In the world of Insights, it’s vital to align your research projects with business priorities. The SIVO Insights Forum recently hosted author of the book, “More than Just Interesting: How to Build an Insights Function for Impact” and former Ulta Beauty VP of Consumer Insights, Elizabeth Oates, who shared these questions to consider.
1 - How do my potential projects drive the priorities of the business?
2 - Which projects are going to drive future success for the business?
3 - Are there any projects that serve multiple business partners?
https://youtu.be/PZs4uAkRH1I
Tune into a lively on-demand conversation “Bridging The Gap: Translating Insights Into Meaningful Business Results" to hear from Elizabeth and other Insights experts including Eliana Wahnon (General Mills, VP of Consumer & Market Insights) and Khary Campbell (Comcast, VP of Consumer Research & Insights).
Learn from Insights leaders as they discuss:
Thank you to Natasha Weith, VP of Research at SIVO Inc. for hosting The SIVO Insights Forum!
Wondering how to facilitate a strategic planning session? Strategic planning facilitation allows you to gain valuable insights from your organization, create a plan, and build strategies to achieve your goals. These exercises are a vital part of any organization's success, and with SIVO Organizational Intelligence, it has never been easier to create a strong foundation for your business. Explore the benefits of holding a strategic planning session within your team below.
First thing’s first, what is strategic planning? Strategic planning is a process used by organizations to set their short or long-term goals, determine their strengths and weaknesses, and create a blueprint to achieve those goals. It is an opportunity for leadership teams to align their vision, mission, and values and build the company's future plans and strategies. Strategic planning facilitation is the engine to the car that drives plans and strategies.
A strategic plan helps determine an organization's future, ensuring that all employees are working towards the same goals. It helps to prioritize resources and allocate them to areas that will bring the most value to the company. Additionally, it helps organizations identify areas for improvement, stay ahead of the competition, and make data-driven decisions.
So, we know what strategic planning is and we know why it matters -- but what is the best way to implement it? A best practice to gather and leverage insights is to have a third-party facilitator manage and facilitate your your strategic planning. This allows teams to participate in the planning discussion, rather than preparing for and guiding the discussion. Facilitators can also document the discussion as it happens, to focus teams on the topic and guide the discussion toward valuable outcomes.
Diving into this process is no small task. Luckily, with the help of a facilitator it becomes much more manageable because you have someone to handle the preparation, session facilitation, documentation and recap of the plan and outcomes. With an expert facilitator as your guide, you will leave your session with a Strategic Plan that will:
This is your opportunity to bring key leaders in the organization together to discuss the company's future. It helps to align everyone's goals and objectives, so everyone is working towards the same vision. Often, individual team members bring a unique perspective to the planning session. That’s why it’s important to discuss their expectations, the current and potential challenges and opportunities that each leader faces, as well as external market forces that may impact the strategic plan. Discussing these inputs during the session allows the team to address key issues and avoid pitfalls as the plan is being developed.
Strategic planning helps organizations identify areas for improvement and opportunities that will bring the most value to the company. These process-driven decisions can fall to the wayside without a dedicated space to identify internal and external opportunities and build plans to achieve them. . The planning process leads to increased effectiveness, efficiency and a better return on investment.
Strategic planning allows organizations to prioritize their resources, ensuring they are used in the most effective way possible, to achieve the company goals. Expert-led planning exercises can uncover redundancies and slowdowns within current processes. The strategic plan can help to increase efficiency by reprioritizing resources to align with key opportunities.
By having a clear roadmap for the future, leaders can make data-driven decisions that are in line with their goals and objectives. The strategic plan provides focus and clarity and it helps to reduce the risk of making poor decisions that could harm the organization in the long run.
Remaining competitive in your industry requires consistent reevaluation and reimagination. From identifying issues in current workflows, to hearing ideas from team members, to researching emerging trends in your industry and related industries -- there are so many opportunities to enhance your organization and get ahead. This information is used as inputs into the planning session, to help you build a strategic plan that addresses key issues and capitalizes on the best opportunities to grow the business and gain market share.
When employees understand the company's plans and strategies, they are more likely to be engaged and motivated to contribute to the organization's success. Chances are, they also have valuable thoughts on areas for opportunity and improvement. That’s why it can be very valuable to include employee insights in the strategic planning process. It can unlock game-changing opportunities that company leaders may have overlooked. Plus, gathering employee feedback can improve company culture and create a positive work environment by improving employee morale.
