Work
Turning a one-off study into a market benchmark
A global B2B technology company wanted to build a position in an emerging category that would last beyond a single campaign. We created a proprietary maturity index that turned original research into a repeatable framework customers, marketers and sales teams could use.
The need
Own the conversation, not just add another survey
The market was crowded with research. The client needed a point of view that could become associated with its brand and remain useful beyond a single campaign.
The starting point
Interesting data, limited staying power
One-off studies could generate statistics, but they did not give customers a reason to return or give commercial teams a framework they could use repeatedly.
What we did
Built a maturity model from original evidence
We designed a survey of more than 1,000 senior decision-makers around five dimensions of organizational maturity:
- Strategy: how clearly priorities, ownership and investment decisions were defined.
- Capability: whether teams had the skills and organizational support needed to execute.
- Data and infrastructure: whether the underlying systems were sufficiently connected and trusted.
- Operational adoption: how extensively new capabilities had moved from experimentation into everyday workflows.
- Measurement: whether organizations could demonstrate business outcomes rather than simply report activity.
Each dimension combined several survey measures rather than relying on a single self-assessment question.
The measures were combined into a 100-point index and four maturity stages. That allowed the analysis to compare organizations at different stages and investigate what separated activity from genuine capability.
The research exposed an important distinction. Organizations could adopt significant amounts of technology while still lacking the ownership, measurement and operating model needed to translate that activity into measurable progress.
The benchmark turned that gap into the central narrative of the program.
What they got
One research foundation, multiple commercial uses
The flagship report introduced the index and the major differences between maturity levels.
The same research foundation then supported:
- a customer maturity diagnostic
- sector and regional benchmarks
- executive presentations and webinars
- sales enablement tools
- personalized assessment reports
- thought-leadership articles exploring individual dimensions
- pulse research tracking fast-changing measures
- subsequent annual waves showing how the market was moving
A shorter assessment used the same core scoring logic as the original study. Organizations could see their overall maturity tier, compare themselves with the research and identify where they were strongest and weakest.
That made the benchmark useful beyond the report itself and gave commercial teams a framework for starting conversations around the customer's own position.
Why it mattered
The client moved from publishing research about the market to providing a framework the market could use to measure itself
The index created a common language across thought leadership, marketing and sales. Customers could benchmark themselves against it, sales teams could use it to structure conversations and subsequent research could extend the framework rather than starting again from scratch.
As later waves were added, the benchmark became more valuable because it could show where organizations stood and how the market itself was changing.