Benchmarking an executive team isn't finding five people on LinkedIn with the same job title and comparing salaries.

Titles are probably the least reliable part of the exercise.

A Chief Commercial Officer in one organisation can be a sales leader. In another they own product, marketing, customer and strategy. A People Director can be the most senior HR leader in a £2bn business or a divisional role three layers below the executive committee.

If the comparison is wrong, the data isn't much use.

Start with scope

For each role, understand revenue or organisational scale, geography, reporting line, team size, functional breadth, decision rights and the outcomes the person is accountable for.

Then identify organisations where the context is genuinely comparable.

That peer group may include direct competitors, but often it should be broader. A regulated organisation may learn more from another governance-heavy sector than from a commercial competitor with a completely different operating model.

Benchmark the role and the person separately

Role benchmarking asks: how does this job compare with equivalent jobs outside?

Talent benchmarking asks: how does the individual or internal successor compare with credible people who could do it externally?

Those are different questions.

For talent, look at track record, scale, complexity, leadership exposure, functional depth and the particular experiences the future role requires. The objective isn't to create a league table of executives. It's to understand whether there is a meaningful capability gap.

Include reward, but don't let reward become the whole exercise

Salary and package data are useful when grounded in the right comparator set. Base salary alone can also be misleading at executive level because bonus, LTIP, pension, allowances and ownership structures vary significantly.

More importantly, a market median doesn't tell you what you need to pay a particular person to move.

Live market conversations add context to published data: what candidates are earning, what they expect, what they would move for and which parts of a package actually matter.

Map the external market

A useful benchmark should identify real potential talent, not an abstract profile.

Who are the credible people? Where are they? How transferable is their experience? Are they likely to move? What would attract them? Are there obvious diversity or location constraints? Is the role you've designed actually attractive?

You don't necessarily need to approach everyone. The point is to understand the market well enough to make a decision.

Turn it into a recommendation

A Board doesn't need 70 pages of benchmarking data. It needs to know what the evidence means.

Is the role scoped correctly? Is the package sensible? Is the internal option competitive? Is there materially stronger talent outside? Would a search be worth running?

That's the value of executive talent benchmarking: not more data, but a better decision.