You begin by defining the goal and scope of your benchmarking initiative and then identify competitors, which may be direct competitors, or similar sized firms in your industry, or market leaders. After defining an area of focus, you then decide on metrics or KPIs to measure and compare and gather the relevant data for measuring and tracking the KPIs you've chosen. Finally, you analyze the data or use a tool that will process the data for you, in order to obtain actionable insights that can be applied to processes in your own organization.