Some teams see the end of the fiscal as a time to take a break, get across the finish line, report on what happened, and then roll into Q1. The problem with this is that they will start next year with the same blind spots they currently have.
Others use this window to listen more deeply, sharpen their focus, and make a few targeted moves that change the trajectory of the next 12 months. (And by the way, this work doesn’t start in Q4, in starts right now, in Q3, when there is still time to learn and make decisions for the future.)
If you want to be in the second group, here are five practical activities to prioritize now, plus how SIVO can support you with both market research solutions and fractional insights professionals along the way.
Before you finalize next year’s plans, you need clear, current truth from the people closest to your business:
Structured “truth mining” conversations cut through assumptions. They reveal:
When you bring these insights into Q4 decisions and planning, you stop guessing. You can prioritize initiatives, messaging, and investments that are anchored in reality, not internal opinion.
SIVO Research team can step in as a neutral, expert listener to:
If you need internal team capacity as well as expertise, our fractional insights professionals can also embed within your team to design and manage this work.
Once you’ve listened to people, you need to look at the numbers.
A focused year-end review should answer two questions:
The output from this analysis should be a short, honest view of:
Going into Q4 and the new fiscal year with this clarity prevents you from repeating expensive experiments and keeps your team focused on what actually creates value.
SIVO can support this review by providing fractional Data Analytics Expert leadership, we can partner with your analytics and finance teams to connect research and performance data. Our data Analysts can build a concise “year-in-review” insights deck that integrates insights and clear implications around category and channel performance, competitive actions, customer trends and promotional performance.
With fresh insight and performance context, the next step is to see your business the way your customer actually experiences it.
Mapping the customer journey means collecting qualitative and quantitative data and then documenting the key stages from first awareness through purchase, onboarding, usage, and loyalty/advocacy. This will capture what your customer is feeling, fearing and trying to accomplish at key decision moments. This work usually reveals two things:
Identifying and fixing the biggest leaks or friction points in Q4, can improve conversion and strengthen retention among your potential and existing customers. It also gives the marketing, sales, product, and service teams a shared picture of “the customer journey we are trying to support.”
SIVO’s customer experience and journey mapping can help you identify key stages, emotions, needs, touchpoints, and opportunity areas that will have the greatest impact on satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. Our experts will facilitate activation workshops so your team can align on the journey and choose focus areas and plan for the coming year.
At this point, you’ve heard from your stakeholders and customers, reviewed the market and your performance, and seen the end-to-end experience. Now you can answer two critical questions with much more confidence:
This work becomes a filter for which opportunities to pursue and when to move on. It gives the team a consistent and differentiated story to tell, in website copy, sales decks and customer success conversations.
Depending on the existing customer data and knowledge that you have, SIVO will customize to your needs which may include, leveraging new and existing data to facilitate working sessions to build your ICP and positioning statements.
From there:
The final step is to turn all this learning into focused action.
Rather than a long, generic annual plan, start with a 90-day, growth-aligned plan for Q1 that:
The key is to make Q1 a testbed for insight-led action, using all that you have learned in Q4 of this year.
SIVO can support this translation from insight to action through:
SIVO doesn’t stop and the delivery of insights and recommendations. Our team’s sweet spot is in being your strategic partner to help you get from insights to action plans that your your team can align on and execute with confidence.
The difference between a “normal” year and a breakout one rarely comes from a single big bet. It comes from a series of better-informed decisions, made consistently.
Q4 can be a pivotal time for your team, that sets you up for a successful next year. These 5 moves:
…give your organization a different kind of starting line for the coming year.
If you’d like help with any of these steps, whether that’s a focused research engagement or a fractional insights leader to guide the work, SIVO can plug in at the level you need and at the pace your business can absorb.
By Kerry Juhl
Fast changing marketplace dynamics and consumer behavior tied to the recessionary economy are putting businesses at a crossroads. Teams need to quickly assess their priorities and pivot to new revenue and profit growth strategies. But in times of upheaval, the activities of teams can take over and they run the risk of confusing activity for progress. The alignment gained by pausing and reflecting as a team can keep the momentum going on key priorities while letting go of the rest.
