Inbound, ABM, attribution software, direct mail, sales engagement platforms… All “must have” marketing trends that ate up huge budgets, distracted Marketing teams, were weakly adopted, and then languished in maintenance mode.
>> Related: Happy Hour Will Resume After Quarterly Planning <<
I understand the temptation in board meetings and planning workshops: how do we create new business, expand existing business, and consistently drive growth? ::Googles Forrester’s marketing trends::
But the truth? Publishing an 80-slide ABM playbook 6 months from now is not the solution. We need preference centers, to bring UTM parameters into Salesforce, and to create a Funnel History custom object in Salesforce. We need them now!
In this post:
Matching plans and programs to your marketing maturity
Enter the Marketing Maturity Audit — a way to map your team’s sophistication across:
- Definitions and Goals
- Interlock/Alignment
- Process and Procedures
- Skills, Knowledge, and Training
- Measurement and Reporting
The goal here is to show if you want to do ABM, then:
- your Lead follow up (and their SLAs) need to be systemized
- Sales needs to see all their Leads in one view
- and we need to automatically match Leads to Accounts
Often these are simple fixes and quick wins. By mapping the gaps, it’s far easier to show which incremental steps will add up to dramatically better marketing. And how skipping these investments can sink any ABM playbook.
Assess your marketing maturity
Start by rating your current state.
Click to expand
Build a realistic roadmap to evolve/grow
From there, it’s time to identify priorities. Dependencies are key here. We can’t create new Lead views if we don’t first solve for Lead-to Contact conversions. It’s not the most exciting/important thing we’re tackling this quarter, but it enables our bigger goals.
Here’s a sample:
Grade yourself
Assess your marketing maturity every quarter to show how the team is evolving. These changes will add up. Hope is not a strategy and neither is the gimmick of the year. But implementing SLA reports? That’s priceless.
