Marketers and boards speak different languages. The key to Iron Mountain’s rejuvenation is that CMO Karen Feldman speaks both

Iron Mountain’s first-ever CMO, Karen Feldman, never had to choose between the board’s language and marketing’s. She already spoke both, and that fluency is what earned her the mandate to make a 75-year-old brand bold.

Few environments make the case for marketing harder than a business built on physical infrastructure, real estate and 75 years of institutional memory. Iron Mountain works with 95% of the Fortune 1000 across more than 240,000 customers in over 60 countries, so this was never a company short of scale or substance, but it had never once elevated marketing to a genuine seat at the top table. That changed when Karen Feldman took the role of SVP and Chief Marketing Officer in November 2024, the first person to hold the title in the company’s history, not because marketing hadn’t existed, but because it had never been elevated that far. That’s the real subject of a recent episode of the Trust & Influence in B2B podcast, where I asked her what it actually took to earn that mandate.

Her answer, it turned out, wasn’t a bigger budget or a bolder campaign. It was fluency. Karen can talk to leadership in the language of revenue, growth and pipeline, and just as easily let her own team talk in the language of funnels and campaigns. That dual fluency, more than any single strategic move, is why the leadership team gave her room to be bold.

Listen before you diagnose

She didn’t start with a plan. She started by listening. “I came in and sort of put my strategy consulting hat on,” she told me, a habit carried over from more than 25 years at IBM, including as CMO of IBM Consulting. “I started by listening, just to understand the different perception internally but externally as well”: customers, analysts, agency partners, and the leadership team itself. It’s a small thing to say and a much harder thing to actually do when you’ve been hired, in part, because people expect you to already know the answer.

Alongside the listening, she grounded herself in data that already existed rather than commissioning something new to justify a view she’d already formed. “Luckily it was a marketing organisation and team that had a lot of the pieces already in place,” she said. “There’d been a brand health study that had just been conducted, and it very clearly said that when customers know us in the category that they’re purchasing for, they were willing to consider us.” The problem wasn’t that Iron Mountain couldn’t compete once considered. It was that too few buyers knew there was anything to consider. “Very few people in the market knew us for our growth capabilities, and in particular our AI and digital solutions.”

The stat that moved the budget

That finding did real work. It gave Karen a case, built on evidence rather than instinct, for shifting spend out of lower-funnel demand generation and into brand awareness, a case sharpened by data she cited showing that close to 95% of a vendor shortlist is decided before formal evaluation even begins. If nobody knows you, you don’t get on the list.

But the moment I’d point to as the real hinge of this story isn’t the budget reallocation. It’s what happened after the new brand positioning, built around the platform “protect what matters, unlock what’s possible,” was ready to show. Karen and her brand leader presented it to Iron Mountain’s leadership team, and one of the senior leaders told her: “I’m sure we’ve all been in organisations before that had world-class marketing organisations and marketing teams, and now we have that at Iron Mountain.” That’s not a metric on a dashboard. It’s the sound of trust being banked, in front of the people whose belief the whole mandate depended on.

Speaking the business’s language, in practice

This is where the language point from the start of this piece gets concrete. Karen’s instinct is to match her language to the room: the language of the business when she’s talking to leadership, the language of marketing when she’s talking to her own team, a habit she traces back to leading an account-based approach at IBM Consulting as CMO, where roughly 500 accounts drove the lion’s share of revenue. “Honestly, my language, it’s more natural for me to speak business language: revenue, growth, pipeline, than it is for me to speak marketing language, which I just don’t think the business always understands. MQLs, SQLs.” It’s a discipline B2B Marketing, the publication I founded two decades ago, has long called being a “commercial marketer”: someone who translates marketing’s work into terms a leadership team already trusts, rather than asking that team to learn a new one.

That translation instinct now shapes how Iron Mountain itself goes to market. For its largest enterprise accounts, Karen has applied the same ABM logic, reaching every persona in a buying group and reading the signals of where each one sits in the decision. For more transactional parts of the business, the shredding side, for instance, she’s kept the traditional funnel language that still fits. The point isn’t that one approach is superior. It’s that she chose the language to match the buyer, not the other way round.

