It’s been nearly six months now since we launched the SM3 Sales and Marketing Maturity Report with its underlying maturity model. We have had some very interesting reactions from our customers – some of which have resulted in changes and upgrades to the model itself.
The foundation layer of the system is a questionnaire using a granular sliding scale and 40 different questions, regarding the Organization, the Industry type, Size of the Organization, Location, etc. This is followed by detailed questions regarding the current state of their Sales and Marketing capabilities. These questions can be answered using the sliding scale to indicate values anywhere between 10 and 99, giving more possibilities for nuancing the answers than is possible using standard on-line questionnaire technologies.
As would be expected, the model uses light weighting factors to “correct” some of the scores.
A Sales Manager tends to be more positive about the way Sales works (and sometimes negative about Marketing), while a Marketing Manager tends to see the world ‘differently’!
Early on, we added “Founder” to the model, because several of our early customers were medium-sized businesses where the founder was still in charge (and he/she was the person who commissioned the report). Apparently, (we know because we asked them), all these founders bought the report because they were either unhappy with the current state of their commercial activities, or they wanted to expand their business and weren’t sure how to do it.
We have the ability within the model (for testing purposes) to exclude a set of answers from one respondent, basically to see if all the answers were reasonably balanced and the weightings are working correctly. Using this facility, we came to the conclusion that in almost all cases the founder had a (very) significant influence on the results:
To give an example, one of the questions asks:
” How well known are your products/services in the marketplace?” possible answers can range from:
10 points – nobody but our customers have ever heard of us, to
99 points – we are about as well-known as Coca-Cola.
Typically answers range from 35-50 possibly 60 – but our Founders typically answer with either 10 or 95!
Above is an extract from the Sales Scoresheet where one of the five respondents gave an excessively high score (see the numbers above the bar charts), on the right you can see that we have flagged the lack of consistency. Two of these – X’s – indicate serious disagreement amongst the respondents.
The problem here is that it is very difficult to improve your capabilities if you can’t agree where the problems lie.
On a more positive note, these findings have led to discussions at all of our customer businesses, uncovering issues that the organization didn’t know they had, and in some cases, solutions are already being implemented.
These results – and the incredibly positive feedback we have received – prove our model and, as important, the direct business value it delivers to our customers, large and small.
If anybody has any ideas how we can fix our “Founder” problem in the model I would be pleased to hear (from) them.
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