I don't think there was an official announcement but somewhere along the line it seems to have become standard practice that if you want to be taken seriously as a thought leader you need to get yourself an index, maturity model or growth barometer.  B2B is rife with them.  Some of them are genuinely interesting and carry significant weight for the industry in which they're published.  Some are vacuous, vanity exercises that are little more than thought leadership click bait. In fact, to help steer audiences I might develop an index that plots the quality of other indexes.  'The Index of Indices'.  Catchy right?  Maybe not. 

Anyway our friends over at Showpad have produced this framework/model to help organisations self identify where they are in terms of sales maturity.  It's a quick and easy way to understand the key stages of sales maturity and where you sit on this scale.  It's a thought provoker and something that will give you some context of what good sales practice looks like today.  

Importantly, the model is built around the buyer experience and how, as an entire organisation, all roads should lead to a buying experience utopia. Why is this important? Well, according to a study from SiriusDecisions, the majority of buyers (81%) today make purchase decisions based on buying experience, over product or price.  I don't doubt this to be true so if you're not thinking, investing and working towards improving your buying experience you're in trouble.