Identifying Opportunities in Data Center Sales

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By Rob DeVita, via The WHIR

We’ve all been an hour into the latest trending Netflix documentary and the dreaded red circle enters center screen, pausing right at the pinnacle moment. We sigh, roll our eyes, and the show resumes. This all too common pause is a sign of the massive change we are seeing in the data center industry. The way end users are experiencing media is shifting the needs of providers of this content.

Today service providers must become smarter and more agile to keep up with these changes. They must be a resource for customers to better connect. As the growth of cloud computing continues, these clouds physically reside in secure facilities known as data centers.

Industry trends are key drivers of this demand, but it is the fundamental components that need to be understood in order to find success. According to a report by Cisco, by 2019, online video will be responsible for 80 percent of global Internet traffic, with 85 percent of US traffic coming from video.

Sign up for Rob DeVita’s online course, How to Increase Data Center Sales, Make Clients Happy and Keep Them Coming Back for More. More details on the course below.

So what does this mean for a data center owner and customer? How can you be agile in a world that is experiencing rapid growth?

Uncovering data center opportunities doesn’t require advanced analytics and understanding of technology. You only need to ask a few simple questions and have a basic understanding of how the market works to identify new sales opportunities for every customer.

Facility Type

First you must identify what type of facility a platform should operate in. Is it a retail, wholesale, purpose built or carrier hotel environment? To answer that question you must look at what your customer is trying to accomplish.

Do they simply need to colocate in a location where all major networks interconnect? Are they looking for their own secure environment to host data? What about a hybrid approach? If there are certain compliances required to meet this, that is also an item to be factored in.

Power Requirements

After selecting a facility type, it will be time to identify power requirements. Scalable, ‘pay as you grow’ UPS architecture models are being seen more today, though a company must still understand the amount of power consumption that can occur. The power requirements of each element from the cooling system to UPS and critical IT load must be looked at; through a needs assessment power requirements can be determined and a plan can be put into place.

Pricing

The basic fundamentals of how to price and which pricing models are best for customers differ from data center to data center and also from opportunity to opportunity.

You can deliver significantly greater value to your customers by opening up the data center conversation.

Even if they are already established in a third-party data center, the rules and pricing have changed even from just three short years ago. Competition in each market has grown and with that so have the services that are available for your customers.

As you look to increase the value you deliver to your clients, the data center and associated services will help cement you as the go-to resource for all of their IT needs.

Sign up here for his upcoming online course, called How to Increase Data Center Sales, Make Clients Happy and Keep Them Coming Back for More, on Feb. 24, 2016.

The class will arm you with new skills and knowledge to more capably and persuasively sell data center services and close deals by deepening your understanding of how data centers work and the latest trends driving the industry, and how to position and price your company’s services in the marketplace, what to look for in contracts and how to avoid contract pitfalls.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/blog/identifying-opportunities-in-datacenter-sales