Marketing is viewed as a profit center and strategic driver of revenue. 

We have a small marketing department with focus on sales support, events, and branding.  Marketing is viewed as a cost center.

No formal marketing department exists and various people in the organization perform marketing functions.

Our marketing department is mainly focused on lead generation.  The link between investment in marketing and revenue growth is not clear.

The company value proposition exists, has been validated by customers, and is being used to guide all marketing efforts.

No company value proposition is defined.

A company value proposition exists but has not been validated by customers.

A company value proposition exists, is frequently tested and revisited as new solutions, practice areas, verticals are added. The value proposition contains proof elements that are verified.

Our sales people are responsible for generating their own leads.

We always hit our lead generation and lead quality targets and only pass leads over to sales when they reach a certain threshold of being 'sales ready'.

Our lead generation and nurturing process is automated using a Marketing Automation system that scores lead quality and provides Sales with prospect behavior and activities.

We don't have a formalized lead generation process or systems to evaluate the quality of leads.  Sales complains that we don't generate enough good leads for them.

We don't conduct market research.  We believe we know what the market needs.

We conduct market research on a regular basis, but the results of our research don't always drive decisions or actions in our organization.

All of our major decisions are validated and informed by rigorous market research such as focus groups, customer interviews, online surveys and speaking to our sales team.

We buy the odd market research report and/or survey our customers once in a while.

A documented industry and competitive analysis exists and is updated on a regular basis. Formal analysis is completed and presented to senior management at least once a year.

A documented industry and competitive analysis exists but it's not always current or used to drive decisions.

No industry or competitive analysis is done.

Industry and competitive analysis is done ad hoc when requested by senior management.

Marketing tracks metrics like cost per opportunity, # opportunities sourced by marketing, and contribution to pipeline.

Marketing tracks program ROI, customer lifetime value, retention rate, and cost per acquisition. Predictive analytics may be used to assist with lead scoring.

No marketing metrics are collected or analyzed.

Marketing metrics and analytics are done ad hoc.  Marketing tracks operational 'vanity' metrics like email open rate, clicks, # leads generated.

Our sales and marketing departments do not get along.  We have a toxic environment with each side blaming the other for lack of revenue results.

Sales and marketing work together like a well-oiled machine.  We have a 'service level agreement' in place for evaluting lead volume, quality and follow-up time by sales.

Marketing and sales have a good working relationship and share in each other's success. Sales is happy with the quality and volume of leads, and marketing feels that sales uses appropriate messaging and follows up with leads reasonably well.

Sales and marketing are trying to work together but without clear guidelines on what defines a 'qualified lead' there is still a lot of bickering going on.

We have a Chief Marketing Technologist (or equivalent) who drives our marketing technology roadmap, makes decisions, and tightly aligns our technical and marketing staff.  We acquire systems and analyze data proactively to acheive our marketing objectives.

Marketing is trying to make better use of technology but are side-stepping I/T and buying 'rogue' systems to execute campaigns, resulting in political issues for senior management.

Our marketing and I/T departments rarely speak to each other.  All technology decisions are made by I/T with minimal input from marketing.

I/T proactively meets with the marketing team to determine their needs for technology, data and systems to ensure marketing has what they need to get their job done.  A good working relationship exists between the departments.

Content marketing is done ad hoc. No content strategy is in place.  When sales requires a new piece of content, marketing works to create something reactively.

No content marketing strategy in place.

Our content strategy is optimized.  We map our content to stages in the buyer's journey and develop persona-specific content and messaging.  Our sales team uses most or all of the content that marketing produces.

Content marketing strategy is defined and content assets are audited proactively to determine quality, relevancy and degree of usage.

We do some email marketing and have a limited social media presence.  

Our Digital Marketing efforts are limited to our website.

We have a Digital Marketing team that runs our social media channels, online advertising campaigns, produces an regular email newsletter, and manages video production projects.

Digital Marketing is a core competency.  We have a large audience of followers online, have a responsive website or 'App', use video regularly in our communications and drive a large percentage of our leads from online sources.