Public benchmarking statistics and metrics

What do you use as sources to gather macro/public data about your industry so that you can compare what you are doing with the bigger picture? I'm looking at this from the perspective of the CFO/CEO of private, SMB businesses (say $10mm to $100mm), not large public companies who may have dedicated resources that can easily do this. Metrics that come to mind include: -Industry size/growth -Target markets growth -Purchasing Trends (e.g. Univ of Michigan I think publishes a monthly Purchasing Managers' Confidence index) -Inflation -etc. In the end we want to collect this data regularly and compare company performance against these metrics. Thanks