Benchmarking: See the world through your customers’ and employees’ eyes!

From internal to external benchmarking

I recently wrote in Part I of this 3-Part series about the importance of benchmarking and then in Part II I wrote about top tips for conducting INTERNAL benchmarking. If you’re ready to jump right to EXTERNAL benchmarking, let’s do it! 

External benchmarking is key to see what your employees and customers either already know about you and your competitors, or are on their way to learning about you. As long as you feel you are always competing for the best employees and customers, you need to benchmark externally so you can be strategic in your communications, marketing, and sales.  The idea here of course is to be better than your employee and customer options in order to keep them happy, contented, and satisfied. 

How to succeed with external benchmarking

Here are three cool tips to get the most out of your EXTERNAL benchmarking.

1. Identify relevant industry data sources 

   • Look for industry associations, research firms or benchmarking organizations that collect and publish data on key metrics for your industry.

   • Having access to aggregated, reliable external data sources makes benchmarking easier. 

2. Focus on close competitors 

   • For external benchmarking to provide meaningful insights, narrow your analysis to direct competitors that are similar in size, offerings, markets etc. The end goal is to get an apples-to-apples comparison that provides useful insights.

   • Comparing to vastly different companies can produce skewed or misleading benchmarks.

3. Look beyond just metrics 

   • While comparing performance metrics is valuable, also try to understand the practices, processes and strategies driving exceptional performance.

   • The idea is to identify and learn from best practices."

   • Look for opportunities to observe operations, interview employees or customers, or have discussions with top performers to gain deeper qualitative insights.

The key principles are to leverage reliable external data sources specific to your industry, carefully select competitors for an apples-to-apples comparison, and go beyond just the numbers to understand the practices enabling superior performance. This provides a more comprehensive and actionable external benchmarking analysis.