Who the Heck Needs Benchmarking?

Why the heck should you care about benchmarking your business against somebody else's business especially since every company is so different in so many ways?I always thought it was nuts and a waste of good energy.

Being a business adviser, I think I am starting to get it.

When dining at a fancy restaurant, my wife likes to look at all the other husbands and compare how they look, their dress, styles, fi to me. If she sees a shlumpy dressed guy, she now says "how handsome I look tonight". Me, I don't really care, but a driving need to compare seems important to make her, and all those those corporate types feel good ...or even feel lousy. Benchmarking has ZERO business impact, other than seeing how you compared to others.  In fact you cannot compare yourself to others unless you are a twin, or both of you have the same fingerprint.  From a business perspective, it must have some value in generating cash and customers otherwise it wouldn't be such a big business.
 
As a well know secret, benchmarking must be an internal self evaluation, over time, improving YOUR own critical business weakness.

As they say, "go with the flow", so we at SurveyTelligence and Infotool now have a benchmarking database, by industry, built from over 250 surveys and over 300,000 survey takers we have done over the last several years. We give it to clients, for FREE. As the hustlers would say, "for customer delight, give the customer what they want...even if it's not necessarily what they need!"