If you've ever wondered why there's such a clear connection between leveraging your competitive strengths, strengthening your competitive weaknesses, exploiting your competitive advantages and increasing your growth and profitability, there are two simple reasons:
- Nobody is an industry of one.
- Everybody competes for customers and clients.
Given this, you'd think every company would treat competitive benchmarking as more of a priority, but most don't.
Why not?
To put it bluntly, it seems to come down to one of two mindsets:
- Ignorance
- Arrogance
Ignorance is "No, because it wouldn't help us get better."
arrogance is "No, because we're already great."
Both are myopic, rooted in a misguided belief that a company's momentum and trajectory are somehow fixed.
Nobody stays on top forever.
Nobody coasts for long.
Continued success comes from continuous improvement.
As Drucker said, “Being at least as good as the leader is a prerequisite to being competitive. What a business needs most for its decisions — especially its strategic ones — are data about what goes on outside it. Only outside a business are there results, opportunities and threats.”
The challenge for most companies is finding competitive data.
Even those with dedicated CFOs, COOs, CPOs and CMOs often find the process of aggregating and analyzing industry, trend and competitive data to be not only time-consuming and difficult, but expensive.
(We believe our strategic analysis & benchmarking tool is a safe, secure, cost-effective solution to this problem, but there are lots of alternatives.)
Once you get past this problem and put your company's performance into its competitive context, however, you pretty quickly identify strengths you can leverage, weaknesses you can fix and opportunities you can take advantage of.
The downside?
Doing that can be hard, while ignorance and arrogance are easy.
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See how our Strategic Analysis & Benchmarking tool can help you tap the data you already collect to become more competitive.
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