You’d think every company wants to protect its data, right?
What is now the core of Iron Mountain’s product suite was born when a Ph.D student lost three weeks of work.
She was doing what most responsible people did at the time, backing up her PC to discs every few weeks. And then one day, her PC died taking her thesis down with it and destroying almost a month of hard work.
This got her husband, Dave, angry. Wasn’t there a way for her to own her work without having to depend on this particular PC? And so Dave wrote the first automatic backup program that was so beautiful it worked in the background whenever she was online, even over slow connections.
Dave saw the opportunity, created a company around it, and brought the idea of automated online backup to big companies who have people out in the world with PCs. And then a strange thing happened.
Over and over, the big company brass would get excited about the new automated backup idea. And then, a few days later, the deal would fall through. This happened repeatedly. Dave and his team couldn’t figure out what was going wrong.
It turns out, while the big company brass understood and wanted what automated online backup could do for them, the operations people, the people in I.T., saw it as a threat. Before, when someone’s PC died it was I.T.’s job to replace it, install fresh software, get them back up and running. If Dave’s company could resurrect the PC as it was, even including recent files, where’s the role of I.T.? So when the big company brass asked their operations people their opinion on the new backup solution, it got a strong thumbs down. Unproven, risky, where is that data stored? It wasn’t hard for I.T. to kill the idea.
We helped Dave’s company see that they needed to make two sales, with two different messages to two different decision makers with very different needs.
To the big company brass, Dave’s company protects everyone’s data from loss, even when they’re traveling, so the most vulnerable information in the company is safe.
To the operations people in I.T., Dave’s solution makes them superman. Before, when a PC died, the best they could do is get the user a new one, without the files that hadn’t made it onto the company servers. Now, I.T. had the exclusive power of resurrecting a dead PC, even remotely.
By creating two parallel marketing tracks — one to the brass, one to I.T. — we were able to make Dave’s company the leader in enterprise data protection, and eventually the core and the leadership of Iron Mountain’s digital product set.
