Every person that works at Pointerpro is imbued with the value of purposeful assessments. Not only the developers of our platform but also a “non-essential worker” like myself. As a marketer and copywriter, I try to understand what users of our software go through every day. One way is to talk to them. More often than not they are consultants with highly diverse domains of expertise. Probably the most effective way to understand them – and how they assess their clients – would be to crawl into their skin. I did the next best thing: developing a quantitative maturity model, as if I were a consultant myself.
What is a quantitative maturity model?
A quantitative maturity model is a framework that objectively assesses an organization’s level of maturity in a specialized area, using measurable metrics. It helps consultants by providing a clear understanding of the organization’s current state and identifying areas for improvement. With a quantitative maturity model, consultants can establish baselines, develop benchmarks, set realistic goals, and create actionable strategies to guide the organization’s growth and track progress.
Ultimately, a quantitative maturity model can be converted into a maturity assessment. This article focuses on the development of the model itself. Find out more about maturity assessment building (with Pointerpro) here.
Why is it so valuable to use a quantitative maturity model?
First of all, for any consultancy that wants to grow, standardizing its methodology to evaluate clients is essential. There are many ways to substantiate that claim, but the two most important ones in my opinion are these:
- It increases efficiency: faster customer onboarding and delivery of business value.
- It leverages specialized know-how that competing consultants may lack.
Using a standardized approach with quantifiable data – in other words, a quantitative maturity model – also facilitates effective communication with stakeholders. It objectifies and therefore justifies your recommendations to get the necessary buy-in from decision-makers.
3 key steps to develop a quantitative maturity model for your client intake process
Preliminary steps
In another blog article, I argued for one of Pointerpro’s key visions for consultancy in this digital age. Namely, that there is a natural evolution in how to be a consultant today. Developing quantitative maturity models is a pivotal phase in that evolution. But a good maturity model is also a specialized one. Therefore, you first need to discover and decide what you want to specialize in as a consultant. What will be your service offerings? Let’s say you’re a digital marketing consultancy. That could mean you build attractive websites for clients, but it can just as well not mean that at all.
For the purpose of this quantitative model-building exercise, I decided I would pretend to be a marketing agency that decided on email marketing consultancy as its specialized service offering.
Step 1: Define the maturity levels
How many levels do you need?
Whoever says “maturity model,” says “maturity levels.” I have noticed that the online maturity assessments from Pointerpro clients often tend to apply 4 different maturity levels, so I’m inclined to go for that as well. A maturity model needs to be sophisticated so having more than 3 levels seems like an obvious choice.
When researching online for email marketing and other maturity models, you’ll mostly come across 4 or 5 maturity levels. Even though having 5 levels is justifiable because it allows for sophistication, there’s more room for ambiguity than when applying 4 levels. As an email marketing consultant in this exercise, I will go for using 4 maturity levels. To visualize my model, I could consider integrating a “level 0” to represent no presence of any email marketing whatsoever.
How to name your maturity levels
Beyond being a truly useful tool, a maturity model also increases your credibility as a consulting brand. Therefore, it’s a good idea to be creative when naming the maturity levels. Let’s say my digital marketing consultancy is called “Rumble In The Jungle”. A client with maturity level 4 could then be labeled as a “Lion.” A client with maturity level 1 could be labeled as “Leafhopper.” A client who simply does no email marketing at all (level 0) could be labeled as something inanimate, like a “Pebble,” representing the absence of the client’s activity in email marketing.
Key takeaways & other tips:
- Having 4 levels is probably the sweet spot (sophisticated and unambiguous).
- Differentiate yourself by giving your maturity levels original names.
Step 2: Define the questions
Finding questions to ask
Asking the right questions during the client intake process is a crucial skill for any consultant. And so it is when developing a maturity model. Working in marketing myself, I have some intuition about what could be potential questions to measure the email marketing maturity of an organization. As a consultant, there’s no doubt you’re an expert in your field and have such an intuition too.
Nonetheless, this wouldn’t be the year 2023 if I didn’t make a case for using ChatGPT. With the right prompts, the AI tool can give you a great starting point. In fact, it can come up with endless excellent suggestions.
Also, diverse sources share email marketing or digital marketing maturity models online. They don’t disclose the exact questions, but the visual representations of their models provide plenty of inspiration. In fact, it made me realize that you can categorize your questions into different domains within email marketing.
