Peerview Data Insights

Will your company still be in business a few years from now? 

Start-ups aside, most business owners and executives will answer "yes" and then chalk it up to strong growth, good margins, talented leadership, dedicated employees, the fact that the company's been in business for decades, etc.

All of which may be true.

Unfortunately, all those assumptions are grounded in the belief that momentum and trajectory are fixed — not 100%, because any company can stumble, but enough such that the average company can expect to do as well tomorrow as it's doing today as long as it just keeps doing what it's doing.

Maybe once upon a time that was the case, but not now.

The new reality is this: there isn't an industry anywhere that's more than one Silicon Valley surprise away from being disrupted.

Think Uber.

Think Netflix.

Think Tesla.

Think Airbnb.

Think Zenefits. (Pre-scandal.)

And then think about an upstart within your industry that's just about to launch with some product, service or approach that you dismissed as unworkable, delayed as impractical or just didn't think of yet.

How do you compete against an unknown like that?

You don't, not until it happens — but you do prepare for it by focusing on two things:

1. Strength
2. Flexibility

Most disruptions don't render entire industries obsolete overnight; introducing something new and convincing customers to adopt it takes time. 

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:

1. Nobody is an industry of one.
2. 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."

What separates good marketers from bad marketers?

According to Salesforce’s 2016 State of Marketing report, "extensively using" these five data-driven tools and technologies are at the heart of their success:

• marketing analytics (aggregating and benchmarking internal and external performance data to help determine your marketing who, what, when, why and how)
• customer targeting and segmentation (using internal and external performance data to determine who gets what, when, why and how)
• marketing automation (using internal and external performance data to program what, when and how)
• agile marketing (test → measure → revise → repeat, with benchmarks differentiating "winners" from "losers")
• predictive intelligence (using internal and external performance data to estimate future actions or outcomes)

 How many do you use?

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Don't let your data go to waste.

See how our Strategic Analysis & Benchmarking tool can help you tap the information you already collect to become more competitive. 

→ Request a 15-minute, no-pressure demo:

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