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Episode 105

November 6, 2025

Ep. 105 – From Blind Spots to Breakthroughs: The Power of Benchmarking w/ Charles Gustine & Connor Budden

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Professional services leaders are constantly balancing growth, delivery, and profitability, but what if the biggest opportunities are hiding in plain sight?

In this episode, Charles Gustine, Director of Customer and Market Insights at Kantata, and Connor Budden, Global Director at Service Performance Insight (SPI), explore how benchmarking helps firms uncover hidden inefficiencies, strengthen leadership, and transform performance across every area of the business.

Recorded live at Kantata Converge, this conversation draws on decades of SPI’s benchmarking insights and unveils SPI Insight, a breakthrough integration that brings real-time benchmarking directly into the Kantata platform.


In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Why benchmarking matters — and how top-performing services firms use data to turn blind spots into breakthroughs.
  • The five pillars of performance maturity — leadership, client relationships, talent, service execution, and operations.
  • Real-world stories of firms uncovering costly inefficiencies and driving measurable improvements.
  • How AI is reshaping benchmarking — delivering faster, smarter, and more contextual decision-making.
  • A first look at SPI Insight — the new embedded benchmarking capability within Kantata that turns data into real-time guidance.


Host

Banoo Behboodi

Vice President, Success Engineering

Banoo Behboodi is a 20+ year software and services leader with extensive experience executing change initiatives with oversight of Customer Success, Professional Services and Delivery and Consulting functions. Banoo’s earlier experiences with AT&T Mobility, Coca-Cola Company and Ernst & Young leading key transformational and compliance projects, provided the foundation needed to be an effective leader and a change agent with a customer first mindset. Banoo is passionate about driving continuous improvement through sharing best practices and empowering resources through technology and analytics to optimize performance and job satisfaction while driving business outcomes.

Host

Brent Trimble

Vice President, Value Engineering

Brent brings more than 15+ year’s of leadership experience in Management Consulting, Strategic Delivery, Marketing services and product development firms to his technology role at Kantata. As the VP of Value Engineering and the Managing Director of Marketing Service & Agency Vertical, he specializes in identifying process improvement potential, business optimization and key health metrics for alignment and orientation.

With deep business understanding through an operator lens - Brent works with Kantata partner firms to refine intrinsic and extrinsic value drivers - giving firm principals the focus required for adoption, mobilization, value realization and ultimately - success.

Prior to joining Kantata, Brent was a client of the platform and held positions at Interpublic Group, Accenture, WPP, and independent marketing consulting firms.