How to effectively carry out a benchmark? If you understand that you are not alone in your industry and that your positioning relative to competitors needs to be studied and reworked to strengthen your business, this is a question you will need to ask yourself.
A comparison, or in other words a “state of play” at a specific moment, a benchmark is an essential practice that lets you measure yourself against the competition and see how companies and professionals in your sector communicate.
An effective benchmark helps you better understand the competition so you can stand out from it.
How should you proceed to carry it out effectively? This article aims to reveal everything you need to know to succeed at benchmarking, from its definition to the actions it triggers, including all the steps involved. Ready?
What is a benchmark?
A benchmark is a form of competitive study that focuses only on companies in your sector. It is part of market research and looks at marketing operations as well as management practices implemented by competitors.
Since it is part of market research, the benchmark is intended a priori. In short, it is similar to the traditional product comparison, but far from being limited to the objective characteristics of a given product (such as dimensions, ergonomics, features…), the benchmark examines one by one all communication practices, internal team management and external marketing strategy.
Did you know? The famous printer company Xerox invented benchmarking in the 1980s. It wasn't for fun… but to survey the field before making a major investment with significant consequences for the company. The aim was to learn competitors' best practices to see which could be transferred internally at Xerox.
The objectives of a benchmark are numerous since the study can aim to:
- Make changes to the communication strategy,
- Enter a new market,
- Improve customer relations,
- Optimize your SEO,
- Expand your offering,
- Compare the products or services marketed,
- Develop managerial practices or internal organization.
Carrying out a benchmark is essential to position yourself and stand out. Sometimes, this study provides a wealth of new ideas or helps you become aware of your mistakes.
A benchmark should be conducted on a specific theme and occasionally. It is different from marketing monitoring, which is an almost constant surveillance of competitors' practices.
A benchmark is long and in-depth (it can last several months!), but must be targeted at a specific moment and focus on a clearly defined theme, otherwise it may never be completed given the scale of the task.
The keys to a successful benchmark
Conducting a benchmark is good!
But you must ensure the study is impactful so it is truly useful for your business. Here are 8 tips to succeed in your competitive study.
- Identify competitors. If you want to compare yourself to companies in your sector, you must identify them in the early stages. This task is the very first and it is decisive for the rest of the study.
Rely, of course, on your direct knowledge, your address book and your close circle. But you would be wrong to stop there. Indeed, stopping there would be the best way to remain in your comfort zone and only face companies... that you already know well.
The idea of benchmarking, on the contrary, is to encounter and analyze otherness in order to take the best for yourself afterwards, to grow. - Define the objective. Why are you doing this benchmark? What information do you want to gather? What do you want to change within your company? You must answer these questions from the start! With a well-defined roadmap, you'll know what to look for and how to navigate the large amount of data you will collect.
- Rank your competitors. Now that you know why you are conducting a benchmark, you need to evaluate and even rank the competitors you have identified. There are those who top the list, whose marketing and management practices you should scrutinize, and those who are interesting but more peripheral.
- Evaluate your company. To carry out your competitive study successfully, you have evaluated your competitors. Do the same with your company! It's not the easiest, far from it... but self-criticism is always full of lessons!
- Illustrate the differences. To better position yourself and compare against the top companies in your sector, you need to visualize your differences. That way you'll know what to improve and what makes you a leader. Use diagrams, infographics, pie charts: anything that can make your differences visually striking, while also outlining a path to apply these best practices learned from competitors to your business. Also indicate, as clearly as possible, your strengths that put you ahead this time: points of leverage are essential, both for you and for your colleagues.
- Think about the customers. Customers are what keep you in business. So throughout your benchmarking process you must always keep in mind that all upcoming changes will be made for them! A customer-centric approach should therefore be your guiding thread when processing the many data you'll receive during this benchmark.
- Work together. For a benchmark, it's essential to work as a team. All employees can contribute their perspectives and ideas! Go even further: the ideal way to collect solid, reliable data is to establish a true benchmarking partnership with your main competitors by setting up a reciprocal exchange of good practices — this will ensure you gather realistic data directly from the source! As the saying goes: keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.
- Monitor the transformation. After the benchmark, you'll probably launch new projects. It's essential to track their progress and measure their impact. All the goal-setting and data analysis related to benchmarking were not done in vain: the next step is to know what to do with them, to give them meaning by embodying benchmarking through a real revolution in your company's marketing and management practices in light of what you've learned during this benchmark.
The steps of a benchmark
Benchmarking is a process that takes time and requires mobilizing teams. To make the study easier, you can break it down into three steps.
Step 1: planning
The first step is setting up the defined objectives. You must identify them, articulate them, and list them in order of priority.
Of course, it cannot be repeated enough: you should always have achievable goals! For example, your aim might be to improve your market position or to positively influence customers in order to increase your revenue.
Do not confuse the set of business objectives (often interdependent) pursued by your company with the establishment of this benchmarking plan. Here, the exercise is instead to focus on a single aspect, even if it is related to others.
During this first step, you will also need to select the companies to include in your analysis. You should not choose too many, but you should choose the best ones.
Step 2: data collection and analysis
The second part of benchmarking consists of collecting data and analyzing it. It allows you to position yourself relative to your objectives and, above all, to the players in the study — in other words, your competitors.
You can thus define who the leaders are, the best methods used, or the mistakes in your strategy. Ideally, express these results with numbers so you can easily create diagrams to visualize them.
Presentation is therefore as important as the numbers themselves: the more visually striking the presentation document, the more it will circulate among the different teams in your company and thus influence their practices.
Be inventive with this document intended to circulate internally, and don’t hesitate to apply within your company the attention-grabbing techniques that are all the rage with prospects: punchy phrases, clear diagrams, dynamic, attractive and interactive presentations that lead your interlocutors to position themselves with respect to their own professional practices.
The objective is to deliver precise results very quickly to facilitate decision-making.
Step 3: action taken
Now that you have the results of your analysis, you must act! Here are some actions to implement:
- You can identify the effective practices and tools used by your competitors and implement them in your company. Of course, don't apply everything! Only what is relevant. This notion of relevance alone requires a deep understanding of many aspects of your business (catchment area, number of employees, preferred communication channels, degree of interconnection between different departments, link between employee compensation and company profits…). Indeed, any good idea spotted elsewhere is not necessarily transferable to your business as-is. You must therefore consider how it can be adapted, or at least how it can improve what you already have in place.
- Identify the areas where you perform well and try to understand why, then identify those that need improvement.The essential thing is that the assessment you make of your company is clear-sighted and fruitful: recognize the points of leverage, outline realistic paths, and propose attainable goals to improve what needs improving. The art is to set goals just above current capabilities to push your company out of its comfort zone, without placing it under excessive strain toward an unreachable target.
You will need to define a strategy adapted to your activity.
- Refocus and realign your business issues and quantify new data. The market is constantly evolving, and this is even truer with the globalization of trade and the digital shift: the key is to stay up to date, to be a reference while remaining ready to adapt continuously… To succeed in this balancing act, looking at how others (your competitors) operate is not a luxury but a necessity!
- Reconsider certain internal methodologies with the objective of improving them.
Our tip
You now have all the keys to succeed in your benchmarking. Know that you can also delegate this task! Get in touch with our editorial teams to learn more.
