The B2B social media sales pitch: Giants tickets, anyone?

In Silicon Valley, Vantage Data Centers finds social media is a good way to find receptive sales prospects.

Vantage Data Centers sells a complex and expensive service, and it often takes the Silicon Valley company a year or more from the time it meets a client to the time it signs a contract. In the meantime, it woos prospects in familiar ways, such as inviting them to a baseball game or a concert. And it’s using social media to find out which kind of invitation will be most appealing to individual clients, says Steve Lim, vice president of marketing.

Vantage specializes in serving technology companies that rely on large and reliable data centers to run their operations and keep their customers happy without Internet downtime. Based in Silicon Valley, in Santa Clara, Calif., Vantage is riding the wave of surging volumes of Internet data generated by the Valley’s technology companies and their customers. “With the explosion of data, there’s so much information flooding around, and so many ways to connect to it and download it—but it has to sit somewhere,” Lim says.            

Vantage sells wholesale colocation services—in other words, it provides client companies with large, dedicated data center technology of 1 megawatt or more that they operate themselves. It generally sells to companies that have outgrown what’s known as retail colocation services, which typically offer smaller sections of data centers shared by multiple customers and managed by the data center provider.

Vantage’s service can cost its customers $100,000 or more per month over a 5- to 10-year contract. “Our deals are large, and we typically have a 12- to 18-month sales cycle,” or the time from initial contact with a prospective customer to a singed contract, Lim says.

As head of marketing, his challenge has been to get Vantage to stand out among the data center competition in Silicon Valley—a tough task but one with big rewards. The more contracts with the technology titans of Silicon Valley, Lim says, the better chance Vantage has of growing with those customers.

Wooing customers over a year or more can require long, consistent attempts to build relationships. “Our sales people build long-term relationships, often using traditional sales activity like invitations to special events, dinner and football games,” Lim says. The trick, he adds, is both finding the hottest prospects—and learning what they like. That’s where social media and other tools of the Internet come in.

To identify potential prospects, Lim and his team use techniques ranging from browsing online prospect-finding services like Data.com, DiscoverOrg.com and RainKingOnline.com to using street smarts like simply noticing when a company down the street starts to show signs of expanding.

One old-school attempt to woo an identified list of prospects was to simply reach out en masse to Silicon Valley executives with what might be considered popular invitations—tickets to a San Francisco Giants or Golden State Warriors game, for example. The trouble is, not everyone’s big on baseball or basketball. Some prefer auto racing, others opera performances. “It was like putting our finger in the wind and doing some cold-calling,” Lim says. “It wasn’t targeted. If we look at 80,000 contacts, how many are really interested in the Giants or Warriors?”

One step Vantage has taken to better target how it reaches out to prospects is using social media data from People Pattern, a company that aggregates and analyzes information from various online social networks to help build targeted marketing campaigns.

By using publicly available information connected with the names, job titles and companies of prospects on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, People Pattern pieces together information common to groups of prospects—for example, senior-level executives within a particular industry that have commented on data center technology with professional colleagues and on the San Francisco Giants with friends. In addition, Vantage may also match those prospect lists with the names of people that have also downloaded one of its white papers on collocation services, providing a list of contacts that appear ripe for an invitation to discuss Vantage’s services while taking in a ballgame.

Lim notes that People Pattern is only one of several strategies Vantage is using to attract the right customers. It’s also working to improve its search marketing techniques, testing new online display ads and redesigning its web site at VantageDataCenters.com, where customers can log on to manage their accounts.

But he adds that People Pattern has stood out in its ability to target segmented groups of prospects, including groups centered around Silicon Valley. “Everyone talks about how they bring in social data, but I haven’t seen anything other than People Pattern to aggregate and analyze that data and produce targeted information,” he says.

While initially using People Pattern during the first half of this year, Vantage applied its information in social media marketing campaigns—including promoted tweets on Twitter and sponsored updates on LinkedIn—and produced a 44% increase in its clickthrough rate, the company says. In addition, it notes that 25% of Internet traffic on marketing landing pages came from social marketing campaigns targeted with People Pattern data.

People Pattern’s annual fees start out at less than $10,000 but can run more than $100,000 depending on the amount of data used, People Pattern says.

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The B2B social media sales pitch: Giants tickets, anyone?