For instance: one domain could focus on “strategy and operations”, while another could focus on aspects like “design and content” or “automation.” Organizing your questions in this way, helps you to maintain a good balance and take different domains into sufficient consideration.
What questions to favor?
That said, remember I mentioned before that a quantitative maturity model allows you to leverage your know-how and skills? It’s in this step you make that happen: By focusing on questions that relate to the services and know-how that differentiate you from your competitors.
An example: If you or someone in your consulting firm is an absolute expert in writing high-quality copy for emails, by all means, provide enough questions about the content and quality of the emails above questions that focus on domains your consultancy maybe doesn’t master as well.
You want the total number of questions in your maturity model to allow for enough sophistication, the same way you did when choosing the number of maturity levels. Five questions aren’t going to cut it for you to come up with very useful feedback or advice. I came up with 15 questions, although a true email marketing expert may come up with 20 quite easily. Online assessments created by consultants who use Pointerpro generally have somewhere between 10 and 20.
What answer options to provide?
Coming up with questions for your client intake process isn’t enough. You need to know what the potential answers are, of course. After all, you’re the expert. Providing answer options – as opposed to coming up with open questions – is what allows you to make your model quantitative.
When thinking about my answer options, I reflexively assumed each answer would have to correspond to a maturity level. But some of the questions I came up with simply didn’t have four possible answers in them. Sometimes the answer to a question is just “yes” or “no.” No problem. That’s why a great quantitative model uses scoring.
The importance of benchmarks
Before I discuss how to attribute scores to answer options in your maturity model, let me emphasize one last essential to-do when deciding on your answer options: finding industry benchmarks.
Even if you specialize your consulting in something as narrow as email marketing. Things may still differ from industry to industry. For instance, the open rate for emails sent out by government or healthcare entities tends to be much higher than for emails sent out by construction industry companies. In other words, you may have to adjust your model a bit for each of the industries you’re targeting as a consultant.
To stay in touch with industry benchmarks, find out what publications and reports are being published, join professional networks, and really dedicate some time to researching and learning. And of course: use your eventual quantitative model to gather and leverage the data you collect. That’s right. Reward yourself for your hard work.
Key takeaways & other tips:
- Inspire yourself with online research for questions and models.
- If you have salespeople, find out what questions come up when meeting prospects.
- Provide at least 10 questions in total for the model so that it’s sophisticated enough.
- Categorize your questions to ensure a balanced assessment.
- Provide enough questions that relate to your core know-how and skills.
- Use multiple answer options. No need to have as many options as maturity levels.
- Don’t forget to research for benchmarks.
Step 3: Define the scoring
The final model
Now it’s time to make the maturity model quantitative. It’s time to attribute scores to all the answer options. If you look at my final quantitative model, you’ll notice there are 15 questions in total and that for each the maximum score is 4. That means a potential client who applies nothing but best practices would score a perfect total of 60 points.
Of course, such a prospect is almost certainly not going to become a client. It’s also extremely unlikely that this type of prospect exists because I’ve made my maturity model demanding enough. In fact, I’ve tried to set up my model so that most respondents end up in the zone I want them to. Based on a maximum score of 60 I was able to define the maturity levels as follows:
- Maturity level 1: 0 – 15 points
- Maturity level 2: 16 – 30 points
- Maturity level 3: 31 – 45 points
- Maturity level 4: 46 – 60 points
Aiming for low scores (but not too low!)
When you’re assessing an organization with your quantitative maturity model during the client intake process, you’re generally in a very early stage of working for them. Your ultimate goal is to provide concrete advice and services down the road. Therefore, you need the maturity score of that client to clearly indicate that there’s room and need for improvement. At the same time, the score shouldn’t be so low that the client gets discouraged or becomes defensive and refuses your help.
Ideally, 60% of the assessed clients would end up with maturity level 2. At least, you should set up your scoring so that the majority of the clients you’re assessing end up in level 2 or 3 (based on 4 levels). 2 motivates them to move away from being underperforming. 3 motivates them to move towards excellence.
Applying more weight to questions of expertise
I mentioned earlier that to leverage your know-how and services as a consultant, it’s important to dedicate enough questions to the domains you master most. If I were really an email marketing consultant, “design and content” would probably be important for me because I would differentiate myself from competitors with services like copywriting. I am also going to assume for the purpose of this exercise that, as an email marketing consultant, I would excel at giving strategic advice.
