What is Strategic Benchmarking?
Strategic benchmarking allows businesses that serve pharmaceutical companies to gain access to prospective clients by obtaining their input on industry-specific issues. By positioning you as the facilitator of the project, strategic benchmarking enable you to determine what types of information to gather and who should participate. Instead of relying on outside research or your team’s judgment, this approach cultivates the observations and background you need while increasing your company’s visibility and offering value to your audience.
The Benefits of Strategic Benchmarking
A significant output of strategic benchmarking is specific, actionable industry data but its primary benefit is access to companies who might not otherwise interact with your company. Strategic benchmarking also provides a non-intrusive way to remain visible to your key clients and other contacts while adding value.
You can also use strategic benchmarking to identify customer needs using interview guides strategically designed to get responses from prospective and current clients who have a vested interest in the topic of your study. At the conclusion of the benchmarking project, offering your target benchmarking audience the results provides an incentive for them to participate and gives you an additional point of contact.
Strategic benchmarking works because it invites your audience to become part of the development process and gives them a stake in project outcomes. They will care about the final results because they had a hand in producing them.
The Strategic Benchmarking Process
A successful strategic benchmarking project requires careful planning and professional execution. Following an established and tested process saves time and money while ensuring the best results. Here’s an overview of the process Pharma Acumen has developed to create and implement winning strategic benchmarking projects:
Determine Project Goals: The first step of a strategic benchmarking project is to decide goals, what information needs to be collected, and desired outcomes.
Design Project: Designing an effective benchmarking project entails determining initial questions and the ratio of qualitative to quantitative data desired.
Identify Participants: We develop criteria to select qualified individuals from your existing clients, prospective clients, and non-clients.
Set Up Interviews: Setting up interviews requires contacting selected individuals and providing an overview of the project and what they’ll gain by participating.
Conduct Interviews: During this step, we perform interviews and record answers. We also refine our question set as needed to elicit the most useful responses.
Analyze Data: The goal of analyzing participant responses is to develop insights on any trends, notable deviations, or market needs that emerge.
Present Insights: We curate insights derived from interviews to create a high-level report for participants. Providing access to these insights creates an additional touchpoint for your company with participants and opens the door to future benchmarking projects.
Evaluate Next Steps: We evaluate the contribution of participant responses to project goals and recommend how to best use the information and access generated.