Iron Mountain: Bringing clarity on Where to play.
How Magnus helped Iron Mountain identify where to grow, build the confidence to pursue it, and create the commercial capability to win in the BPO sector.
Eight sectors in. One clear direction.
Context
Iron Mountain had a clear growth ambition in enterprise services and a strong foundation to build from. The question was not whether to grow, but where to focus commercial energy to generate the greatest return.
The Challenge
With multiple sectors showing potential, the business needed an evidence-backed way to prioritise, and then the commercial infrastructure to pursue the chosen sector with real conviction.
What Magnus Did
Magnus worked with Iron Mountain to assess eight potential sectors, identify the highest-value opportunity, and build a full go-to-market strategy for BPO, including market sizing, value proposition development, ICP definition, and a structured account growth methodology.
Impact
£3.6bn market opportunity identified. £22m in-year pipeline generated across three accounts, with further upside still to be mapped. Both the CEO and senior sales team equipped with a clear narrative and the tools to lead strategic conversations in priority BPO accounts.
The Opportunity
Iron Mountain had the ambition to grow in enterprise BPO and the market position to do it. What they needed was clarity on where to focus, confidence in how to pursue it, and the commitment and coordination to make it stick.
Magnus worked with the business to assess eight potential sectors, identify BPO as the highest-value opportunity, and build a go-to-market strategy the commercial team could own and act on. Within weeks of the engagement completing, a live partnership opportunity was identified through the intelligence work and generated £22m in active opportunity. The business now has a commercial operating model for BPO it can scale.
Iron Mountain had significant strengths to bring to the BPO sector: deep client relationships, proven delivery at scale, and a solutions portfolio directly relevant to organisations managing complex data and compliance obligations. And the market itself was substantial, a large and fast-growing serviceable opportunity in the UK alone.
Magnus worked with Iron Mountain to identify where within that market the greatest commercial potential sat, how to position as a strategic partner rather than a service provider, and how to build the conversations that would unlock it.
Clarity
Iron Mountain came to Magnus with eight potential growth sectors. Magnus assessed all eight across three factors: market attractiveness, commercial fit with Iron Mountain's portfolio, and the strength of existing relationships and pipeline in each sector. Based on these factors, a prioritisation framework was built and identified three top sectors with higher attractiveness scores: BPO, Pharma/Life Sciences, and Retail. The data supported focusing on BPO as the primary focus, and the business had a clear answer to where its commercial energy should go.
Confidence
With the BPO sector identified, Magnus built a strategic pursuit plan aligned with Iron Mountain's commercial growth objectives. Market and competitor intelligence was combined with structured workshops to develop a value proposition the team believed in, define the ideal customer profile, and create a messaging architecture built for C-suite conversations.
The intelligence gathered through customer and internal interviews sharpened this further. The Iron Mountain team not only had the insights and data about which sector to pursue, but also how to show up in it with conviction.
Commitment
The prioritisation framework became a shared reference point across strategy, sales, and marketing, replacing a broad set of options with a common commercial direction everyone could get behind.
As the project progressed, it opened broader conversations about how Iron Mountain pursues large enterprise accounts globally, giving the CRO a platform to drive greater commercial coordination across the business. The team not only had a clear strategy, but also a shared conviction to act on it.
Coordination
Magnus identified four priority accounts with the highest commercial potential and mapped a pursuit strategy for each, giving the sales team a structured, immediately actionable starting point.
The work also produced an account sprint methodology: a focused, repeatable session that compressed Magnus's strategic account growth framework into a format deployable across any priority BPO account. The first session, run ahead of a key account meeting, was described by one participant as the best hour of sales training they had received. That methodology is now embedded in how the team works and is being carried into the next phase of growth.
Commercial impact
Magnus sized the BPO opportunity at £3.6bn in UK serviceable addressable market, with a base case of £3m in year one and a £50m upsell opportunity across the account base. The most significant outcome came through the intelligence work itself: a total of £22m in-year pipeline identified across three accounts, with a projected £30-40m annual pipeline over the next three years.
The CEO is now actively pursuing C-suite relationships in priority BPO accounts, and Iron Mountain's marketing function described the work as the strongest commercial output they had seen produced internally. The foundations for peak performance, a pursuit model focused on the right goals and built to deliver, are now in place.
The intelligence work didn't just identify the right sector; it built the foundation for a repeatable way of pursuing it. The team now has a shared framework for qualifying opportunities, mapping accounts, and leading strategic conversations that they can apply beyond this programme.
The methodology is live, the accounts are identified, and the pipeline is already moving. BPO is no longer a possibility, it is an active, coordinated growth pursuit with the intelligence, the narrative, and the system to sustain it.
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