You may be looking to gain deeper insight into your audience, its needs, and its barriers, create original and engaging thought leadership content, or explore new ways to generate leads.
For all these, you should consider deploying a maturity model.
What is a maturity model, and how does it work?
A maturity model is a way of illustrating the impacts of being more, or less, developed in a specific area.
Organisations use maturity models to benchmark their capabilities and offerings against competitors, identifying areas where they are lagging behind and where they can excel.
Therefore, a maturity model serves as a roadmap for continuous improvement, allowing companies to set goals for advancing to the next level of maturity and, as a consequence, better serve their market.
Establishing maturity
Organisations establish and define ‘maturity’ based on a specific, relevant set of attributes – for example, how digitally mature a company is – and then group organisations based on how mature they are in this area.
Building a maturity scale
A maturity scale is then created, showing:
- Organisations that are less developed, underperforming or still working towards improvement. These are positioned very low on the maturity scale
- “Best-in-class” organisations: those who are excelling with very high scores.
Once we establish maturity, we can determine the impacts of a certain level of maturity and explore each group’s specific needs, challenges, and priorities.
Further analysis
Analysts commonly compare maturity with business metrics to demonstrate that a high level of maturity directly correlates with improved business performance – and that lower levels of maturity can cause businesses to struggle.
Examining the differences between organisations that have increased their level of maturity also provides a better understanding of the journey from ‘struggling’ to ‘thriving’. This approach highlights key points and areas for a struggling organisation to focus on when seeking to improve its own maturity.
Who can benefit from maturity models?
Any organisation, brand or business
Maturity models allow businesses to diagnose gaps in their capabilities and prioritise improvements with precision. By segmenting their audience or operations into maturity tiers (e.g., “novice” to “leader”), businesses are able identify priority areas they need to improve on to serve their markets better.
Marketing & PR agencies
Building better marketing, thought leadership and PR campaigns:
Maturity models provide a structured way to assess an industry’s progress, educate the market, and position a brand as a leader. They are, therefore, a powerful tool for agencies to build strategies tailored to their clients’ audience and create more engaging, data-backed stories.
Hyper-targeting and demonstrating better value to their clients:
This analysis enables agencies to tailor content and messaging to their clients’ niche audiences. For a client in the B2B space, this could mean segmenting an audience based on their maturity level in automation. For example, segments with low maturity can be invited to a bespoke “foundational” webinar that aligns with their automation struggles, while more advanced segments receive optimisation guides or checklists.
Enhancing client-agency collaboration and promoting loyalty:
Maturity models provide a structured framework to assess a client’s evolution, highlight gaps in messaging and positioning, and set clear expectations on what’s achievable at different stages of their maturity. Agencies can also analyse their clients’ maturity in areas like crisis management or stakeholder engagement, informing a step-by-step plan to position clients as industry leaders, or, for less mature clients, as problem-solvers.
Growing their business:
Maturity insights also strengthen an agency’s pitching process by demonstrating in-depth knowledge of a client’s audience and market, as well as how they can stay ahead of competitors. Additionally, agencies can use models internally to audit their capabilities such as content production efficiency or customer success and retention, ensuring they exemplify “best-in-class” practices for their own growth.
Why use a maturity model?
If your product or service (offerings) aims to improve your customer’s business, a maturity model will tell you exactly where your offerings stand against your competitors.
You can also use this information to mature in your specific category and position yourself as leader.
For audience insight
Where are your customers struggling? Which sections of your audience are struggling the most?
A maturity model highlights your audience’s key difficulties during each stage of their development and the benefits of advancing to each higher stage. In turn, you will be able to see where your offering best aligns with their needs and goals.
Exploring each maturity level’s firmographics helps you target efforts towards specific markets or industries with lower maturity organisations and tailor your approach to their unique barriers.
For thought leadership
Provide data-driven evidence of the importance of what you offer – you understand the journey, its challenges and its pitfalls, and you know how to help your customers rise through the ranks. A maturity model offers a clear comparison of what the ‘best-in-class’ strive for and illustrates its benefits by identifying a correlation between:
- an improvement in an area you can help with directly
- an improvement in your customers’ business performance – whether in revenue, growth, innovation, or other metrics
This creates opportunities to:
- Showcase original research and create unique data-driven thought leadership content
- Strengthen media relations and earned media efforts – releasing findings and benchmarking reports that attract media attention
- Position your brand as a trusted advisor guiding the industry forward – offering spokespeople for commentary on where the market is heading based on the maturity model, using the findings to craft compelling guest /byline articles, driving speaking opportunities at industry conferences, panels, interviews, keynote speeches etc.
For lead generation
Offering a benchmark against which to be assessed highlights the importance of organisations using your services. With this in mind, you can use the maturity model to create an assessment tool for potential customers, helping them determine how they compare to their competitors and where they can improve.
We recommend creating and hosting a self-assessment tool on your company website, which is particularly useful for:
- generating leads, and collect valuable information on their needs and pain points
- boosting SEO – search engines love to recommend tools, which will drive more traffic to your website and help you rank higher
How to successfully create a maturity model?
Designing the questionnaire
The first step of creating a maturity model is designing a questionnaire. At Sapio Research, during this stage, we work with our clients to:
- Define maturity questions: We include a range of questions to assess organisations’ maturity from multiple angles, though we determine the exact criteria for the model later. At this stage, we establish what constitutes more or less mature for the specific focus area and begin developing the ‘best-in-class’ standard.
- Include a variety of performance metrics: Depending on the metric, there may be a stronger or weaker correlation between higher maturity and better performance. Including multiple metrics ensures a broader range of potential impacts can be explored.
Some metrics will link more clearly to higher maturity than others. We can show you the full range of benefits by looking at different metrics. We also include metrics that aren’t obvious results of higher maturity to highlight the unexpected benefits our client’s solution can bring.
Depending on your needs, we’ll also include other questions, such as challenges you experience or benefits you see from your maturity level.
Analysing the data
Once the questionnaire is designed, we collect the data from the target audience and begin analysing it, creating the finalised model.
During analysis, we segment those surveyed into their maturity level from low to high. We can tailor the number of groups to the specific maturity model, and define the criteria based on key maturity factors established during questionnaire design and data trends.
We then assess performance by maturity level, evaluating the correlation between the chosen performance metrics and the differing maturity levels. Then, we examine each group’s key factors (e.g., barriers, challenges, or needs). We illustrate and explain the findings, supporting our clients with interpreting and using their maturity models.
Maturity models in action – some examples of our work:
Example #1: The Procurement Impact Report for Vertice One.
To build their maturity model, we surveyed 300 procurement decision-makers across the US and UK, assessing how well procurement functions operate across both countries and determining the relationship between procurement efficiency and business performance. Vertice One used their research findings to:
Inform their thought leadership campaign:
Vertice One created a thought leadership report on the current state of procurement (Procurement Impact Report).
With a maturity model showing five different levels of procurement maturity, they were also able to demonstrate a link between more advanced procurement processes and improved business efficiency, growth, and sustainability.
Build their own self-assessment tool:
Their Procurement Impact Self-Assessment tool allows potential clients to benchmark their level of maturity against the procurement leaders surveyed and see how they could improve.
Example #2: The 2025 EF Corporate Learning Maturity Report
The report relies on findings from a maturity model to inform you on how to develop a ‘highly mature’ language program.
We then connected the findings to the fact that business growth directly correlates with a strong learning culture and advanced training programs.
Interested in how a maturity model can add value to your business or for your clients?
We offer advice and guidance throughout creation, analysis, and beyond to ensure you can fully take advantage of a maturity model tailored to your needs.
