Maturity Frameworks: A Hidden Gem in Your GTM Strategy
Move beyond features. Benchmark progress. Elevate conversations.
Have you ever felt like your sales team is stuck in the weeds, selling features instead of business outcomes, or like your marketing campaigns aren’t quite landing with executive buyers? If so, it might be time to consider a maturity model.
A thoughtfully designed maturity framework, built in partnership with customer success and professional services, can be one of the most powerful assets in a go-to-market motion. It transforms how your team speaks to customers and prospects, unifies your company's messaging across teams, helps your company shift from product selling to business value selling, and can be a fantastic demand generation asset.
Let’s walk through how and why it works and look at three real-world case studies that prove its value.
What is a Maturity Model?
A maturity model is a structured framework that outlines the progressive stages of growth or capability in a specific area. Some examples we will explore today include marketing maturity, digital transformation, and business process optimization - but it can apply to virtually any technology category (I’m focused here on B2B)
Each stage typically reflects a level of sophistication or value realization, helping companies:
Understand the progression to best-in-class
Benchmark their current state
Identify gaps and opportunities
Define a path to an ideal future state
Maturity models are often a reference framework that’s accompanied by assessment tools or scorecards that allow customers to self-identify where they fall within the framework. For marketing and sales teams, these tools become powerful thought leadership content and conversation starters with senior decision-makers.
Why a Maturity Model is a Powerhouse Marketing Asset
Beyond its function as a diagnostic tool, a maturity model becomes a strategic asset when embedded into your go-to-market efforts. When used effectively, it:
Drives executive engagement – It opens conversations beyond technical teams - often with CMOs, CIOs, and other business leaders interested in the longer-term strategy and outcomes.
Creates strategic alignment – A well-done maturity framework is a vision for your company’s most successful product adoption - and often a differentiation versus competitors. By detailing a best-in-class model (and how your product maps), you can unite marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams around a common vision of customer progress.
Enables value-based selling – If the maturity model is properly rolled out and salespeople are effectively enabled, it can equip your teams to talk about impact, not implementation.
Used in campaigns, QBRs, and executive workshops, maturity models become the bridge between thought leadership and revenue-driving conversations.
Four Case Studies: How Companies Used Maturity Models to Drive Growth
1. BEA Systems: Business Process Optimization
Many moons ago, when I was a Director of Product Marketing for BEA’s fastest growing product, I helped build a Business Process Optimization Maturity Model that became our best performing demand generation asset. It included:
An online self-assessment tool for both customers and prospects
A instantly generated benchmarked report that compared their results to peers by industry and company size
Recommendations for next-best actions for progression
An offer for a consultative advisory session
For select customers or prospects, a top business consultant on the professional services team would run a day-long executive strategy planning session, helping a customer align their executives around their vision for their progress.
This campaign asset pulled us out of technical conversations and into strategic ones. It brought financial buyers to the table, where before we’d been selling lower in the org. Instead of selling the features of our BPM we were saying, “Let’s understand the strategy, obstacles, and opportunities for your business if you modernize your processes.”
The results? Access to the C-Suite, more qualified leads, deeper executive engagement, and a dramatic improvement in how customers perceived our value.
2. MeridianLink: Digital Progression Framework
This blog came to life thanks to Suresh Balasubramanian, CMO of MeridianLink. MeridianLink sells digital lending and account origination software to banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions. He and his team built the Digital Progression Model and Assessment Tool to guide financial institutions through digital transformation.
Source: http://www.meridianlink.com
The model:
Outlines distinct stages of maturity (from manual to optimized operations)
Anchors each stage in clear business value (e.g., increased application throughput, better decision-making)
Includes a short diagnostic for executives, not admins
After taking a short survey, respondents get a short report on their current stage and the best next steps. The sales team also offers a more detailed, custom report in an exploratory meeting.
The campaign reframed the sales conversation around where a customer stood in their digital journey — and what it would take to reach the next level.
The Result?
Increased executive engagement
Accelerated multi-product adoption
Improved sales cycles
More satisfied customers
It wasn’t “Do you want to buy this feature?” but “How do you win in your market?”
3. Marketo: Customer Success-Driven Expansion
Marketo’s maturity model was built in partnership with customer success and professional services. It included a deep analysis of real-time customer feature usage and benchmarking of Marketo’s own data - not just customer survey data. Initially designed for use in customer business reviews, it helped clients benchmark their marketing operations, feature adoption, and next steps.
Marketing used it for targeted campaigns against specific segments based on maturity and feature usage to drive adoption
Marketo University offered content to move users up the maturity curve
Account teams used it to map feature usage across customers and upsell more
In QBRs, Customer Success Managers used it to create both focus and urgency: “You’re at Level 2, but your competitors are at Level 3—here’s how we can help you get there.”
