The short answer#
Colocation providers, like most infrastructure vendors, sell through two routes: their own direct sales team, and a partner channel of advisors, agents, consultants and resellers who bring them customers. Providers maintain partner programs and pay the partner when a customer they introduced signs a contract. That payment comes out of the provider's own cost of sale — the budget that would otherwise fund a direct rep working the same deal.
So the buyer pays nothing to the advisor, and — this is the part people reasonably doubt — the buyer does not pay a higher rate for having used one. Providers price a deal on its own merits: power, term, density, credit, how badly they want the logo, what the competing bid looks like. A partner-sourced deal and a direct deal are quoted from the same desk under the same approval process.
Why providers pay for this at all#
It is cheaper and lower-risk for them. A direct sales team is fixed cost that gets paid whether or not it finds a deal; a partner is paid only on a signature. More usefully for the provider, a partner arrives with a requirement that has already been scoped — a kW figure, a density profile, a term, a real timeline — instead of a cold lead that may turn out to need something the provider does not sell.
That last point is the one worth internalising as a buyer. The channel exists partly because providers do not want to spend sales cycles on deals they will lose on fit. A provider would rather an advisor tell you honestly that they are the wrong building for you than spend six weeks on a bid that dies in the second round. This is a genuine, structural alignment between an advisor's incentive to be right and the provider's incentive to not waste effort — and it is the strongest thing that can be said in the model's favour.
The conflicts this creates, stated plainly#
Any honest account of this model has to name what it distorts. There are three real conflicts, and a buyer should assume every advisor is subject to all of them until shown otherwise.
1. Compensation is not identical across providers#
Different providers structure their partner programs differently. That means an advisor's recommendation and an advisor's paycheque are not perfectly aligned, and an advisor who tells you the two never diverge is either not paying attention or not being straight with you. The mitigation is not to pretend the gap does not exist — it is to make the recommendation defensible on evidence you can audit, so that a recommendation driven by anything else would be visible to you.
2. The advisor is only paid if you buy something#
There is no compensation for concluding that you should stay where you are, renew in place, or that the cloud is genuinely the better answer for this workload. That is a real bias toward action, and it is the one buyers most often fail to account for. If an advisor has never talked a client out of a move, that is information.
3. Coverage is not the whole market#
An advisor can only bring you providers they have a commercial relationship with. Most of the operators worth considering in a given metro are reachable this way, but not all of them: some operators — typically wholesale and hyperscale-focused ones — run their own referral programs or sell direct only. An advisor's map of the market is not the market. A good one tells you which operators in your metro sit outside their reach and that you should approach directly.
How to test whether an advisor is actually independent#
Independence is a claim every advisor makes and few can evidence. These questions separate the two, and they are worth asking in the first conversation, before any requirement has been scoped.
- "Which operators in this metro can you not bring me, and why?" An advisor with a real map answers this immediately and specifically. An advisor who says "we can get you anyone" has told you they either do not know or will not say.
- "Who pays you, and when?" The answer should be: the provider you select, on signature. If the answer is vague, or if the advisor is paid by you *and* by providers, understand exactly what each payment is for.
- "Will you tell me if the answer is to stay put?" Then ask for an example of when they did. The example is the answer; the willingness is not.
- "Do you resell, or do I contract directly with the operator?" These are materially different. A reseller sits in the contractual path, sets your price, and owns the SLA relationship. A referral advisor does not — you sign with the operator and hold them accountable directly. Neither is wrong, but you should know which one you are buying.
- "What does your recommendation rest on that I can check myself?" Ask for the evidence, not the conclusion: which operators were asked, what each said, what was compared on what basis, and who declined to bid and why.
That last question is the load-bearing one. A recommendation you can audit is worth more than an assurance of neutrality, because you can check it and you cannot check a promise. If an advisor cannot show you their working, the neutrality claim is unfalsifiable — which is another way of saying it is not a claim at all.
How this works at Clectiv, specifically#
We are paid by the provider a client selects, on signature, under that provider's partner program. Clients are not invoiced for scoping, sourcing, comparison or negotiation support. We are subject to all three conflicts above and do not claim otherwise.
What we do about them is make the work auditable. A client sees which operators were approached, what each was asked, what each answered, who declined and the reason given, and how the responses compare on a common basis — including the operators we cannot transact with, which are named as such. The sample reports are four fully worked examples of exactly that output; they are open and require no signup, and they are the most direct answer to "what does this actually produce."
We also do not publish live availability anywhere on this site. Whether an operator has space in a specific building next quarter is a question only that operator can answer, and the answer decays quickly. Asking every relevant operator that question on a client's behalf, and writing down what they said and when, is most of the job.