Sales Life: Arun McIntosh of Iron Mountain

Our regular feature ‘Sales Life’ invites senior salespeople to give their views  on key sales issues.

This quarter we talk to Arun McIntosh, Business Development Director for Iron  Mountain.

What do you do?

Iron Mountain helps organisations around the world to reduce the costs and security risks associated with managing information. I am responsible for developing new business across two product lines: Document Scanning & Digitising, and Secure Shredding. I work with our commercial teams on major opportunities, helping to secure new business

What’s happening in your industry?

Our business is characterised by three significant trends. The first is the decline of paper. Businesses are generating fewer paper records to store and dispose of.

The second is the increasing importance of data protection and security. Last year, the Information Commissioner’s Office was given new powers to issue fines of up to £500,000 to organisations in breach of the Data Protection Act. Businesses are now far more aware of the risk to their reputation and brand if confidential information is leaked. This means that data protection, and the secure storage and disposal of information are taken far more seriously than they once were.

The third trend is the growing attention paid to corporate and social responsibility. Iron Mountain’s customers want to know that we can deal with their secure waste in an environmentally responsible way. We take this extremely seriously. Across our fleet, for example, we make sure that the highest levels of safety are assured and that emissions are kept to a minimum. Our efforts have received industry recognition in the form of awards for our driver training initiatives and the technology that we have implemented across our fleet. Iron Mountain commissions independent auditors to certify that we act in environmentally responsible ways. We aim for a closed-loop system with everything re-used. For example, the credit cards that we take away for secure disposal are shredded and the material re-cycled. This is important to Iron Mountain and increasingly important to our customers.

What is your top sales challenge?

Iron Mountain is making the transition from a company that has built a deserved reputation for providing secure storage for mostly paper records, to an information management company. We want to talk to customers about our full suite of solutions across the information lifecycle. Many know us primarily as a records management and storage provider. Even our own salespeople are inclined to focus on the core business, so my challenge is to get in front of customers and show them how we can help with all their information management, protection and storage challenges.

Tell us about a memorable deal

A major supermarket chain was already our client for records management. At a meeting with our sales team it emerged that they had a major problem with the disposal of used vouchers. The money off vouchers they issue to loyalty scheme members have to be securely destroyed because they have a monetary value and contain personal details. Used vouchers were transported to a central depot and shredded in-house, but their shredder had broken down. As a consequence, the depot was full to overflowing with vouchers waiting to be shredded. Vouchers were backing-up in stores creating a serious security risk.

It’s a cliché to say that every problem is an opportunity, but in this case it was true and we were able to arrange an emergency collection the next day. We took the vouchers away for secure off-site shredding and freed up space at the depot so they could start taking used vouchers from stores again. Through our prompt response we were able to show them it made no sense to have their own expensive and failure-prone shredder manned by a team of staff. I worked with our sales team and the customer’s security manager to build a business case showing that secure off-site shredding was a more cost-effective option. We won the business and now we process more than 50 tonne of vouchers every month, and growing. We’ve reduced costs and improved security for this major supermarket chain, and it all started with our ability to help them out in a crisis.

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Find out more about Iron Mountain