An important step amidst a consumer learning initiative is to reflect, assess, and decide on next steps. It can happen in-person or virtually and can take as little as 60-90 minutes of the team’s valuable time. For this critical step in the journey, an outside, unbiased facilitator can be your most powerful tool.
There is no better time than now to consider these top 5 benefits of engaging a professional facilitator:
1. Unbiased Professional
A trained facilitator brings the valuable benefit of being an objective leader who can listen to all points of view, not vested in a particular position or outcome. This creates the conditions for a more open dialogue and opportunity to see possibilities that otherwise may be missed.
2. Participate in the Discussion
Ask yourself where you can add the most value. Should you try to participate and facilitate or focus 100% on participating with your team? Engaging a trained facilitator does a couple of things. It sends a message that this work is important. It also allows you, the owner, to invest your energy into the discussion while allowing an expert facilitator to customize the process and tools around your needs and objectives.
3. Full Engagement
Critical to success is hearing from everyone in the group. This can be tricky, particularly if there are strong (or silent) opinions and voices, and now you are not in the same room! Facilitators are skilled at navigating the group dynamics and engaging all participants into the discussion to ensure each voice is heard. They also know how to keep the ideas flowing when the group might get stuck.
4. Stretch Thinking
One of the most valuable benefits of a trained facilitator is the ability to stretch the group’s thinking. They are experts at quickly capturing ideas, summarizing, asking the right questions to build on ideas, connecting the dots between ideas, and pushing participants to think outside the box.
5. Drive to Solutions
With a process designed to meet the objective, the facilitator continually uses techniques to ensure a successful outcome with clear next steps, accountability and buy-in from the group.
Through the stages of Immersion, Interaction and Ideation, we help our clients gain empathy and develop the strategies and alignment needed to boost momentum and forward progress toward the team’s goal. Please contact Kerry.Juhl@SIVOInsights.com to learn how we can customize an approach with the right professional facilitator to meet your needs. We have a team of seasoned professionals who are passionate about working with like-minded clients and would love to talk to you!
by Cindy Blackstock
Have you had a conversation with your consumer?
It is an enlightening and humbling experience to really get to know who they are, what they think, how they experience your product or service, and what they need from that experience. It can be very beneficial to be face to face, having conversations with consumers to build your intuition and empathy. However, often it is more valuable to leave the interviewing to expert moderators, allowing you to focus on the answers, rather than how to pose the questions.
Why Use Experts Qualitative Research Moderators
Expert qualitative research Moderators are skilled at conducting qualitative research to uncover the “why” behind the “what” of consumer behavior and preferences. Experienced Moderators apply a range of specific research techniques, with nuance and finesse, to get beyond consumers’ top-of-mind thoughts. This allows them to identify the underlying needs and motivations that drive behaviors and choices.
Specifically, Moderators can help teams across four key learning dimensions:
Moderation Techniques Enable Insights to Surface
With certifications from organizations such as, RIVA, QRCA, and the Insights Association, great Moderators have a broad toolkit, employing specific qualitative research techniques to achieve their research objectives. These research techniques include:
Open-Ended Questions: Starting with open-ended questions that encourage participants to provide detailed responses. These questions typically begin with phrases like “Can you describe…” or “Tell me about…”
Comparative Questions: Asking participants to compare or contrast different aspects of their experiences or opinions. For example, “How does this compare to your previous experience in a similar situation?”
Timeline and Sequencing: Exploring the chronological aspects of experiences by asking participants to recount events in a specific order. This can help create a detailed narrative.
Sensory Exploration: Encouraging participants to describe sensory aspects of their experiences, such as what they saw, heard, felt, or smelled during a particular event.
Metaphorical or Analogical Questions: Asking participants to describe their experiences using metaphors or analogies. This can help participants express complex concepts more vividly. For example, “If this brand was a shoe, what kind of shoe would it be and why?”
Projective Techniques: Using projective techniques like storytelling, drawings, or role-playing to access participants’ subconscious thoughts and feelings.
