Performing a Maturity Assessment of your Marketing Organizations

Before you jump into a Marketing Automation implementation project it is always wise to perform a Maturity Assessment of your Marketing Organization. This becomes all the more relevant when you have a Global Marketing team which has to align with Local compliance needs. Top 5 benefits you will get from a Maturity assessment:

1. Closer look at variations in Marketing Processes across Geographies
2. Uncover Business impact areas, process bottle necks and redundancies
3. Identify cross-collaboration across Marketing teams as well as with Sales/ Inside Sales Teams
4. Details on Lead sources, Campaign channel Efficiency and Marketing databases
5. Finally a view of your Enterprise Application landscape from Marketing PoV

The outcome of this exercise is to do a deep dive into your Marketing organization and accordingly plan the Marketing Automation execution in the best possible way. A caution will be not to perform too much analysis. I love doing this in a simple yet effective manner. I use a matrix as below where one axis lists Marketing Automation disciplines and the other axis has Assessment buckets.

I recommend using below 4 Assessment buckets :

• Bucket 1: Process Gap Score - 30%
• Bucket 2: Business impact Score- 30%
• Bucket 3: Scope of Process Automation Score- 20%
• Bucket 4: Enterprise Integration Complexity Score - 20%

Each bucket has four scoring levels (0-3) as below. A higher score means increased priority for the capability.

The idea is to score each Marketing disciple along the Assessment buckets. Simple excel based formula can help calculate the scores for each discipline. You may include following Marketing Automation disciples to make the assessment comprehensive. The following Marketing Disciples are suggested

1. Contact/ Lead Database Management
2. Marketing Automation 
3. Lead Management and Conversion
4. Campaign Management
5. CRM Integration
6. Analytics/ Reporting

Discuss with your Business Users to determine the level-2 detailing of each discipline. For example your Lead Management can be expanded into: a)Lead Generation; b)Targeting; c)Segmentation; d)Nurturing Process; e)Lead Scoring/ Grade; f)Visitor Tracking. Once the detailing is done, perform the assessment as above and you will surely find things that will be an eye-opener for your business as well as help prioritize capability road-map for your implementation.

Hope you find this helpful !!

This is article is part of a short series on guiding Organizations plan their strategy around Digital Marketing Automation . You may be interested in reading more on small steps towards your big move to Marketing Automation Platform