When Best Practices May Not Be Best

Many companies are obsessed with learing about best practices for their industry and creating a roadmap that mirrors those practices within their own strategies. We look to analysts, the tier 1 companies within our industries, vendors who solve problems we struggle with and whoever is getting the most media coverage on a subject we want to own. Based upon what they're doing, we think - Gotta get me some of that!

Best practices essentially have two parts:

• First is the theory, methodology and high level thinking that used to create and support the practice.
• Second is the execution of the first.

Best practices are appealing because they're usually based on something known to produce a desirable outcome. The downside is that those outcomes happen for the entity that developed and executed on that best practice.

Unless your company is exactly like that company, then adopting that practice as-is may not produce those results for you. But even more concerning is that your differentiation can be diminished if you're seen as a wannabe or imitator of the developer of the best practice.

When this happens is when we lose track of what we're trying to achieve and allow best practices to turn into hero worship. Imitation is not the best use for best practices.

Consider tossing out the 2nd part and focusing on the first. If you take a best practice and analyze the ideas and methodology behind them, what do you see?

Once you've done that, think carefully about how what you've discovered applies to you and your company.

Ask yourself a few questions:

Can you add in some of your own secret sauce to put a spin on a best practice that more closely aligns with what differentiates your company?

In what ways do your target markets differ from the source of the best practice? Based on those differences, how can you shift the best practice to align with what your company provides?

What's your company's distinctive value? Will adopting this best practice amplify or detract from that?

If you put the best practice into use, what will need to change? Culture, process, messaging, positioning, etc. Or what might change that you wouldn't want to change?

What do you expect to get from the best practice? Is that achievable? At what cost?

Another Way

Appreciate best practices for what they are and learn from them.

Figure out how your company's expertise can become a best practice and put that out there for others to learn from and model. That's part of being a thought leader within your industry.

We all have best practices, we just fail to recognize that when we're too close to them. Then we get sucked into thinking that the grass will be greener if we can just get what someone else has by doing what they do.

Best practices are great. I've even got a few of them up my sleeve. But, like everything else, they must continuously evolve to establish longevity as a best practice. How I do things today is not like how I did them a year ago.Today is better based on all I've learned in the last year and how I've incorporated those insights.

How are you building best practices for marketing your company?

What would you do differently?

Just a little something I've been thinking about lately.

Comments

[trish bertuzzi]

Ardath, love your thought process on this! I agree that a best practice is only relevant if you are comparing apples to apples. You have to have (or rent) the expertise to know whether that is the case or not.

Once that is done, #2 comes into play and that is where we see so many companies fall down. They have the process in place that should make success repeatable and scalable. What they fail to do is execute flawlessly. They don't hold their people accountable or they knee jerk react to the slightest indicator of change.

More than ever before sales and marketing are science - not art. Create the formula that works for your organization then execute!

Thanks for listening!

[Ardath Albee]

Hi Trish,

Great feedback! I'm really interested in what you'd say are the criteria for a best practice to be repeatable and scalable. I'd say that it has to do with your last point about creating a formula that works for your organization - key point. Not someone else's formula.

And that knee-jerk reaction to change during execution is a definite issue is see a lot.

Thanks for sharing!

[David Dodd]

Ardath,

Great post!

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it rarely makes for the best strategy. Best-practice benchmarking - identifying and implementing the most successful practices of a high-performing company - can help the benchmarking company improve, at least up to a point. But when you adopt the best practices of a competitor - the most common form of benchmarking - you simply make yourself look like your competitor. As more and more companies pursue the same best practices, they look more and more alike. Competition differentiation goes down, and price competition heats up.

Unfortunately, these same principles also apply to marketing. As more and more companies adopt the same "best" marketing practices - content marketing, lead nurturing, etc. - those practices will become less effective as differentiators. The good news is that, for some time at least, the companies that are best at performing the best practices can still set themselves apart from the competition.

[Stephanie Tilton]

Terrific post, Ardath. Interestingly, McKinsey published an article in January on how companies can test their strategy. The first test is "Will your strategy beat the market?"

McKinsey says "The best companies are emulated by those in the middle of the pack, and the worst exit or undergo significant reform. As each player responds to and learns from the actions of others, best practice becomes commonplace rather than a market-beating strategy. Good strategies emphasize difference—versus your direct competitors, versus potential substitutes, and versus potential entrants."

The full article is here: http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy/Strategic_Thinking/Have_you_tested_your_strategy_lately_2711

Best,
Stephanie

[Ardath Albee]

Hi Stephanie,

You always add some great info to the conversation! Thanks very much for the link - I hadn't seen the article. Wherever do you find the time to read as much as you do - and even better - how do you do such a good job of keeping track of it?

[Ardath Albee]

Hi David,

Thanks very much for your thoughtful comment. Being great at execution is a must have as both you and Trish state. I think it will be interesting to see how well even the best companies will continue to evolve both ideas and execution in step with markets.