While the maturity model wasn’t a major part of Marketo’s acquisition marketing (Marketo relied on assets like the Definitive Guides at the time), it was a key lever for expansion. It helped reposition customer conversations from tactical support to strategic planning — leading to upsell, stickiness, and advocacy.
Big thanks to Anastasia Pavlova, former Sr. Director of Demand Gen at Marketo, and former VP of Growth and DG at OneLogin for sharing this story and framework from her tie at Marketo.
4. GTM Partners: The MOVE Maturity Assessment
Anastasia also pointed out a live Maturity Model that’s effective and visible in all its glory right now. GTM Partners created a maturity model designed specifically for B2B companies to evaluate the strength and scalability of their go-to-market operations across four critical dimensions: Market, Operations, Velocity, and Expansion (MOVE).
The model identifies a company's GTM stage (Ideation, Transition, or Execution)
It guides teams through structured growth phases like Total Addressable Market to Total Relevant Market segmentation, marketing and sales alignment, and proactive investment in enablement.
A detailed self-assessment tool gives participants a personalized maturity report with strategic recommendations for next moves (of which GTM Partners can help you execute)
By completing the MOVE Assessment, GTM teams can gain a snapshot of their current capabilities, receive tailored advice for improving cross-functional alignment, and prioritize their most impactful growth levers.
The structure and execution of this framework are a bit more simple than the one I created at BEA (we had more categories), but the overall structure, call-to-actions, and format are quite effective if you’re looking for templates to build your own. (I have not worked with GTM Partners and am not endorsing them, I’m just a casual observer of their maturity framework)
5. Additional Examples
If you decide to build your own maturity model, it’s a great idea to check out even more examples. I generally like five segments better than three for more nuance. I like collecting contact information at the end of the process instead of the beginning for lower bounce rates. But explore and see what makes sense for your audience and company:
How to Build Your Own Maturity Model Campaign
Creating a maturity framework isn’t easy, but it can be very rewarding. It’s critical that assets be detailed enough that they are insightful and engaging, not just a high-level summary. Here’s a playbook to guide your team:
1. Design the Model
Identify 3–5 stages of customer maturity based on business outcomes. Avoid framing the journey product stages or making it too much about your company. The best focus on a function or business process and feature strategic impact, ROI, and business value stages.
Collaborate with Customer Success, Professional Services, and product to define what each maturity stage looks like and a vision for best-in-class in your category - even if your product doesn’t feature it yet.
Dig into product and customer data and examples to help establish benchmarks
Validate with customers - share your first draft with trusted clients for feedback
2. Build a Self-Assessment
If targeting prospects: Keep it short and valuable. 5–7 questions max.
If targeting customers: You can ask more and deeper questions that will provide and spark more insight.
Provide immediate benchmarking of survey results: “You are here compared to your peers.”
Ideally, you have enough data to benchmark companies by size or industry as well to provide more accurate benchmarking
3. Create Campaign Assets
Messaging for executives, sales, marketing, professional services and support
Self assessment report
One-page maturity map
Executive summary of benchmarking trends
Customer testimonials at each stage, featuring ROI if possible
Workshop or strategy session format (led by sales, Professional Services or Customer Support)
4. Enable Sales and Customer Success Teams
Create discussion templates that resonate with different executive personas
Train internal teams on how to use the model as a conversation starter for executive conversations
Offer talk tracks tied to business value, not product features
Use the model in Quarterly Business Reviews, discovery calls, and renewal discussions
5. Run An Evergreen Campaign
Use the assets across channels - homepage features, digital ads, events, webinars, keynotes, customer case studies, email footers and more
Create nurture campaigns segmented by customers at different maturity stages
Tie new customer stories or ROI case studies into maturity stages
The Benefits of Selling with a Maturity Model
When done right, this approach delivers:
🔹 Stronger Executive Engagement – It opens doors with CMOs, CIOs, and COOs by speaking their language.
🔹 Bigger Deals – Mapping a path to strategic value unlocks cross-sell and upsell.
🔹 Faster Sales Cycles – Executive buy-in accelerates decisions.
🔹 Better Customer Success – It gives your CS team a strategic planning tool, not just a support model.
🔹 Thought Leadership – It positions your company as an advisor, not a vendor.
📌 Companies that successfully engage C-suite buyers see:
✅ 35% higher ACV (McKinsey, 2023)
✅ 30% shorter sales cycles (Forrester, 2024)
✅ 2X higher likelihood of expanding within the account (Gartner, 2024)
Final Word: From Feature Selling to Value Selling
The best maturity models don’t just live in a PDF. They live in sales conversations, QBRs, boardroom discussions, and strategic planning sessions. They become a centerpiece for how your company drives value across the customer lifecycle. Framing technical products in a larger vision and against a longer horizon is very impactful.
If your company is aiming to elevate its position in the market, move beyond product marketing, and truly lead the conversation, a maturity model might be the most powerful, untapped asset in your playbook.
Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.
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