Skip to content

    Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking

    Competitor analysis and benchmarking is identifying who a company genuinely competes with for the same buyer and budget, and measuring where it stands against them.

    Service within Market Research

    In Growth Strategy: Diagnose Growth

    How we help with Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking

    Benchmarking that changes what you do next.

    1. Establish who you actually compete with

      The alternatives a buyer genuinely considers, including doing nothing and building it internally, which are usually the two largest competitors.

    2. Compare on what the buyer decides on

      Price, time to value, integration and risk, rather than on a feature grid that reflects how each company describes itself.

    3. Benchmark the numbers you can get

      Pricing, headcount, funding, hiring and customer signals, assembled from public sources into a picture of how each competitor is actually run.

    4. Say where the gap is

      Analysis that ends in a comparison table has stopped short. The output is where this business can win and where it should not try.

    More services within Market Research

    Benchmarking that changes what you do next.

    What Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking delivers

    • Is our margin structurally lower than peers, or are we just worse at managing cost?

      The most valuable answer is often that the gap is structural and cannot be closed. That stops a management team chasing a target that was never available to them.

      • Peer benchmarking, with the drivers behind the gap

    • What multiple can we actually defend in this round?

      We benchmark the metrics that earn the multiple, not just the multiple. Pairing growth and margin against the comparable set tends to persuade investors more than a range on its own.

      • Pre-transaction benchmarking

    • Which of our business units is genuinely earning its capital?

      Internal benchmarking across business units on returns, working capital and productivity. Usually the fastest route to a capital allocation decision.

      • Internal benchmarking

    • We are growing well. Why is cash not improving?

      Growth composition, incremental working capital and cash conversion. Growth that consumes more capital than it returns looks like success for several years before it does not.

      • Growth quality and cash conversion

    • Our board wants to know if our costs are reasonable.

      Functional benchmarking of finance, HR, technology and procurement against comparable companies at comparable scale, broken down to specific cost lines rather than an aggregate.

      • Functional benchmarking

    • Is our finance function where it should be for our size?

      Maturity benchmarking against a defined capability model. It needs no external financial data, and usually surfaces more actionable gaps than any ratio comparison.

      • Maturity assessment

    How a benchmark is built to hold up

    Benchmarking is easy to do badly, and the failures are invisible in the output. Four things make the difference.

    1. 01

      Frame the business by its economic engine, not its industry

      A distribution business assessed on EBITDA margin looks weak against any comparison, because it earns through turnover and ROCE is the measure that reads it. We work with seven archetypes, each with its own binding constraint.

    2. 02

      Build the peer set by hand

      Industry classification alone is unusable in India: NIC codes are self-declared, rarely updated and routinely wrong. We screen on model, scale, sector, ownership and stage, then verify every survivor against its filing.

    3. 03

      Publish every definition and adjustment

      Ind AS 116 alone can move EBITDA by several hundred basis points with no economic meaning. EBITDA is rebuilt from the schedules, other income comes out, and every metric carries its formula.

    4. 04

      State what the data will not support

      Percentiles need twenty or more comparable entities; below that we report ranges and say so. Where a credible peer set cannot be built, we will tell you at scoping.

    FAQ

    Questions founders ask about Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking

    Who are our real competitors?

    Usually not the companies in the same category. The alternatives a buyer considers most often are doing nothing, a manual workaround, or an internal build, and all three beat most vendors most of the time.

    How do you benchmark private competitors?

    Filings, pricing pages, job postings, customer reviews, funding records and channel checks. It is incomplete by nature, and stating the confidence level is part of the work.

    How often should this be refreshed?

    Annually for the structural picture, and immediately when a competitor raises, changes price or enters your segment. A benchmark that is two years old is a description of a market that has moved.

    Is it worth doing if we are the category leader?

    Particularly then. The leader is the company with the most to lose from a shift it did not see, and leaders are structurally the last to notice.

    What our research says about Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking

    What does our competitive positioning look like when written by a competitor, not by us?

    CA Mallavarjalla Mounika, in Commercial DD: Testing the Business Model Under Scrutiny

    The useful output of benchmarking is not a position. It is a short list of gaps worth closing, an explanation of what drives each, and a statement of what the company should do differently.

    Sriram Chidambaram, in How to Benchmark a Business, and Why Most Benchmarking Fails

    The people behind Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking

    Competitor Analysis and Benchmarking is run by the studio team: one multidisciplinary team whose pods work in tandem, matched to the sector and the stage the company is in.

    Karthik Beknal

    Strategy Consulting / Labs pod

    Led by Karthik Beknal

    Lead - Strategy Consulting & FP&A. Defines direction and drives it through focused sprints.

    See the pod structure
    Studio TeamThe operators, investors and builders who run engagements end to end.Meet them

    What usually runs alongside this