you basically take these large scale models,
then you take this kind of input data from the utilities
and the grid operators, you layer in a variety of assumptions
about how it'll evolve,
and then you kind of run it through these modeling engines.
And so traditionally, the only way to get access
to these modeling engines, if you will, was either to hire
a transmission planning staff that would then run them
and you'd have to rely on the grid.
Or you would traditionally hire these consultants
that would take six to eight weeks to turn around a study.
A single study can cost $25,000 to $50,000 and
they typically take about six to eight weeks to return.
And that's for a singular POI.
But, that doesn't really help this site selection use case
where you're looking at every POI.
And for the listeners, when I say POI,
that is a point of interconnection.
Think of that as where you actually
plug your data center into the grid. Think like an outlet.
And there are certain points in the grid where you can do that.”
Via Jake Anderson at PVcase
Watch the full episode:
Ep. 138 Jake Anderson, Head of Business of PVcase | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast
www.dcsmi.com/podcast/jake-anderson-head-of-busine…
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[New Podcast Episode]
“Even if you manage to get a warm introduction
to the financial decision maker,
everyone has gotten so risk averse
over the last couple of years that
if you haven't first built consensus
among that person's team,
they're going to send you back to the team.
So, what that means, is there's no longer a decision maker.
There's a decision-making committee.
And once we realize that there's multiple stakeholders
that are involved on a team,
and perhaps across one or more teams within the company,
we realize that there is...
Whether there's a formal or an informal or an ad-hoc,
there is for sure a decision-making committee.
And understand, from your standpoint,
there is no magic tool that's going to
consistently tell you exactly who that
decision making committee is.”
Via Joshua Feinberg at DCSMI
Watch the full episode:
Ep. 137 Joshua Feinberg, CEO of DCSMI | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast
www.dcsmi.com/podcast/ep.-137-joshua-feinberg-ceo-…
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[New Podcast Episode]
“They're really dependent, co-dependent, on us
coming out with the power and cooling systems.
Because designing a data center at
132 kilowatts per rack is not trivial.
There's very few people in the world that can do that.
So, they're really dependent on the reference designs
that we provide so that customers can actually
deploy their solutions.
And now with Rubin coming out,
it's rumored 240 kilowatts per rack.
And then in three years it's going to be one megawatt.
It's really important for the industry to have this blueprint
-- to be able to deploy these solutions as they are developed,
like I said, at light speed, like a new generation every year.”
Via Steve Carlini at Schneider Electric
Watch the full episode:
Ep. 136 Steve Carlini, VP of Innovation and Data Center of Schneider Electric | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast
www.dcsmi.com/podcast/steve-carlini-vp-of-innovati…
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[New Podcast Episode]
“These are the types of events that we've seen our clients,
we've seen others that we talk about,
that do these owned events where basically,
you're running the whole event.
So you have control over who's on the guest list,
who attends, what you talk about, the timing,
and everything like that.
You can put on these events for anywhere
from a few hundred dollars to maybe a few thousand dollars.
And you're getting the perfect people attending.
Because you've perfectly picked who gets the invitations.
And the only thing holding you back from doing this more
is how good you are at being able to create awareness
and drive up the perceived value of attending.
So, this is for sure a fantastic way to generate leads
in a defined geographic area on a low budget.
And when you start doing this, well,
in addition to just hosting this series
for your primary buyer persona,
you segment it out and
create a series for your secondary buyer persona.
Maybe you create a version for channel partners
that you work with in your local area --
where you invite managed service providers,
network integrators, value added resellers,
IT consultancies. Do a version of that.
You start to realize once this gets up and running...
Wow! You could literally be doing one of these ...
at least twice a month, maybe three times a month.
You're like, wow, this is a really, really good low-cost,
revenue growth engine for our colocation data center business.
Now, what about the long distance prospects and clients?
Could you do this with them as well? Absolutely!”
