Why You Should Create Your Own Industry Benchmarks

One way to emerge from the shadows to the forefront of your industry is to help establish the standards for it.

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One of the most powerful things a consultant can do in any niche is set the standards for it.

One powerful advantage of being an independent consultant is that you have the time and flexibility to really study what’s happening and start pulling together a detailed set of best practices.

If you’re smart, you can turn these best practices into benchmarks and turn these benchmarks into an industry index which will put you at the forefront of your niche.

Why Benchmarks and Indexes Are So Alluring?

Having benchmarks to compare different organisations against one another is incredibly powerful.

Almost every organisation wants to know how they compare to one another. Benchmarks enable organisations to track progress and improvement over time. If they are independently evaluated and can show improvement, that’s very useful for them internally.

For another, doing better than the competition is a powerful motivator. It’s often easier for people internally to get more resources if they can show they’re doing better than a competitor.

In 2020 I published a rather primitive (and highly subjective) list of the top communities in different sectors.

I was immediately flooded with questions asking why one organisation was higher than another - or why an organisation had or hadn’t made the list when another had/hadn’t. Many organisations were keen to hire FeverBee to improve their ranking. This was the moment when we realised we had to become far more rigid in our process.

The Benefit Of Setting The Standard

There are some obvious benefits of being the organisation that sets the standard.

1. Credibility and influence. If it spreads it immediately affords you a degree of credibility and puts you in a position of influence. Even if it doesn’t, it provides you with an objective means to evaluate clients and explain to them how they compare.

2. Viral traffic. Benchmarks and indexes showing rankings have a tendency to be shared within an industry. There is a strong chance that a clear ranking will spread within your sector. Organisations featured highly tend to share it with others - which helps propagate the standard.

3. Increased work. Organisations may contact you directly to try and improve their ranking. This can lead to a steady stream of work. But be mindful of the potential conflict of interest issues. The organisation must genuinely improve their results. Even being evaluated and included in the index can be a source of work. Many organisations who hire us today simply want an independent evaluation of how they’re doing.

4. Content and examples. It provides you with an easy means to create content and have examples. You can simply look up the top-performing organisations in your industry and use them as examples. If you are the source of the best examples in the industry, people are more likely to flock towards you to see what they should do.

It’s not a surprise that most of the top management consultancies also publish their own indexes. It’s one of the most consistently successful strategies out there.

What Do Benchmarks Look Like?

You can find plenty of examples of benchmarks. The typical format is a table with a list of organisations/industries on one axis and and a list of observations on another.

Here is one of our examples below

Generally, you want a colour-coded list that allows you to quickly compare organisations of a similar type against one another.

If you are able to access data, you can also pull together benchmarks that show how different organisations directly compare to one another. The below was largely the result of us scraping data from different organisations.

(I wrote more about these here).

There is no shortage of standards and benchmarks you can look at online for inspiration. In benchmarks, you’re not necessarily looking for a ranking, but rather a comparison by different variables.

What Does An Index Look Like?

An index is different in the sense it does show an overall ranking represented by a numerical value. This value is factored by reviewing a range of different variables.

Indices are typically used to track changes in market conditions, economic trends, or other relevant factors. You could, for example, show the level of maturity in your niche across different industries or geographical locations.

An example of an index is shown below.

Whatever you create, I can’t stress enough the importance of having a final summary visualisation that people can review at a glance to understand how they’re doing. The visualisation will decide whether your standards fly or die.

Colour-coding is typically the best way, but it’s not the only way of displaying benchmarks and indexes. It’s worth exploring different options to decide which is best for you.

If you want to invest more time and energy into it, you can also make it interactive. You can create a simple dashboard where organisations can select the measures they want to compare themselves on and see how they compare etc…

How To Create Your Benchmarks

It’s perfectly possible to sit in a dark room by yourself and write down a list of standards based on your knowledge. The problem with that is you’re just one person with a narrow range of experience. Speaking to others helps form that experience, but you might be far better off if you bring others together.

This is why creating standards should be a collaborative process. If you can invite a small number of peers in your industry (especially those representing large organisations in your industry) to collaborate to create the standard, they are more likely to spread and be widely adopted. This helps give it legitimacy. You can also award them a title of prominence in the creation of the standards.

Two Key Considerations Of Benchmarks

Pay careful attention to two things.

How you will get the data?

Many organisations have asked us to benchmark their team size and budget against their competitors. But that information isn’t publicly available. You can hazard a guess, but the accuracy of that guess is open to interpretation. You can request information from organisations to make your comparisons, but the odds of getting it (initially are slim).

Your best bet is to use publicly available information to set your standards for now. There is plenty of publicly available data in financial reports, engagement metrics, search traffic data etc…Don’t rely on gaining access to private data for your benchmarks.

How will you ensure consistency and transparency?

Let’s imagine you evaluate design as part of your benchmarks. Your evaluation can differ remarkably from someone else’s. This is going to lead to inconsistencies and, potentially, accusations of bias. This means you can do one of two things.

First, you could pull together a panel of experts to give their ratings and then average the result. That works, but it’s incredibly time-consuming.

A far better option is to create a series of yes/no questions and create your benchmarks out of this. This doesn’t remove subjectivity entirely, but it drastically reduces it. It means anyone can follow the process and come to relatively similar results.

For example, instead of using ‘is the website easy to navigate?’ you can ask ‘are all pages accessible within 2 clicks?’, ‘is the navigation menu consistent on every page?’, ‘is there a breadcrumb trail back to the homepage?’

Designing a series of yes/no questions also means you can create the standard and then bring in others to help do much of the research. You can set this up as a form that people can complete and progress through if you like.

Invest Heavily In Maintaining It

Once you have gone through the process of creating your standards, invest heavily in maintaining them. You can build your entire practice around it if you like. You should do an update of every organisation/sector at least once per year.

This naturally helps you create great content. You can constantly create comparisons between different sectors or organisations. You can even invite others to submit their organisation to be included in your index (this can essentially become a lead-generation machine for you too).

You should aim to invest significantly in making this one of the major planks of your promotional activities.