The practice of benchmarking can cut the way to the growth of your business. Learn how to apply this method in your company and move forward faster.
If you want to get there fast, go alone, but if you want to go further, do it benchmarking. Know that benchmarking can cut a good path of mistakes and frustrations for your business, if done right . But for that, you need to know very well what it is and how to do benchmarking.
This article will help you along that path, with examples and everything.
What is benchmarking?
If we were to translate the term benchmarking for Portuguese, we would have something like “reference point”. And this method is just that: parse a reference in a systematic way to simplify the arrival to success. In this case, here the reference is the competition to your product or service.
The objective is to improve the business strategies using the collection of information from the competition. With this, it is possible to seek new routes to come up with original ideas, avoid unnecessary risks, identify trends , improve operational processes and even invest in the business more intelligent.
Therefore, this is a in-depth work , focused, analytical, which will generate a precious instrument for the growth and maturation of a product or service. But you don’t have to think that this is a seven-headed beast: in fact, benchmarking is within the reach of any company, but the result will be proportional to dedication.
Doing benchmarking will help your company get an idea of your current position in the market, understand how the audience responds to communication stimuli for products or services, and better understand the product sales cycle and campaign duration, for example. The construction of this document can generate a very rich history of references to accelerate your business.
I like that! And so? Just do it?
Benchmarking offers a series of combinations of information, and if you don’t select well, it’s easy to get lost and get nowhere. Data collected without purpose does not become information. Another very important care is, at all times, to maintain the rationality of the analysis . This type of work ends up impacting emotion, since data collection is done from the best in the sector and therefore, it is very easy to get lost in the initial proposal. It can also happen that the business goes down the path of self-deception, reproducing copies with insignificant changes, but claiming that there was an improvement in the process. If that happens, the fate will be irrelevance.
A good process of benchmarking is part of the
self-knowledge of oneself business. This will be a great starting point, as you can start by focusing on the point that calls for change. We can assemble the benchmarking schedule from a few blocks. They are:
1) Selection of the competition
Choose three competitors, the best of your sector. Choosing more than that can add a lot of complexity to the analysis, but less than that can generate insufficient data. One idea is to choose businesses of different sizes to get an idea of what can be done with a lot of resources – or with little.
2) Selection of the team of survey
It is necessary to determine which team or person will be responsible for the benchmarking. The advice is to have someone dedicated to the activity following the cycles of products , services and campaigns from start to finish. Dividing a professional’s attention between his main activity and benchmarking is not smart. If so, better wait to start this type of work.
3) Indicators
Choose an area, product or service that needs improvement, ask the uncomfortable questions and start listing the data needed to answer them. Build a table with the research topics, which solutions are used, company names and other metrics that are important. Do this in a way that is visually easy to interpret, find the data and report. This document should be perennial, intuitive and easy to fill. It can be done through an advanced spreadsheet or application.
4) Data collection method
Choose sources of information in an ethical manner, respecting privacy laws and the confidentiality of what is being analyzed. It is possible to obtain information from widely known sources, such as press releases, disclosure of quarterly results, interviews and articles with success stories, advertising material, in addition to the website and social networks.
5) Analyzes and suggestions for improvement
Here, the data are analyzed and translated in an intelligible way, bringing insights,
improvement points and creation of new products and services, among other ideas. Managers must meet with the research area to understand which solutions should be implemented, in what way and in how long. It is very likely that at this same meeting it will be possible to establish other objectives of benchmarking.
Categories of benchmarking
Check out the main categories of benchmarking that should be considered before starting the research:
Internal benchmarking
Often the company itself has departments that work with unquestionable efficiency, which can serve as a model for the business as a whole. It is possible to recognize this type of case through the positive results, relationship between colleagues and well-structured processes , among other indications. Periodic meetings with managers and people from the teams help in this exchange and to arrive at a map that can be implemented in a standardized way.
Cooperative
Companies that form partnerships can share knowledge and experiences so that both can grow. The suggestion is to set up a committee, with people from both businesses, to structure the processes, approve the planning of changes and start implementation.
Competitive
It is the benchmarking focused on
good management practices competitor’s business. Normally, this type of information is kept confidential, but sometimes it can be disclosed in the form of a case of success in some publication. Monitor publications that cite your competitors through alerts that reach your email, registering them in Google Alerts.
Functional
This model of benchmarking is focused on a specific aspect of the business, which will be analyzed in depth. You can analyze, for example, the digital marketing actions of the competitor company , monitoring the activation pattern by email marketing, the management of social networks and actions to impact the audience.
It is important to emphasize here that digital marketing has taken on a central role in the companies’ sales strategy, as it has the ability to quickly publicize products and services, from very attractive investments . Therefore, this should be a thoroughly analyzed item in any benchmarking strategy.
Bet on a tool that makes your business stand out!
Generic
It is the benchmarking focused on functional and everyday aspects of the business. For example, the person can impersonate a customer to map the company’s face-to-face service. Or you can make a purchase through e-commerce to analyze operational aspects: what the shopping cart looks like, which transport companies are used, the product’s path. And, when the “paid receipt” arrives, you can analyze if the unboxing experience was taken into account – if it was well packaged, if it has any personalization, gift, addition of a personalized aroma.
benchmarking is a very complete tool to
promote good practices in the company . But remember that all this effort is only valid if the diagnosed changes are implemented, even if gradually. This is how progress works: leaving behind what no longer makes sense and improving what still contributes to the company’s growth.
