To survive and thrive in a competitive business environment, companies are being hammered to continuously adapt and deliver more, faster, better, and less expensively. Today’s emphasis on more and faster growth via better customer experiences is the focus for many organizations. Are all the functions within your organization delivering the results you need? One of the best ways to know is to regularly assess and benchmark each function. 

Companies use the strategic planning process to identify what the business should become and how to best achieve its vision. Part of this process entails appraising and then improving the company’s capabilities and processes, which is the only way to achieve lasting excellence. The appraisal process includes benchmarking. Benchmarking provides you with the opportunity to compare your performance to your peers and use that information to improve customer and business value.

Mind Your Gaps

How does your competition know where to aim and how far? They use assessments and benchmarks. Benchmarking and assessments enable your company to collect quantitative and qualitative information needed to identify gaps and pinpoint ways to improve performance. Assessments and benchmarking can be done for nearly every business process, and we highly recommend focusing on the Marketing function. Marketing, especially Upstream Marketing, is essential for accelerating customer-centric organic growth.  Marketing is the primary function responsible for finding, keeping, and growing the value of customers. Research finds that best-in-class (BIC) marketers who can demonstrate and measure their impact, value, and contribution join the C-Suite or gain them as their champion.

Unfortunately, many companies do not benchmark their Marketing.

This is a missed opportunity.

When times are tough, Marketing becomes even more important. Why? It supports revenue generation. Sadly, too many companies pull back on their marketing efforts during down cycles, essentially putting their revenue generation efforts in idle mode. The Profit Impact of Market Strategy research has shown that companies that invest in Marketing during a down cycle recover from the cycle faster with increased gains over companies that turn off their Marketing as a way to reduce costs. There is an old saying that “one cannot save their way to revenue.”

Regardless of the economic climate, we believe that a company should make sure its Marketing is firing on all cylinders and operating as effectively and efficiently as possible.

Creating an organization and a Marketing function dedicated to achieving excellence and serving as a value creator takes aspiration, perspiration, and commitment. 

Assessment and Benchmarking Create Pathways for Excellence

The idea behind assessments and benchmarking for excellence is that by implementing the best practices for a particular process, your company can close a performance gap to achieve superior results and enhance its own competitive advantage. Benchmarking and assessments of your every function’s capabilities can produce tangible, quantifiable performance targets that you can consistently measure over recurring time cycles to ascertain performance changes and the impact of these changes on your entire organization. The first step is to audit the current state.  This requires you to assess and benchmark your capabilities.

Then, using an external reference, you can gain insight into these best practices to improve your competitiveness and increase value from your customers’ perspective.

Once you have clarity around opportunities to improve, create a plan to close gaps.

The value of undertaking assessments and benchmarking is that the data you collect reveals what can be achieved beyond where you are and provides insight into how to achieve improved performance levels.

Ready to Close Performance Gaps?

Frequent and regular assessments and benchmarking enable you to measure changes in your performance relative to best-in-class companies. Through benchmarking and assessment, you’ll be able to identify and implement best practices within your organization to make dramatic improvements that will contribute to the bottom line.

Purchase Your Assessment

As you establish these best practices, you will create pathways for improvement and platforms to achieve market leadership. As these mature, you will be able to build models for what Robert Camp refers to as the “best of the best.” These models are what serve as your path to business and Advantageous Excellence.

Learn how to conduct assessments and establish benchmarks for your Marketing Excellence initiative. We can help when you’re ready to start.

FAQ:

• Identify performance gaps (“mind your gaps”)
• Pinpoint improvement opportunities
• Establish measurable performance targets
• Track performance changes over recurring cycles
• Understand the impact of improvements on customer and business value

1. Audit the current state by assessing and benchmarking capabilities
2. Use external reference points to identify best practices and competitiveness opportunities
3. Create a plan to close gaps once improvement opportunities are clear
4. Establish recurring measurement cycles to track progress and impact over time

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