Strategic planning provides a roadmap for the future, ensuring that everyone in the organization is working towards the same goals. This helps to ensure that the organization remains on track and empowered to achieve its long-term objectives. SIVO’s Organizational Intelligence provides the tools to create a rock-solid plan for your business, so you can execute, and get ahead.
SIVO Organizational Intelligence is a trusted partner for organizations looking to leverage strategic planning. In our strategic planning sessions, SIVO's expert facilitators listen and probe to understand your organization’s needs and goals. Then, we help you develop a comprehensive plan with strategies to grow your business and win in the marketplace.
By working with SIVO, your team can leverage experts with 20 years of experience, across industries and company sizes, in organizational development and strategic planning facilitation. Our strategy and market research firm creates custom solutions that meet the unique needs of our clients.
Could your business benefit from our insights and expertise? Get in touch with our Organizational Intelligence team to schedule a discovery call. SIVO will develop a custom Organizational Intelligence solution that aligns with your needs so you can get ahead.
By Julie Rose
“CEOs aren’t feeling the need to hoard labor as much as they once did. A quarterly survey of CEO confidence released on February 8, 2024, by The Conference Board, a think tank, shows 23% of CEOs expect to lay off workers in the next 12 months, up from 13% from the previous quarter.” *
With employee staffing constraints and cutbacks sweeping through many companies, business teams are feeling the pressure. So how does the work get done?
We know that business leaders continue to seek actionable insights to guide their decisions but there are fewer people and often not enough time to get it all done. Many insights teams are turning to fractional talent to fill staffing gaps. This provides the freedom to say “YES” to internal stakeholders, set strategies and take on new projects while not burning out the team or falling short on annual objectives.
As teams consider their staffing options, here are three easy steps for making the case for adding fractional resources.
Step 1 – Outline what issue you are solving.
Use information on hand to justify what the “current state” is costing you and the business.
Step 2 – Evaluate and select the right resource for your needs.
Workforce talent continues to evolve and there is no shortage of options, including interns, fractional talent, contract to hire, or permanent hire. Determining what’s best for you and your organization is key. When evaluating the right resource for your needs, there are a few key questions. Short vs. Long term? Trained vs. Untrained? Junior vs. Senior Level? Hours per week? Budget parameters?
Step 3 – Make the case to your internal stakeholders.
Finding the right talent with experience and selling the option internally might seem daunting. With the right solution, it is possible. Present your case to internal stakeholders by outlining the business need, presenting a tight range of staffing solutions, including the benefits of your recommended choice, and the associated cost and timing. You may also want to include the bios or resumes of the potential talent you are recommending.
If your evaluation in Step 2 supports contract or fractional talent as the optimal solution, below are a few additional resources from SIVO that can help.
Why Choose SIVO On Demand Talent for your Fractional Insights Talent Needs
SIVO On Demand Talent is here for you, with exceptional insights talent for fill-in roles or finite initiatives. You will experience the uniqueness of SIVO On Demand Talent through our Experience, Service and exceptional Talent!
Contact SIVO, Inc. at Contact@SIVOInsights.com to discuss how SIVO can help you make the case for fractional talent. Also, check out SIVO’s On Demand Talent Profiles to learn more about the many fractional Insights Professionals - from Insights Generalists to Research Specialists - that can be an asset to you and your team and help you meet your goals.
* Noted in a NerdWallet article, Will 2024 Be a Big Year for Layoffs? February 2024
By Kerry Juhl
The Responsibility & Privilege of Serving Customers
“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.”
– Mahatma Gandhi, 1890
This quote is more than 100-years old, but it is still true today. The opportunity to serve customers is a privilege. The responsibility of that privilege is ensuring the customer’s voice is heard and understood. Brand teams need to know what their customers need and what they value, as decisions about products and services are made on the customers’ behalf.
Defining Customer Value
Understanding customer value can be a differentiator for companies in today’s challenging market. Simplistically, if a brand team has $1 to invest – or needs to cut $1 in spending – knowledge about what customers’ value must guide these business decisions to stay competitive.
So let’s talk about customer value…In everyday conversations, value has many meanings including price, worth, or even benefits. It is imperative for organizations to operate with a common understanding of customer value. From a marketing and branding perspective, it helps to think about customer value as an equation:
Customer Value equals Benefits minus Cost (CV=B-C).
