Content and events
A sector webinar fills with the right job titles and produces a registration list. A registration list is not a pipeline. It is a list of people who were free on a Thursday.
Vertical and industry SaaS
Your buyer does not know your category exists
A quantity surveyor, a practice manager, a farm business manager. They are not weighing you against a competitor. They are weighing you against a spreadsheet that mostly works and the colleague who knows where the paper is. Your demo shows a product for a problem they have never put a name to.
Not open yet. Ours scores your funnel rather than your customers’, and it takes about the time your SDR spends explaining the category.
Where the decision happens
The shortlist is written by someone who has not spoken to you
Category education is not a nice-to-have in this segment. It is the whole of the first half of the sale, and it happens while nobody from your team is in the room.
94%
67%
13 and 9
Put those three together and the shape of the problem is obvious. A buyer who has never heard of your category is forming an opinion from whatever they can read without asking anybody. Then they carry it into a room of about 22 people, most of whom will never visit your site.
A maturity index is one of the few things a buyer genuinely wants during that week, and it leaves behind a document with their own position in it. That is what reaches the other 21, and those are the people who stall a deal you never knew was live.
Today
Four sources, and every one of them ends at a demo request
Content, paid, events and outbound SDR. The spend differs, the destination does not.
Lead gen forms are cheap to fill in, which is exactly the problem. Nobody can tell a curious operations lead from a buyer with a budget.
Paid search
You are bidding on terms the category invented, which means you are paying to reach the small share of the market that already knows the words.
Outbound SDR
The call has to teach the category before it can qualify anything. So the first 18 minutes go on a definition, and the last two on a budget question nobody was ready for.
The demo is a good thing pointed at the wrong stage. It shows a buyer how to operate a product while their open question is still whether this is something companies like theirs do at all. That is an expensive way to spend a sales engineer.
What we would build
Five rungs, written in the vocabulary of one industry
The [Industry] Digital Maturity Index. The respondent gets a level rather than a percentage. A rung tells somebody where they are and what the next move is. A percentage tells them nothing they can act on.
The ladder
Level 1
Paper and memory
The work happens properly and the record of it lives in somebody’s head, a notebook or a van.
Level 2
One spreadsheet, one owner
There is a file, it is good, and everything waits for the person who maintains it to come back from leave.
Level 3
A system, partly used
Something was bought and configured once. Half the team uses it and the other half still sends attachments.
Level 4
Where the work happens
The system is not where the day gets written up afterwards. It is where the day happens.
Level 5
It tells them things
The data comes back as a decision before anybody thinks to ask for it, and the business plans against it.
The five rungs travel between verticals. Not one sentence of the wording does. A quantity surveyor and a veterinary practice manager are both somewhere on level 2, and they would abandon each other’s questions inside 30 seconds.
Which is why the first week is spent listening to your customers talk, not drafting. The rungs are ours. The nouns have to be theirs, and the ones that land are the ones your best deals used.
Choosing between a maturity model and a score
Why it compounds
Survey first, report second, benchmark third
A maturity index that authors its own bands is useful. One that places a respondent against several hundred real peers in their sector is something nobody else in your category can put together by copying your page.
Field the survey
The same question set, run as an industry survey with a named sample and a closing date. Respondents answer because a sector report is a thing they want.
It also produces the first cohort.
Publish the report
The findings go out as a sector document with the method stated, which earns the coverage and the links that a product page never will.
This is the asset the trade press picks up.
Release the benchmark
Now it stops authoring its own bands and starts placing each buyer against real peers, and it gets better every month it runs.
The part a competitor cannot copy by reading your site.
Of the 13 interactive formats we classified, the peer benchmark is the only one whose advantage widens with use. Everything else can be rebuilt by a competitor in an afternoon once they have seen it. (RampFunnels, Quiz Funnel Opportunity Atlas, 2026)
It is also the slowest to stand up, and we would rather say that now than at the end of week three. The first release ranks people against bands written with you and labelled as authored. The peer cohort arrives when the responses can carry it, and the leads work from day one either way.
Routing
A rung is a segment, and it decides the entire follow-up
The same answers that teach the buyer the category also sort them, which is the part that pays for the build.
Level 4 and 5
They already run a system and they are asking what it should be doing next. That is a live deal and the result page books it, with the rung and the gaps carried into the call notes.
Level 3
A half-used system and an internal argument about whose fault that is. The best pipeline in the set and the slowest, so the sequence is written against the rung rather than against the download.
Level 1 and 2
A spreadsheet and a person who owns it. Not a deal this quarter. The follow-up teaches rather than sells, and it is the only honest thing to send somebody who has just been told they are on rung one.
Packages
Three packages, fixed scope, nothing open ended
Vertical SaaS tends to need the third one, because the survey, the report and the benchmark are a sequence over quarters rather than a build over weeks.
Prices are not published yet because they are not final. When they are, they go on the pricing page as numbers.
Questions
What demand gen leads ask
It moves the teaching earlier. An SDR call is a good place to confirm a budget and a terrible place to explain a category. Explaining costs 20 minutes of a call the prospect booked for a different reason. If the index has already walked them up the rungs, the call starts at the point your SDRs currently reach at minute 18.
Your turn
Your own funnel is somewhere on a ladder too
Ours scores your own funnel on the four things that decide whether traffic converts, and names the one costing you the most leads.
Not open yet. When it opens, the score and the report are yours whether or not we ever speak.