Growth, improvement, profit, and sustainability. These are the goals of every business. But it can be hard to know exactly how to reach them without a good understanding of where you’ve been, and where you are presently.
Professional services firms seeking growth and improvement need a roadmap that signals the route they should take to win work against other firms in the same landscape. Benchmarking your firm over time, against the market, can provide this understanding.
This article explains why benchmarking over time can provide the most useful roadmap to success.
Why benchmark your firm?
Competitor benchmarking evaluates your firm compared to similar firms on a range of key performance indicators. This can help you glean insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, relative to your own firm.
By analysing competitor benchmarks, firms can home in on areas where they excel and those that may have room for improvement. This draws a roadmap for firms to achieve success via the most efficient route. It can direct firm leaders where to invest strategically, as well as measure the impact of previous strategic efforts.
Our benchmarking reports, Beaton Benchmarks, are unique because we measure your firm’s performance based on client feedback obtained through the Client Choice Awards process. A Beaton Benchmarks report shines light on how clients view your firm; which we believe to be the most valuable perspective. Clients, after all, will vote with their wallets on your service and performance.
If there’s a key metric that your firm is working on, it can be really valuable to track that progress over time.
Why track benchmarking data over time?
Roadmaps showing where you came from, at which points the road turned, became bumpy or smoothed out in relation to strategic or environmental factors, are most valuable. To map this out you need to look at results from previous years.
Beaton partner Paul Hugh-Jones explains that analysing performance over time is particularly useful for firms seeking to improve in target areas.
“Tracking is important to be able to monitor the impact of your efforts and investments on your priority metrics over time,” said Hugh-Jones.
“For instance, if your priority is to increase the firm’s reputation for being cost conscious and you’re investing resources to achieve this, tracking will show you if and how you are improving over time, relative to your competitors.
“If there’s a key metric that your firm is working on, it can be really valuable to track that progress over time.”
Benchmarking your firm’s results over time ensures you are monitoring the impact of your investment in key strategic areas.
How does it work?
Beaton Benchmarks’ client feedback data dates back 20 years. During that time, we have measured hundreds of professional services firms across Australia and New Zealand, covering most of the major top and mid-tier firms across the professions. Our comprehensive dataset compares feedback from tens of thousands of clients and is collected and refreshed annually. Several hundred thousand client ratings make up our dataset.
Any firm that has entered the Client Choice Awards will have historic data to compare their current results with and can purchase a Beaton Benchmarks report that includes time comparisons. New customers of Benchmarks can also access comparison data, provided they entered the awards in a previous year.
“If someone is buying a report for the first time, looking at their key metrics over time is really helpful,” says Hugh-Jones.
“We can show them the tracking report and where they may need to make changes, or where they are excelling.”
Firms who are new to both Benchmarks and the Client Choice Awards can opt for bespoke research that will showcase the firm’s position at present. However, we still advise those firms continue to carry out benchmarking annually, so they can monitor progress and see the impact of any strategic changes. The easiest way to do this is by entering the Client Choice Awards.
How to get the most out of benchmarking reports
Before obtaining a benchmarking report, you should consider what you want to achieve or understand from it. What questions do you have, and what areas do you want to know more about? Plot out your key metrics or priorities so that a detailed year-on-year chart can be built.
Some examples of the priority areas that firms may choose to track over time include:
- Innovation – how innovative clients perceive the firm in question to be
- Consideration – the extent to which the market would consider using you or your competitors
- Price/value – whether clients perceive the firm to be charging a far price for services
- Client experience (CX) – how positively or negatively clients rate their buyer experience using a firm
- Trust – whether clients feel they trust a firm and how this has changed over time
- Prospecting – how regularly a firm makes contact with clients and prospects to enquire about their needs and work opportunities
Paul Hugh-Jones adds that you may wish to understand trends in the broader market. For example, after monitoring prospecting over recent years, at Beaton we have noticed a significant drop in the amount of prospecting clients perceive their firms are conducting. This is useful information for firms who might want to embark on a prospecting drive.
“We have noticed that prospecting has reduced across all professions in recent years. All sizes and all types of firm are prospecting less than they previously did,” says Hugh-Jones
“As an observer of this market, it is useful to look at this kind of tracking to understand, is it a one-year thing? Or is there a trend we should seek to understand?”
Professional service firms are complex organisations and it can take several years to drive change. Tracking client feedback data over time ensures you are making the right investments to ensure clients notice those changes, as part of a more positive client experience.
Actionable client feedback and tailored benchmarking
Registration for Beaton Benchmarks is now open for a limited time. Participate for free in the largest, most comprehensive client sentiment industry benchmarking study in professional services.