Whether it is through in-depth interviews, in-context missions, ethnographic research or through online community bulletin boards, great Moderators will employ these techniques to discover underlying insights about the consumer that they could not otherwise articulate through simple conversations.
Trust SIVO with your Qualitative Research
Contact SIVO, Inc. at Contact@SIVOInsights.com to discuss how SIVO can provide you with the insights you need, via our team of expert Moderators to lead your qualitative research projects. Also, check out SIVO’s On Demand Talent Profiles to learn more about how a fractional Qualitative Research Strategist/Expert Moderator can be an asset to you and your team.
To Make Your Workload Manageable
By Marilyn Weiss
In these inflationary times, companies are cutting operational costs, including their workforce budgets. In 2022, there were at least 154,000 layoffs from more than 1,000 tech companies and so far in 2023, the trend continues with 55,000 layoffs to date. (USAToday.com & Layoffs.fyi, Jan. 2023)
Not only is this devastating for employees that have been laid off, but it is also difficult for those who remain. Post layoffs, organizations become leaner and the scope of work for each employee gets stretched wider. Employees are asked to stabilize the organization and drive future growth with fewer resources.
On the bright side, this increase in individual scope of work can create opportunities to gain new experiences and demonstrate leadership. However, the broader scope can also leave employees feeling overworked, stressed, and unable to manage the expanded workload. When it feels like there is just too much work and not enough hours in the day to get it done, the best way to manage through it, is to adopt a “Fractional Mindset.”
What is a Fractional Mindset?
A fractional mindset is a new way of thinking. It’s breaking down a system into smaller fractional pieces. When you are faced with a problem, adopting a fractional mindset makes the problem smaller. A fractional mindset, when applied to your assigned workload, allows you to approach your role and responsibilities by dividing them up into smaller, fractional tasks. This gives you freedom to take a step back to strategize and prioritize the best way to complete them.
Prioritize the Workload
The first step requires some analysis. You will need to prioritize your list of tasks and/or objectives based on what will add the most value or make the most positive impact on the business. A best practice is to sort the completed list by those items that make the most positive impact on the business or drive business growth.
Delegate the Workload
The next step requires some self-reflection. You will need to consider which tasks/objectives YOU should personally complete and which ones are best to delegate to ANOTHER to complete for you. Ask yourself some questions to determine if YOU or a delegated resource under your direction is best:
If the answer to these questions is, “No”, consider the possibility of others doing these tasks on your behalf, under your supervision. This allows you to manageably “stretch your bandwidth” across your workload, without becoming overwhelmed and stressed by trying to do it all yourself.
Delegation Resources to Consider:
The pros and cons of each resource are captured below:
When to Utilize your Resources
Internal peers or direct reports are a great option when the team has capacity to take on your assigned workload. If your teammates do not have capacity, delegating to your external agency partners to manage finite projects is a great option.
Sometimes, however, you just need to essentially “clone yourself” or bring in an expert with a skillset that differs from your own. In these instances, you can bring in fractional professionals that, with a little onboarding, can hit the ground running. Delegating to your fractional resources can help you work through your increased workload and objectives in a manageable way.
How SIVO can Help
For insights teams, SIVO offers full-service custom research design, management, and execution to help you with custom market research projects. SIVO On Demand Talent solution also has 100+ fractional Consumer Insights Professionals with a range of skillsets to help you meet your business objectives on your timeline, reducing your stress while allowing you to make a positive impact on your business.
Adopting a fractional mindset will help you approach your role and your workload with confidence, efficiency, and effectiveness. And when the time comes, let SIVO be the agency that you delegate to! Contact@SIVOInsights.com
If you're part of a consumer insights team, you already know what this time of year looks like. The upcoming start of annual planning season brings high expectations, overlapping requests, and limited capacity. You’re pulling together top trends, completing industry reviews, immersing stakeholders, and expected to deliver fast, sharp guidance that informs decisions across the business. There’s no shortage of urgency. But there is often a shortage of time, hands, and headspace.
In this post, we’ll focus on how teams like yours are preparing for the planning season pressure with smart, flexible insights support. From tips for handling the volume to examples of how fractional talent can plug in fast, this is a practical guide to getting through planning season without compromising on quality.
