This white paper is an excerpt from research profiling a class of companies that demonstrate successful practices in developing the benchmarking function. Information was gathered through extensive surveys and interviews among managers from 14 companies across nine business sectors that included financial services, travel services, pharmaceuticals, aviation, utilities, telecom, construction products, government and retail. Best Practices, LLC analysts employed qualitative and quantitative research methods to identify and probe the winning strategies and operational approaches in customer relationship management implementation among organizations within these sectors.