No this isn’t some type of personality quiz. (Although according to a recent Facebook quiz, I am a raccoon and I am going to live to be 88 years old.)
Based on our deep client-side and consulting experience, Demand Spring has developed the Revenue Marketing Maturity Assessment to help you understand the key practices and processes on the road to marketing nirvana. Because every model needs a memorable visual, we’ve introduced animal kingdom representatives to align with the stages of maturity:
- Lagging Organization: Rodent
- Emerging Organization: Fox
- Accelerating Organization: Puma
- Dominating Organization: Gorilla
So, what do these stages mean? They’re the categories we map your maturity to using the seven essential components of a healthy demand system:
- Buyer journey Insight
- Sales and Marketing alignment
- Optimized lead management processes
- Technology Foundation
- Inbound marketing
- Content
- Analytics
Our Revenue Marketing Maturity Model identifies the characteristics of lagging, emerging, accelerating and dominating companies across each of the seven elements.
Here are a few examples for each stage:
Lagging
In lagging organizations, demand generation has not been a priority and they’re playing catch-up. Communication with buyers is typically product-centric and volumes of content go unused because there is no strategic content plan.
Emerging
Emerging organizations recognize the change in buyer behavior and are beginning to embrace personas. Key technologies are in place – marketing automation and CRM – but there is little integration and data remains siloed. In emerging organizations, Marketing is driving less than 5% of the pipeline.
Accelerating
In accelerating organizations, Marketing is typically driving more than 15% of marketing pipeline. This is due to the increasing alignment between Marketing and Sales, as well as a more strategic approach to engaging buyers through compelling content aligned with both buyers and the stages of their journey. At this point, sales is no longer kicking sand in Marketing’s face.
Dominating
The dominating stage is the holy grail of revenue marketing. Full on beast mode, hence the gorilla. Marketing and Sales are joined at the hip with common goals, strategies, and KPIs. Strategies and metrics are aligned with business objectives. And advanced analytics drive true data-driven decision making.
The Reality
There are not many organizations that have reached the domination stage. The reality is that most still have a ways to go to drive transformative results, but no one is entirely in one category. Increasingly we are seeing clients accelerating their content, but to what end? And we still see still lagging in collaboration across departments.
To make sure you’re in sync and to determine your organization’s maturity, take our Revenue Marketing Maturity Assessment.
