The Better Benchmark
Looking Inside for the Results That Matter
Your company is a unique and special SN WFLAKE You have your own mission and purpose, your own set of goals and expectations, your own distinct collection of people and ideas and expertise.
Yet far too many companies fall into the trap of comparing themselves to other companies and emulating them to the degree that they lose their individual shine.
The same can be said about your competitors, or the business next door, or the one located across the country or across the world.
The leadership believes they are staying competitive; in fact, they’re erasing the very distinction that can attract customers and eclipse brand competitors. This is especially true when it comes to benchmarking.
What makes your company great is different than what makes that other company great.
It’s seen as a highly advisable way for companies to be sure they are staying current in their field and able to match comparable offerings.
That’s a good thing; your uniqueness is what differentiates you from those other businesses.
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Instead of turning a blind eye to a competitor’s advantage, benchmarking ensures that no opportunity goes unnoted. Yet while it’s a helpful process in many industries in many ways, it can also be a waste of time and effort – and it can even weaken a company’s results.
Benchmarking has become especially popular with the rise of marketing automation This is understandable. Marketing automation is still so new for many companies that there’s a natural tendency to examine competitor activities and achievements to identify new tactics and determine whether or not their efforts are “successful.” The problem: marketers are setting these benchmarks based on how they compare with other companies, rather than focusing on how their marketing automation strategies have driven results and improvements internally.
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This dynamic leads to one dangerous and prevalent expectation: that your performance should be evaluated based on how well others do, rather than how well your company could or should be doing. That tendency puts a potentially disastrous foundation into play, in which outsider activities become the driver for your marketing strategy.
This is ill-advised for two reasons. The first is that your company simply cannot see the nuances, background and factors that led to your competitor’s results. Possibly they invested more into a campaign than you know, making their ROI look more impressive than it really is. Perhaps their marketing automation strategies are based on influences that don’t apply to your company. There’s also a more insidious danger; your team could be lulled into a false sense of security if you manage to meet industry benchmarks while your marketing infrastructure could actually be performing at a much higher level.
Start looking inside Let’s be clear here. Relying on outside benchmarks is not inherently wrong or bad; it’s just that focusing on external factors often comes at the expense of accurate internal evaluations. This can be a critical difference. For companies new to marketing automation, setting internal benchmarks can be a more useful marker for measuring the success of everything from strategies to campaigns to staff roles.
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