What Iron Mountain’s Achievements Tell Us About Scaling Marketing Pipeline & Revenue

0
121

Share on LinkedIn

B2BMX blog image.pngEarlier this week at the B2B Marketing Exchange (#B2BMX), Iron Mountain’s Director of Global Marketing Operations and Automation, Leslie Alore, began her presentation with a very salient slide (see below).

It illustrates the idea that funnel mechanics mean little to CMOs. Rather, growing revenue is the top concern of C-level executives.

Leslie revenue slide.pngMarketing’s focus on revenue isn’t itself anything new. But this slide broke down an important idea that few others have. Namely, that the C-level is largely ignorant (or at least little concerned) with the individual goals of demand marketing and marketing operations practitioners – MQL volume, lead velocity, greater transparency and reporting, systems integration, etc.

And let’s be honest, we can’t blame CMOs for not caring that your team pumped up lead volume 10% this quarter or that your ops counterparts boosted funnel velocity. The C-level typically has far too much on their plate to remember all the nuances of B2B marketing – they trust that you know what you’re doing and that you’ll get it done.

 This doesn’t mean the funnel is dead

Assuming the funnel is dead because CMOs don’t care about it (or because account-based marketing is focusing targets) is like telling your mechanic not to fix anything that you wouldn’t understand.

Marketing’s revenue-generation mandate is a good thing. The fact of the matter is, however, that such marketing-attributed revenue comes from fine-tuning the funnel. This means orchestrating lead data sources, increasing data integrity, automating manual processes, integrating systems and enabling performance measurement all to scale programs while lowering resource expenditures.

Iron Mountain’s marketing goalsslide 2 goals.png

Executing these objectives produces higher lead volume, conversion rates and velocity that ultimately result in marketing-attributed revenue.

Iron Mountain’s demand orchestration journey

Iron Mountain has executed all these objectives just as well as (or perhaps better than) any other B2B marketing team I’ve witnessed. As Leslie went through her presentation, what amazed me was how the team’s achievements have continued to scale over time.

A little over a year ago, I worked on a case study with Iron Mountain six months after the team implementing Integrate’s software to orchestrate and automate top-of-funnel demand generation efforts. Even at that time, the results of the team’s funnel-tuning efforts were impressive.

Six-month results:

  • Cut 25 hours per month in manual tasks
  • Created $3.8 million in marketing-influenced pipeline

In the last year, though, the team’s successes have continued to scale, surpassing expectations. While the six-month mark was impressive, the 18-month results show the amount of scale possible when a team adeptly implements demand orchestration strategies.

18-month results:

  • MQL conversions jumped from 6% to 22%
  • Scored MQLs multiplied 4x
  • 84 hours in monthly lead processing tasks were eliminated
  • Lead follow-up time dropped from 9 days to under 1
  • Influenced pipeline increased by 5.5X to $21.6 million

How orchestrating demand results in revenue increasesslide 3 increase revenue.png

It must be noted that these achievements weren’t solely the result of Integrate’s demand orchestration software; technology amplifies good marketing – it doesn’t fix bad processes and strategies. Iron Mountain’s successes resulted from supporting great strategies, aligned processes and hard-working marketers with a well-integrated MarTech stack.

If you’d like to learn more about Iron Mountain’s journey to demand orchestration success, read the updated case study. Get it here.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

David Crane
David Crane is Strategic Development Manager at Integrate and an ardent student of marketing technology that borders on nerdy obsession. Fortunately, he uses this psychological abnormality to support the development and communication of solutions to customer-specific marketing-process inefficiencies.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here