Planning season can be a moment of high visibility for insights teams. It’s when your work directly shapes decisions on budgets, brand priorities, innovation pipelines, and go-to-market plans. Expectations are high, and so is the payoff if done well.
This is also when the work becomes less linear, as you’re often not managing one big project, but you’re responding to competing needs from multiple teams, often simultaneously. You’re asked to shift from high-level trends to granular customer behavior, to turn data into strategy, and to do it all faster than ever. Internally, you may be running up against resource constraints, limited capacity for synthesis, or pressure to answer questions that haven’t been fully scoped. Stakeholders want insights, leaders want speed, and everyone wants you to predict the future so they can plan better for it.
This is the reality many insights leaders are preparing to navigate right now: how to maintain rigor under pressure, how to prioritize when everything is urgent, and how to protect the quality of insight that drives real decisions.
With overlapping asks and limited time, prioritization becomes a strategic skill. It’s not just about getting things done, but making sure the most valuable work gets done well. Below are a few practical ways we’ve seen insight teams stay focused and deliver effectively under pressure.
Start with internal alignment
Before saying yes to every request, align with key stakeholders on what’s truly critical to planning outcomes. What decisions need to be made in the next few weeks? What’s nice to have versus required? This helps filter the noise and focus resources where they matter most. If you’re a seasoned insights pro, this step probably comes naturally to you.
Map deliverables to decisions
For every request, clarify what decision it’s intended to inform. This helps the team determine how deep to go, what methods are appropriate, and whether existing insights already cover it.
Synthesize what’s already known
Planning often sparks redundant questions. A quick synthesis of past work, organized by theme, audience, or priority, can help prevent unnecessary rework and provide fast traction. Even a short “What We Know” session can help reset expectations and surface gaps more clearly.
Be transparent about trade-offs
Not everything can be done at the same depth, and it’s best to communicate that clearly. Stakeholders usually respond well when you explain what’s possible, what’s at risk, and where additional support would make a difference. This creates space for smarter resourcing decisions, and helps prevent extra stress and burnout among your team.
Build in a checkpoint before things scale
Use a mid-cycle checkpoint to review whether what’s being delivered is actually moving planning forward. If not, it’s better to adjust early than stretch your team to deliver work that won’t be used.
When insight teams hit capacity during planning season, the instinct is often to either say no, or simply push through. But overloading the team rarely leads to strategic work. It leads to shortcuts, slower turnarounds, and deliverables that lack the synthesis stakeholders expect – putting the strategic plans at risks.
Many teams are addressing this challenge by bringing in short-term support. But success depends on who you bring in and how they work. Traditional freelancers or overflow support often require onboarding, guidance, or extra training time. That adds to your workload instead of reducing it, and that’s not what you need when you’re already stretched thin.
What works better is adding insight professionals who understand planning cycles, know how to manage complexity, and can operate as part of your internal team. When done right, this model gives teams the room to focus on what matters most. It protects insight quality while meeting the volume and speed planning requires, and it also reduces pressure on the team, making it possible to stay sharp across multiple workstreams.
At SIVO, we work with companies across industries to extend insights teams during planning season. Our On Demand Talent includes seasoned researchers, strategic thinkers, moderators, planners, and communicators who can step into the specific functions you need. Whether that’s help managing an overflow of qual studies, needing someone to run stakeholder synthesis, or build strategic narratives that tie research to business planning – fractional insight experts are here to help.
You don’t need to compromise quality to meet a deadline, and you don’t need to burn out your team to deliver on planning season demands. Whether you need a sharp moderator for next week’s workstream, a strategic partner to help frame consumer implications, or someone to translate findings into clear planning outputs, we can match the right talent to your exact need.
Need Extra Capacity on Your Insights Team for Planning Season, Fast?
Let’s find your perfect match!
SIVO Insights brings together research, talent, and intelligent technology to help organizations navigate complexity with confidence. Have a business challenge? Let's talk!
We bring together research, talent, and intelligent technology to help organizations navigate complexity with confidence
