Competitive benchmarking refers to your brand position compared to your competitor’s. Benchmarking allows you to compare your brand’s performance against your rivals by using relevant pre-set metrics. By benchmarking your business, you can identify loops holes in your strategies, determine the best practices, and maintain a competitive edge within your market.

Competitive benchmarking has three categories: strategic benchmarking, process benchmarking, and performance benchmarking. Competitive benchmarking measures your rival’s performance and identifies the latest trends and practices in the data.

Challenges Businesses face during benchmarking.

As mentioned earlier, businesses are required to gather information regarding other business strategies. However, you may face many problems during benchmarking that can leave your strategies lagging and ineffective, such as

• Lack of actionable insights
• Slow adaptions to strategy
• Manual data collection

Competitive benchmarking enhance your brand value. Along with that, benchmarking has numerous benefits, such as

• Enhancing brand’s social performance
• Improving content strategy, influence strategy, and customer care strategy
• Improves crisis management

Additionally, it allows you to monitor and measure your company’s performance and inform your brand about your performance strategies across your business.

Competitive benchmarking consists of three steps. Let’s take a look.

Select your Competitive Benchmark

You need to track your key performance indicators that could be anything from inventory to customer retention or average sales cycle length. The ideal KPI for competitive benchmarking is tracking the sales org that can serve as early indicators for more significant outcomes.

Identify the Competition

The next step is to identify the competitors that you want to benchmark against. Select the right competitor that is doing well in the areas where you want your brand to improve. Benchmarking is different when it comes to different industries.

• Competitors of similar sizes

These types of competitors are your biggest rivals. Keep an eye on their performance, and you can easily get on the right track and spot immediate prospects for improvements.

• Competitors above you

Your business is going to grow sometimes. Thus, benchmarking big games can help you put yourself in their shoes and how they can help you improve your brand for good. Analyze their strategies and how they are improving themselves.

• Competitors below you

Looking at your competitors who are below you can help you with their innovative strategies and products that you can implement in your brand to make it more convenient.

Decide your Benchmarking Metrics and Implement them.

Collecting data of your rivals is a tough task. Public companies release their annual reports online, however, the difficulty starts with getting the private company’s reports. You can get a private company’s annual reports from press releases, news articles, and sales reports.

With benchmarking tools, you can keep an eye on your competitor’s data. Some benchmarking tools are free, while some tools require fees.

In the end, competitive benchmarking is an ongoing process that can help you find out any blind spots in your business if conducted regularly. It can improve your sales efforts and determine the best practices for future requirements. If you are new, you can hire a certified eCommerce development team who can guide you through sales strategies and help you enhance your business.