Most ‘best practices’ are just the graveyard of original thought. I said what I said. We spend so much time looking at what the ‘top performers’ are doing that we forget those companies usually established those practices five years ago, and they’re probably bored with them by now anyway.
If you’re doing exactly what everyone else in your sector is doing, you aren’t competing. You’re just participating. It’s like trying to win a marathon by matching the pace of the guy in 50th place. You’ll finish, sure. But nobody is going to remember you were there.
The $14,000 mistake in a Chicago boardroom
Back in 2019, I was working for a mid-sized logistics firm. We were struggling with customer churn, so the leadership brought in a consultant—let’s call him Dave—who specialized in ‘industry benchmarking.’ We paid this guy fourteen thousand dollars for a three-week audit. I remember sitting in this freezing glass boardroom on Wacker Drive, drinking stale coffee, waiting for the secret sauce. Dave opened his laptop and showed us a deck of 40 slides that basically said we should change our email cadence to match what FedEx and DHL were doing.
We followed his advice to the letter. We automated the ‘touchpoints,’ used the ‘proven’ subject lines, and simplified our dashboard because ‘the industry is moving toward minimalism.’
It was a total disaster. Our customers didn’t want minimalism; they wanted the complex, ugly data tables that helped them do their jobs. By trying to look like the big guys, we stripped away the exact reason our niche clients liked us in the first place. We lost three major accounts in four months. I felt like an idiot for not speaking up, but hey, Dave had the benchmarks. It sucked.
Benchmarking is just professionalized plagiarism with a better haircut
The problem with benchmarking is that it assumes your competitors actually know what they’re doing. They usually don’t. Most big companies are just a collection of people who are also terrified of making a mistake, so they copy someone else, who is copying someone else. It’s an echo chamber of mediocrity. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. When you benchmark, you aren’t aiming for ‘the best.’ You’re aiming for ‘the middle of the pack that won’t get me fired.’
I used to think that there was some secret vault of knowledge that successful companies had. I was completely wrong. After ten years in ‘general’ operations, I’ve realized most of it is just momentum and luck. If you copy their ‘best practices,’ you’re inheriting their legacy debt and their outdated thinking without any of the scale that allows them to survive those mistakes.
Most ‘best practices’ were developed for a specific company, at a specific time, with a specific budget you don’t have.
Anyway, I remember this one boss I had who was obsessed with spreadsheets. He wouldn’t let us buy a new piece of software unless we could prove that at least three other companies in our ‘quadrant’ were already using it. He thought he was being diligent. In reality, he was just making sure we were always two years behind the curve. But I digress.
The 11.4% lift from doing the ‘wrong’ thing
I know people will disagree with this, but I think you should actively ignore your competitors’ websites. Don’t even look at them. I ran an A/B test last year on a checkout flow where the ‘best practice’ was a clean, one-page guest checkout. Every blog post on the internet says this is the gold standard. I decided to ignore it and built a clunky, multi-step process that forced people to answer three specific questions about their setup before they could pay.
Our conversion rate went up by 11.4% over a 90-day period.
Why? Because the friction made the customers feel like we actually cared about their specific technical requirements. The ‘best practice’ would have told me I was losing people at every step. The reality was that the people I was ‘losing’ were the ones who were going to return the product anyway. Precision beats volume every single time.
I might be wrong about this for high-volume B2C, but for anything with a price tag over $500, ‘frictionless’ is a lie sold by people who want to sell you SaaS tools.
A quick note on why I hate HubSpot’s blog
I’m going to be unfair for a second. I genuinely hate the HubSpot blog. Not because the writing is bad—it’s actually quite polished—but because it has created a generation of marketers who think there is a ‘right way’ to do everything. They’ve turned business into a paint-by-numbers kit. If I see one more ‘Ultimate Guide to [Topic]’ that says exactly the same thing as the other ten guides on page one of Google, I’m going to throw my laptop out the window. It’s sanitized. It’s safe. It’s boring. I tell my friends to avoid following their templates because if you follow a template, you’re telling the world you have nothing original to say.
Total waste of time.
How to actually get ahead
If you want to actually grow, you have to be willing to look stupid for a while. You have to be okay with your ‘metrics’ looking weird compared to the industry average. If your ‘Time on Page’ is double the industry average, maybe it’s not because your UI is confusing—maybe it’s because your content is actually worth reading.
- Stop buying ‘State of the Industry’ reports. They are historical documents, not maps for the future.
- Talk to five customers who actually hate your product and ask them why. Don’t survey them. Call them.
- Find one ‘best practice’ in your department and intentionally do the opposite for a month just to see what happens.
I don’t have a neat summary for you. I’m still trying to figure out which of my own ‘rules’ are just habits I picked up from people who were more confident than they were competent. It’s a weird feeling, realizing you’ve been playing by a rulebook that was written by someone who doesn’t even work in your industry anymore.
Is it possible that we’re all just copying each other into extinction? I don’t know. But I’m tired of being beige.
Just try something weird tomorrow. See what happens.
