Handy little measuring benchmarking tool for marketers ...

Check out this measurement benchmarking tool from Forrester Research. Although I am more a fan of taking baseline readings and tracking progress over time, this is a handy little tool for companies to understand what elements of their strategy they can benchmark as opposed to tracking baseline.

This is how Forrester describes their tool:

Benchmarking Tool

Forrester’s free benchmarking tool that can help you compare your company’s interactive marketing budget and organization against your peers’. Simply answer a few questions and our tool will compare your answers with similarly sized companies against five metrics:

1. The size of your interactive marketing budget
2. The share of your advertising budget dedicated to interactive marketing
3. The percent of your interactive budget earmarked for emerging media
4. The size of your interactive team
5. The number of agencies you work with for interactive support compared with other companies of your size

When I was interim Marketing Director for Forrester's Marketing and strategy Business Unit over a year ago, one of the changes I proposed was this tool for 3 reasons:

1. A tool like this gets round the issue of people being scared of data/research
2. A great way to generate traffic [as it is free] and ultimately quality leads especially from laggards
3. A way for companies to see if they are lagging or leading compared with market

This was my rough proposal at the time. I am glad to see the final thing looks much better than my rough version, but hey I am no designer.

From the perspective of Forrester, the question is, does this little tool also generate quality leads for the sales force to follow up on, or for marketing to nurture into the sales pipeline?