Via Joshua Feinberg at DCSMI
Watch the full episode:
Ep. 135 Joshua Feinberg, CEO of DCSMI | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast
www.dcsmi.com/podcast/ep.-135-joshua-feinberg-ceo-…
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[New Podcast Episode]
“One of the things that companies need to be doing is
utilizing that marketing budget towards their HR team.
Because if you have little Billy Joe looking to be
a project manager somewhere, right?
And he's looking at company A and company B, well,
who has the better website?
Who has the better social media campaigns?
And what information is on there that is relatable to him?
A lot of companies want to put their projects and
highlight their projects. So that's cool.
But what about your staff?
What are the entitlements and benefits that you're giving them?
And why is that not listed on your website?
And so that it's easily accessible, your insurance programs,
all of the things.
So I find companies who have all of the information
a candidate may want do better and they're more attracted there.
And then all of the other subsequent questions that candidates have,
the culture issues, those are already answered within their website
from their marketing teams, from videos,
from interviews on the website, from articles, blogs, things like that.
Because ultimately the younger generation doesn't want
to sit there and have a 30 minute conversation
with someone all of the time.
They want to look at the information, take 15 minutes doing that,
and then make a decision on where they want to work.”
Via Roxxann Sczepanik at JCP (Joseph Chris Partners)
Watch the full episode:
Ep. 134 Roxxann Sczepanik, Partner of JCP (Joseph Chris Partners) | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast
www.dcsmi.com/podcast/roxxann-sczepanik-partner-of…
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[New Podcast Episode]
“And it starts even earlier than that.
It's understanding the goals and the challenges
that are going on in these buyer personas'
professional lives that are a leading indicator that
at some point in the next couple of days,
next couple of weeks, next couple of months,
they're going to be a perfect prospect,
a perfect candidate for potentially becoming
your next biggest fans and your next happiest clients
on the planet singing your praises from the rooftops.
So, that's how I would approach how a
colocation data center can educate clients.
Lean into the self-driven buyer's journey.
Understand whether this customer education program,
this client education program,
is truly meant for post-purchase like client education,
or whether you're also going to create
a version that is for prospects.
What kinds of companies they're from and
who are the key stakeholders,
what do they want to learn most?
So that's how I would approach
how a colocation data center can educate its clients.”
Watch the full episode:
Ep. 133 Joshua Feinberg, CEO of DCSMI | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast
www.dcsmi.com/podcast/ep.-133-joshua-feinberg-ceo-…
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[New Podcast Episode]
“I get a number of people that reach out to me and say,
‘Hey, can my site be a data center site?’
And we'll go through a process.
We actually have some tools that we use internally
that can vet out pretty quickly the zoning.
Is there any flooding issues,
100- or 500-year flood issues?
Is there power nearby?
And just seeing power nearby isn't a qualifier,
it's a starting point.
Natural gas is also another component that we're looking
for here and natural disasters is.
And so how we vet that out is we'll use our software
and I might use my internal staff, my professionals,
that can easily vet it out pretty quickly.
Any one of us on our team can vet out sites pretty quickly.
But then, we'll have a ‘go’ or ‘no go’ depending on
a bunch of criteria.”
Via Howie Berry at Avison Young
Watch the full episode:
Ep. 132 Howie Berry, Principal and Data Center Specialist of Avison Young | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast
www.dcsmi.com/podcast/howie-berry-principal-data-c…
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The Data Center Sales & Marketing Institute (DCSMI) is a boutique business advisory, consulting, and training firm for data center providers as well as IT, facilities, construction, real estate, and sales and marketing companies that partner with data center providers.
DCSMI specializes in go-to-market (GTM) and webinar-led growth (WLG) for the data center industry. The firm empowers data center professionals across GTM teams, including sales, marketing, customer success (CS), product, channel partnerships, and C-suite executive sponsors.
DCSMI also produces and hosts several related media properties, including the Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast, Data Center Sales and Marketing Newsletter, and Data Center Sales and Marketing Webinars.
Joined 4 April 2018