Benchmarking – the process of comparing business performance against the performance of others – is a popular performance management tool. But while benchmarking can deliver potentially powerful insights that can lead to performance improvements, that’s only the case if you can avoid the key mistakes and pitfalls of benchmarking. In my experience, many companies fall foul of these pitfalls and fail to get the most out of benchmarks.
In this article, we’ll look at the advantages of benchmarking, the potential pitfalls, and how to overcome these pitfalls to use benchmarking effectively in your organisation.
Different types of benchmarking
I’ve written before about the different types of benchmarking, so I won’t go into too much detail here. But, in a nutshell, benchmarking can be internal (comparing one part of the business against another) or external (comparing the organisation to another company, which could be a competitor or a business in a completely different industry). Those categories further break down into process benchmarking, strategic benchmarking and performance benchmarking.
Benchmarking can be used to look at specific business functions (for example, benchmarking HR effectiveness against others in the same industry), the entire organisation or even individual performance.
What are the advantages of benchmarking?
Done well, benchmarking can help you unearth opportunities for improving your processes, practises and performance. Ultimately, identifying areas for improvement is the single biggest advantage of benchmarking.
Depending on your business’s needs, this improvement may mean increasing customer satisfaction, boosting staff engagement, reducing costs, increasing revenue and profit, streamlining processes, or any other area that could do better.
As a side benefit, external benchmarking also helps you to learn more about your competitors and industry.
Overcoming the downsides of benchmarking
It’s clear that benchmarking can be a really useful tool in your performance management arsenal. However, to get the most out of benchmarking, you need to overcome some the main pitfalls or disadvantages of benchmarking.
For me, the biggest downsides of using benchmarks can be broken down as:
How to get it right
So how can you overcome these pitfalls and use benchmarks successfully in your organisation?
The first critical step is to see benchmarking as only a part of the performance measurement picture, not the complete picture. To really understand and improve performance you need a combination of benchmarks, forward-looking KPIs, targets, a strategy map, and projects/initiatives that deliver change.
For me, performance measurement and management all starts with strategy. This means you need to clearly map out your strategic goals and identify your critical business questions (the things you need to understand if you’re going to achieve those goals). Then you can design meaningful KPIs that help you to answer those questions and track performance against your strategic goals. And you can compare performance using internal and external benchmarks.
This link between organisational strategy and performance measurement is critical. Rather than tracking KPIs that are easy to measure or benchmarking against data that’s easily available, focus on the KPIs and benchmarks that link to your strategic goals. These are the measures that will have the most impact on business performance.
You can then use what the data tells you to better understand and predict performance, and use that information to plan projects, initiatives and changes that will improve future performance.
Where to go from here
If you would like to know more about KPIs and performance management, cheque out my articles on:
Or browse the KPI Library to find the metrics that matter most to you.
Written by
Bernard Marr is an internationally bestselling author, futurist, keynote speaker, and strategic advisor to companies and governments. He advises and coaches many of the world’s best-known organisations on strategy, digital transformation and business performance. LinkedIn has recently ranked Bernard as one of the top 5 business influencers in the world and the No 1 influencer in the UK. He has authored 16 best-selling books, is a frequent contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for Forbes. Every day Bernard actively engages his almost 2 million social media followers and shares content that reaches millions of readers.