How can you align industry benchmarking with your company's goals?

A lot of organizations can talk the "What" of their services or products, the "How" behind the mechanisms of their products or services, but not many can give a clear "Why." To define purpose, you need to reflect on why are you doing what you are doing in the first place? Then, you can lead up to defining metrics that highlight how successful you can be in achieving the "Why" in what you do.

To measure your success, you'd need to have your KPIs/metrics well defined and universally aligned - ideally between Marketing, Sales and Product. Once you have KPIs/metrics defined, you will then need to understand what data you have today, and what will you need to paint the right picture of how your organization is running. You may need to integrate more platforms into your workflow to paint a better picture, or perhaps partner with 3P data vendors to enrich your customer profiles in your CRM. Best way to do this is audit the customer journey to define touchpoints where data is shared.

Auditing the customer journey is so important; it can give insights on where leaky faucets are. Just like a plumber, you try to find where there can be leaks, that ultimately put roadblocks in getting your target audience to convert (purhcase, contact sales etc.). Take a holistic approach to get a general understanding of the flow, then do a deep-dive on the health of each metric, to see if the current figures reflect an accurate picture or not. If not, find the problem and find ways to fix it!

Key things you should beware of during the analysis period are the quality of data and the nature of your business in comparison to the industry. Some if not all analysts might fall for the trap of misinterpretation when the quality of the data collected is not there. One thing to avoid is to have a prior proper plan for the data collection methods, the monitoring process, and auditing. Data should be cleaned up in advance. Another thing is how much similar and different is your business nature compared to the industry. Not every trend in the industry can be applied or benchmarked with your business. You need to know how to pick the right one that reflects your business and impacts how your business runs in the market.

What are your primary KPIs/Metrics? Whichever they may be, those should set guidance for defining targets. Refer to historicals and industry benchmarks that share your KPIs/Metrics, then collaborate XFN to define targets that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timebound)!

With Targets set, build a strategy to achieve your targets. This should be strategy that allow for growth, and deliver some form of benefit to customers in the medium-to-long term (i.e., improve CX for product sign up etc). Strategy should be clear, actionable, measurable and aligned across key departments in your organization. Developing a RACI Matrix may help at the start to set the stage on which department is responsible for what portion of executing strategy!

One practical way to monitor progress is to use a time based Balanced Scorecard. What this means is that once you know your KPIs/ metrics to track over time and how they relate to different parts of your business (e.g. finance, marketing, sales etc.), then you can write that target and status (e.g. green, orange, red) on the right hand side of the Excel sheet and the columns in between the metric name on the left and the target/ status on the right, you can track each business metric by week/ month/ quarter/ year. As a small business some metrics we need to track on a weekly basis, whereas larger companies only really track on a quarterly or half yearly basis. Hope this helps! Good luck!

The reality here is that it isn't always appropriate to compare yourself to industry benchmarks. If you're looking for an average engagement rate for a drinks brand, for example, you could be comparing yourself against everyone from bottled water to red bull, with the latter almost certainly skewing the results. Industry benchmarks are useful to understand the guardrails, but owned performance will always be the most relevant indicator. Are we improving? Have we beaten targets set against our previous performance? If you continue to build iterative improvements it won't matter what the rest of the market are doing - you'll overtake them all eventually.

Before understanding whether or not it would be relevant to align your business to industry benchmarking, verify where you are currently positioning your brand and product (or service) now, and how you would like your brand to be positioned in the future. And if you are launching a disruptive product, then develop a strategy that will allow your product or company to become the industry benchmark. Regarding your purpose, it is not enough to have a clear purpose, mission and vision, it is important that you develop a talent development strategy that ensures your company purpose is embedded in your ways of working.