Benefits include the advantages of quality, service, image, brand, experience, and the functionality one gets or emotions one feels when using the product or service. Cost is not only price – which we think of as cash, credit, interest, even service fees - but it can also include non-price terms such as time, effort, energy, and convenience.*
When teams define their Customer Value Equation, they can clearly identify growth opportunities by emphasizing or improving aspects of an offering that customers value (where to invest) and they can identify cost savings by eliminating aspects of the offering that customers do not value (where to cut).
Developing the Customer Value Equation
SIVO employs a 5-Step Process to develop your Customer Value Equation. In partnership with our client teams, we Mine, Explore and Quantify the customer value drivers leveraging Functional, Emotional, Life-Changing and Social Impact values. Note that the Quantify Step can be qualitative consumer learning, a quantitative survey or ideally, a combination of both. The design of this step is dependent on how much past learning that the team already has in hand.
Four Categories of Customer Value
We then partner with teams to Develop & Refine the Customer Value Equation. Lastly, we help teams Apply their equation by assessing where their products/services are over/under-delivering and facilitate them through the generation of ideas to improve the customer experience.
The result of our process is rich with discoveries. These insights provide a unifying understanding of the target customers’ purchase drivers, must-haves and nice-to-haves regarding a product or service – giving teams confidence and clarity on what to do with $1 more or $1 less.
Our Offer to You
SIVO is interested in sharing our Customer Value Equation experience and case studies with you and your insights team! Our “CVE Download” can easily be part of an in-person or virtual “Lunch & Learn” or your next team meeting.
If you can answer “yes” to at least one of the following three questions, please reach out to SIVO.
To learn more, contact us at Contact@SIVOInsights.com.
*Referenced article by Gautam Mahajan https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2394964320903557
by Cindy Blackstock
At SIVO, our team of insights experts have honed their skills over many years of market research and the lessons gained along the way now prove to be invaluable. We have learned that insights are just useless facts unless they can be applied to the business in a way that drives action among our client teams and growth on their businesses. So, in the spirit of sharing useful content and a bit of our “secret sauce” with our valued clients and partners, here are 5 Keys for Turning Consumer Insights into Action.
Start with the End in Mind
As market researchers in search of consumer insights, the SIVO team must understand how the results will possibly be used, what actions will be taken by our clients and how our clients intend to influence and have impact in their organization using our research. When we are equipped with the business objective and the actions that might stem from the results, we become clear on the research objectives and design. We all know that best consumer insights experts can envision how the research results need to come to life before starting the research. When we do this, we avoid two big pitfalls in research – first, the fatal one, missing a key question and second, the sloppy one, asking questions that don’t need to be answered or are already known.
Conduct a “Get Smart” Session
By facilitating a “Get Smart” Session with the client team, SIVO can mine existing information and surface institutional knowledge. There are 3 key reasons for the session:
Plan for Quality Input to Get Quality Output
It has been said that the quality of the output is only as good as the quality of the input. This is very true when designing market research. SIVO experts start with detailed learning plans to outline how the business objectives translate to the learning objectives and market research approach. This is where we align with the client team by defining things like sample composition and size, key measures, and of course, the action standards. Action standards outline the “if/then” scenarios for research outcomes and the follow-up actions. For example, if the results indicate X, then the action to be taken is Y. Documenting the action standards, before the research is executed, forces both the SIVO and client teams to think through the possible actions for each hypothesized outcome.
Report the Key Findings (and, all the rest too!)
Some client teams want an at-a-glance Executive Summary of results that they can quickly act upon, and others want all the details for a more thorough understanding before taking action. SIVO provides both, either in one report or in two separate deliverables. We must be clear on the delivery of the topline summary versus the full report with the detailed findings (supporting data, quotes, video clips, images, etc.) for future reference.
Make Clear Recommendations
It’s critical to turn data into insights and insights into actions. Too often professionals in the insights industry are hesitant to make bold recommendations on potential actions to take. However, client teams are looking for more than data and insights. They need courageous recommendations that inform their decisions. To drive action, SIVO puts a stake in the ground! It is, however, important to point out that recommendations are an educated opinion or point-of-view, based on the insights and findings of the research. Clients will then use research recommendations, in conjunction with other external factors, to guide or inform their actions and decisions. The best way to be confident about the recommendations is to circle back to Step 1! Start with the end in mind!
Contact the SIVO team at Contact@SIVOInsights.com or reach out to me directly at Cindy.Blackstock@SIVOInsights.com to help you uncover insights that inform your future decisions and actions!
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
