Creating benchmarks/comparables for customers

Robin Guldener

Hey community,

my company (B2B SaaS, software to manage company car fleets) is thinking about setting up a benchmark for our customers based on product data that we have. Our customers all run car fleets but nobody has the overview across fleets as we have because we have data on how 1000+ of them are run by our customers every day. We regularly get asked for best practices & insights, so we thought a "fleet benchmark" could be helpful for customers.
Some examples of metrics we are thinking about:

• Numbers of cars managed per employee in the car management team (can easily be measured by us by number of users on the platform)
• Average cost per car per year
• Average number of accidents/repairs needed per car per year

The idea would be to calculate the average and 90th percentile for these across all customers and then chart for each customer where they stand compared to their peers.
We are hoping to use this in quarterly business review calls (provide more value, start a discussion about where they are good & bad) with larger customers and thinking about maybe adding a "benchmark" page in the product (as an upsell).

As this is a first for us I am looking for experiences from people who have done this before:

• Have you built a benchmark for your customers before? How did you come up with the metrics and what worked best?
• How have you used these benchmarks?
• What tools did you use to build them?
• Mistakes/things we should avoid?

Thanks a lot and looking forward to your experiences!

Stewart Stokes

Hey, Robin!  It sounds like you are on the right track.  We used benchmarks in QBRs at a prior company.  I wasn't part of building it out but I did use them regularly in my QBRs.  My thoughts below.

• I'd look for a combination of things that: 1) Matter to your customer.  2) Will drive additional usage and stickiness with your product.  An ideal benchmark is something that they care about and that forces them to use your product if they want to improve it.
• We used these benchmarks as a point of comparison in QBRs.  Executives are usually competitive and like to see how they stack up against other orgs.  For high performers, it was a chance to celebrate them and make them see the value they receive from our solution.  For lower performers it was a chance to encourage them to increase usage and talk about where (and more importantly why) they are falling short.
• I wasn't involved in this but I believe we had someone who was good with data pull customer data out of our system, create the benchmarks, and then build a tool that allowed us to easily see how each customer compared against these benchmarks.  Someone then built a single powerpoint slide where we could plug-in and visualize the data to allow for easy conversations during QBRs.
• Nothing specific I can think of here.

Good luck!

Ed Powers

Hats off to you for going down this path, @Robin Guldener. Context is everything, as @Stewart Stokes points out--some benchmarks are useful to customers while others are not. A good practice is to understand the outcomes your customers are pursuing and map how your metrics lead to them.