From our perspective (sales benchmarking), best practices benchmarking is a means of adopting the processes that have been proven out by world class organizations that may (or likely may not) come from your industry that are relevant to your business function.

There is still a heavy implementation component after adopting a best practice, so we do not see anyway cutting to the chase as it were (and therefore not accepting responsibility for the fruit of someone else’s effort).

Anyway, if you are interested in our take on benchmarking, we have a booking coming out published by Penguin next month called Making the Number. See http://www.makingthenumber.com.

I am happy to send you a free galley copy if you’d like.

Cheers,
Mike Drapeau