Iron Mountain, a global leader in storage and information management services, has long been at the forefront of incorporating innovative technologies into their business operations.
Implementing 6sense has marked a significant shift in how the company approaches their marketing strategies, targeting, and overall efficiency. Iron Mountain’s Jack Speyer, director of marketing operations, and Scott Stano, senior manager of demand optimization, explain how they’ve used 6sense to unlock a 21x return on investment (ROI).
The Challenges
Prior to the implementation of 6sense, Iron Mountain faced several challenges in their marketing operations:
- Redundant Campaigns: Teams were creating identical campaigns across different market segments, leading to inefficiencies and wasted resources.
- Limited Targeting Capabilities: Iron Mountain had a traditional go-to-market strategy that didn’t allow for precise targeting, relying instead on a broad approach that wasn’t always effective.
- Inefficient Use of Marketing Funds: With limited insights into customer intent and buying stages, the marketing spend wasn’t optimized, affecting the overall return on investment.
“Before 6sense, we were using a lot of guessing and relying on past experience to make go-to-market decisions. We treated all accounts the same. We had a wide, not deep, approach on how we wanted to go-to-market,” Scott says.
The 6sense Solution
The integration of 6sense enabled Iron Mountain to use customer intent data to build refined marketing strategies.
6sense provides valuable insights into what potential customers were researching and looking for, allowing Iron Mountain to tailor their sales strategies to meet actual customer demands rather than trying to generate demand for predetermined services.
“Instead of relying on our best guess, executing and then waiting for the outcome — 6sense allows us to monitor in real time. We can see if accounts are moving forward and sparking additional engagement.”
Scott Stano
Senior Manager of Demand Optimization, Iron Mountain
Since implementing 6sense, Iron Mountain has segmented accounts based on their buying stages. They use 6sense account intelligence to determine what accounts are looking for, then serve them up with 6sense display advertising, 3rd-party campaigns, or event invites.
As a company that serves over 60 countries, Iron Mountain also uses 6sense to look at global organizations and examine opportunities.
“As we click through and look at the different views into large, global accounts with potentially thousands of employees, we can get a unique read on who we should be talking to, where, when and what buying groups they are in,” Scott explains.
6sense then gives Iron Mountain a good idea of how to target accounts with relevant content based on their buying stage. Scott says he likes the different perspectives 6sense data provides.
“I always describe 6sense as a Rubik’s Cube. You can click it different ways, and the sides look different based on what intelligence you’re trying to gain,” Scott says.
6sense has also sparked a constant evolution in marketing operations, according to Jack.
Iron Mountain is using keyword intent data to identify customers that are at risk of not renewing, he says, and to identify accounts that may not be taking full advantage of their tools and could use more help from customer enablement.
Finally, 6sense’s integration with other key platforms like Salesforce, Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, and Hubspot have made Iron Mountain’s go-to-market strategy more efficient by pushing the right contacts into campaigns and tracking their effectiveness in real time.
“I think it’s important that any tech provider you select has the vision to keep up with a market that is as fast as artificial intelligence, and the MarTech landscape. As all of these new and innovative ideas are coming out, it strikes me that 6sense is not only trying to keep up, but staying ahead of the curve,” Scott says.
Results
With 6sense, Iron Mountain achieved increased efficiency and cost savings, improved campaign results, and redefined strategic business growth.
- 21x ROI
- Display cost per lead decreased 47%, allowing for double the reach with the same flat budget
- Double the industry’s click-through rates on advertising, which is about 1.32% for software and technology companies (source)
“As we have embarked on a transformational journey at Iron Mountain, we’ve been really looking to elevate the power of our work in marketing, use new data and AI to better target, segment, and execute our campaigns on a global scale,” Scott says.