For my quantitative model, that means I’d want to make sure low-ranking answer options on “design and content” and “strategy and operations” questions have a more negative impact on the total maturity score. Here’s what I did: For a few of the questions associated with “strategy and operations” and “design and content” I applied a low score for the already likely answer options 2 and 3. Instead of applying a proportional score of 2 and 3 – as I did with the other questions – they only deliver respectively 1 and 2 points.
Defining yourself as a consultant through your quantitative model
This account of applying weights to answer options for the sake of emphasizing your own key skills and services may not seem very objective. That’s because it isn’t.
Yes, a quantitative model is about giving an objective indication of a client’s maturity. But that objectivity is always going to be nested in the subjective point-of-view of the consultant. I am a copywriter at heart. Applying more weight to content-related questions in my model is actually nothing more than explicitly defining my vision as an email marketing consultant. I in fact do deeply believe that content is key.
There are many potential nuances you could consider in a quantitative model. When defining the scoring of questions related to “strategy and operations,” I also wondered whether sending 1 marketing email per month was necessarily worse than say 3 emails. So, I reflected on ways to score the different answer options here. The conclusion? In my vision as an email marketing consultant, I believe that sending out only 1 email per month is synonymous with not exploiting the potential email marketing has for any organization. Hence, I attributed a lower score to the answer option “1 email per month.”
Scoring to develop professional assessments down the line
The effort of defining scoring is also valuable because it’s the basis for a top-notch online assessment you could develop later on. In the user help video below, my colleague Stacy explains how to apply scoring in Pointerpro. Just to give you an idea.
Key takeaways & other tips:
- Set up your scoring so that the majority of assessed clients would end up with maturity level 2 or 3.
- Favor your strongest domains of expertise and service by penalizing “low-ranking” answer options that are related to them.
- Applying weighted scoring is a useful exercise to define your vision as a consultant.
- Scoring is the basis for a professional online assessment
The outcome and the next steps
Testing the model
If, like me, you’re no mathematical wonder, the proof is in the eating of the pudding. I put my own model to the test by answering the questions, as if I were assessing one of the companies I used to work for as a marketing employee. Based on my experience there at the time, my assumption before taking the test was that maturity level 2 would apply.
The result
In the image below, the applicable answer options are marked in green. For the majority of questions, the applicable answer turned out to be indeed a “level 2 answer”, generally corresponding to 2 points out of a maximum of 4.
I ended up with a total score of 27 out of 60, which corresponds to an overall level 2 maturity score. The difference between ending up in level 2 (a score between 16 and 30) and ending up in level 3 (a score between 31 and 45) was made by the questions I decided to apply a custom score on. If I hadn’t done so, my total score would have been 31, corresponding to maturity level 3.
That comes to show that the impact of weighted scores is not so impactful as to completely derange the result, but enough to be a subtle push towards accepting the need for some consulting service.
If you’re interested, you can view my Google Sheet here and from there download the format you need.
Next step: attach feedback and advice
Now that my model is finished I have what is called a descriptive model. One that describes the as-is situation of my potential email marketing client.
Another nudge for that client in the direction of accepting my services, based on the as-is evaluation, is to kick-start things by immediately providing them with some relevant advice.
One way is to associate generic advice based on the maturity level. A more powerful one would be to utilize the data you’ve just gathered. In other words, if the answer options that applied to your client illustrate some sort of weakness in one or more specific domains, it’s the chance for you to share feedback, relevant best practices and gain the client’s trust. In that case, your maturity model becomes a prescriptive model, as it literally prescribes solutions. You can follow up by suggesting concrete services to help them bridge the gap your maturity model has exposed.
Take it further: Automate the entire process
I’m not going to lie, developing this quantitative maturity model for email marketing took quite a bit of effort and work. Reading this article, you may have already concluded that it would be wise to turn your model into a full-blown maturity assessment. One that you could have your potential clients fill out, instead of having to invest more time yourself in evaluating each one individually, through calls and meetings.
As a member of the Pointerpro team, I’d like to urge you not to stop there. With our platform, you are able to not only build and distribute digital assessments – to prospects directly or via your website. You can automate the entire process, from assessment to advice delivery. Based on the principles of a quantitative maturity model with custom scoring, Pointerpro allows you to build report templates that auto-generate custom advice for each respondent, in a branded PDF format.
Download our quantitative maturity canvas for free
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Before anything else, I invite you to start building your own quantitative maturity model. I hope this article will help you do so. To get you started, here’s a canvas you can use as a hands-on guide.
