IMPORTANT – URGENT – IMPORTANT – URGENT – IMPORTANT – URGENT
This post explains how the SM3 Maturity Matrix will help you understand and improve your current capabilities in both sales and marketing. It will tell you where you are strong and weak, and how to become stronger across the board.
After my last post, which delivered tons of third-party evidence for our SM3 idea, I received several DM’s asking for more background – so here it is…
As this is a longer read, get yourself a cup of coffee, a glass of water, and maybe a biscuit – and enjoy.
What is the purpose of the SM3 Maturity Matrix? In fact, what’s our ‘why’?
Put simply, we exist to deliver the answer to these questions – which were previously ‘unanswerable’ –
“Is there any way we can find out how our revenue engine (our sales AND marketing organizations) compares to averages, and to the world’s best? Can we learn where we are relatively weaker and stronger? Can we get guidance on how to improve?”
These are critically important questions for all commercial organizations, but until now there was no way to gain this understanding. True, there are sales checklists, sales audit tools, marketing audits and marketing checklists. But they are all flawed.
To understand how your revenue engine compares, you need to consider sales AND marketing together. What levels they are each operating at – using a common measure – and also measuring how they interact.
Having reached this stage of my career, I have seen the disconnects between sales and marketing throughout my fifty-year career, which was in sales and marketing. Cats and dogs, two tribes, both confined to their respective worlds. But here’s the truth. You need both working well, at the same level, and together, to truly flourish and maximise returns.
THIS ISN’T THEORY, THIS IS THE CORE OF YOUR BUSINESS SUCCESS. EVERY WEEK YOU DELAY, YOU ARE LOSING MORE REVENUE TO THE LACK OF OPTIMIZATION.
EVERY WEEK…
Who says this is a very big challenge? Oh, just the likes of IDC, Aberdeen, Forrester and Salesforce. And to be fair, pretty much every other serious commentator we could think of!
My business partner, @normanmanley and I both felt this challenge. We wanted to try to help all commercial organizations. We started from scratch. We built a measurement framework (a maturity matrix), we analyzed the critical core components for success in sales and marketing organizations (not individual skills, but organizational capabilities).
We researched for many months. We looked at publicly available materials on capability standards from major consultancies, advisory bodies, and influential consultancies. We also examined the output and available public teaching materials from the relevant professional bodies. We brought it all together and defined ‘what is the best of the best’ in every single area. It took a long time!
From this, we then defined both the ‘absolute best possible’ capability in every category, along with ‘not even started on this aspect’ (the bottom level) for every element. Then all the stages in between. We ended up with around eight core areas that are required for success in sales and in marketing, each with five clearly defined performance levels
From there, Norman (a Data Scientist and Mathematician) added in a host of weightings – by geography, industry, job role of the respondent etc), all of which increase the accuracy of our report outputs.
Finally, after more than a year had elapsed, we asked our wonderful panel of twenty worldwide domain experts to review, sanity-check, and further refine all of these definitions.
We have leading experts in sales, marketing, leadership, negotiation, procurement, and pricing in our panel.
The www.sm3maturitymatrix.com was created!
To be clear, we are only evaluating your revenue generation operations. ‘Business Development’ is in the mix, but ongoing customer support, aka customer success, is not.The result? The world’s first-ever self-delivered (you can have up to five relevant people in your organization complete a questionnaire) sales and marketing review, or sales and marketing audit, or sales and marketing checklist. It combines your own input and the very best analysis to deliver the results.
There are two levels –
- The full report is over 60 pages – based on your own input. It tells where you stand/compare overall in both sales and marketing, and, in detail, where you are over every single category. It also tells you how you can improve in every category. It also tells you about the worldwide megatrends that will impact everyone in sales and marketing in the next couple of years (a little bonus after all of our research, we thought you might like!). On top, we also provide two graphical summary reports (three pages each) – one each for YOUR sales and marketing operations to help you further.
- OR, you can have our light version – just the two graphical reports.
The result? To date, every company that has gone through the process has given us exceptionally positive feedback – 100% satisfaction!
Here’s a simple example of just how powerful the output is. This is the real-life output (spidergraph) for a start-up that was convinced their marketing was strong, but they had a challenge in sales. The redder, and the closer to the edge (which is the halfway point of the next performance level above your current position), the stronger you are. The SECOND they saw this, they knew where their challenges were and how they could improve. Sales were not great either, but were more consistent.
That’s our story to date. What we have delivered is –
✅ Highly accurate
✅ A powerful tool for you
✅ Cost-effective
✅ Simple
✅ Fast
✅ And yes, unique – there is nothing else at this level in the world for Sales and Marketing
DM me or go to the website. But please do think about taking the questionnaire. You can thank us afterwards!!
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