Make trust pay for itself

Earning trust is one thing. Making it self-sustaining is another, and this is where the practical playbook gets genuinely useful rather than merely admirable. As CMO, Karen consolidated what had been a patchwork of siloed regional agency relationships into a single global partner. That move did two things at once: it let the marketing function move with more speed and consistency across regions, and it freed up budget that helped self-fund the initiatives she needed next, including a modernised Adobe, Marketo and CDP stack that went live only last week at the time we spoke. Trust, in other words, didn’t just unlock permission. It unlocked a mechanism that keeps paying for itself, which matters enormously at a moment when, as Karen put it, there’s “real tension” in every marketing organisation between driving growth and driving productivity.

Trust has a new gatekeeper

Karen is candid that nobody, including her, is yet an expert in exactly how AI is reshaping B2B buying, but the direction of travel is already visible in the data she watches. Close to 80% of B2B search terms now surface a Google AI overview before a buyer clicks a single link, even though large language models themselves still account for only a small slice of overall search traffic. Buyers are using those overviews to do what Karen thinks of as mid-funnel comparison shopping: does Iron Mountain have a point of view in this category, how does it stack up on capability, what are customers and analysts actually saying. None of that is new marketing territory, it is the same brand-perception work Iron Mountain has always needed to do, just read back to a buyer by an algorithm instead of a salesperson.

What Karen has found, and says is oddly reassuring given how new all of this is, is that AI search visibility “100% correlates” with the categories where Iron Mountain already has strong brand perception, and lags in exactly the categories where it doesn’t. Trust, in other words, hasn’t been replaced by AI. It has simply found a new gatekeeper to pass through first.

What earned trust unlocks

What that trust has since made possible is the boldest thing Iron Mountain has done publicly: its partnership with McLaren Racing, built on the observation that McLaren’s 60 years of Formula One heritage sat scattered, unstructured and largely unusable, the exact problem Iron Mountain exists to solve for its clients. It’s the kind of partnership that only makes sense once you’ve already earned the standing to propose it internally.

Karen isn’t treating any of this as finished. Reflecting on where the mandate goes from here, as she approaches two years in the role this November, she was clear that the strategy itself doesn’t change: “Those four pillars we keep. We just have a different set of initiatives… we’re really trying to accelerate all of our AI initiatives now that we’ve got that foundation in place.” Boldness, once earned, compounds.

What to do with this

None of this required a bigger budget than most marketing leaders already have. It required patience, evidence, and a willingness to speak in terms the business already trusted.

• Listen before you diagnose. Before proposing a strategy, a CMO should spend real time understanding how customers, analysts, agency partners and your own leadership team actually perceive the brand today, rather than assuming you already know the answer.
• Let existing data do the persuading. Look first for evidence you already hold, brand health studies, pipeline data, win and loss analysis, that can build a case for reallocating budget, rather than commissioning new research to justify a decision you have already made.
• Translate your work into the business’s language before you present it. Talk about revenue, growth and pipeline when you are in the room with leadership, and save the marketing vocabulary, MQLs and SQLs included, for your own team.
• Match your language, and your funnel, to the buyer in front of you. Complex enterprise accounts may need full account-based reach across a buying group, while more transactional parts of the business can still be well served by a traditional funnel.
• Check what AI search is already saying about you, category by category. Where Google’s AI overviews already summarise your space, that summary is fast becoming a buyer’s first, unpaid impression of your brand, and it is worth knowing whether it is accurate.
• Look for moves that make trust self-funding. Consolidating fragmented supplier or agency relationships can free up budget to reinvest in the technology and initiatives your mandate depends on, rather than requiring a fresh budget ask each time.
• Treat an earned mandate as something that compounds. Once leadership trusts the strategy, use that standing to pursue bolder partnerships and initiatives, rather than assuming the hardest work is already behind you.