Pre-planning season, typically in Q3, is a critical window to gather strategic intelligence before annual planning begins in earnest. This period might not get the spotlight that Q4 planning does—but it's where much of the real preparation happens.

Done right, the pre-planning sprint equips cross-functional teams with a shared understanding of how their market is shifting, what consumers need now, how competitors are evolving, and what data reveals about where to invest next. It eliminates guesswork and fuels better decisions later.

What is a Pre-Planning Sprint?

A pre-planning sprint is a focused, time-limited phase where teams run strategic audits of key insights: evaluating category performance, identifying emerging consumer trends, reviewing competitive moves, and uncovering whitespace opportunities. Think of it as the runway before your business planning takes flight.

It’s not about creating the strategy yet—it’s about gathering input that will shape it. This allows your organization to enter Q4 with clarity, alignment, and momentum.

Why It’s Worth the Time

Leaders who prioritize the pre-planning phase often experience smoother and more productive annual planning cycles. Here's why this window is so valuable:

• Reduces scramble: You’re not trying to analyze and plan at the same time. Pre-work helps you show up ready with facts and direction.
• Fosters alignment: When teams start with the same market facts, strategic conversations stay grounded in what matters.
• Reveals risks and opportunities early: Competitive shifts and consumer tensions can inform product roadmaps, brand activations, or innovation priorities.
• Supports data-driven strategy: Real insight replaces assumptions, powering better business decisions for the year ahead.

An Ideal Time for Focused Planning Research

Importantly, the pre-planning window is an ideal time to run short research sprints. Unlike large-scale research initiatives, these fast insights projects are highly focused on current business questions—offering just enough clarity to set a strategic north star before deeper planning starts.

For example, a growing food brand may use this phase to segment customer needs within their category. A retail business might review online shopping behaviors over the past six months. A CPG team could benchmark category share movements. Each of these helps inform where to prioritize during formal planning.

When supported by streamlined partners or On Demand Talent—seasoned consumer insights professionals who can jump in quickly—these smaller research projects can be executed without disrupting the day-to-day. You get the answers you need fast, without heavy lifts or long lead times.

The bottom line: Treat pre-planning like a strategic asset, not an afterthought. The return is not just better data—but better decisions that lead to growth.

Category insights are a type of market research that helps organizations understand the broader landscape in which they operate. They look beyond individual brand performance to capture trends, signals, and behaviors across the entire category or competitive set. These insights offer critical context—connecting consumer desires, competitive dynamics, and macro trends in one view.

So, What Do Category Insights Actually Include?

Category insights often cover a mix of quantitative and qualitative data sources. While the specific mix may vary depending on the business, they typically include:

• Consumer insights: What are people buying, wanting, and looking for within your category?
• Competitive analysis: What are competitors launching, shifting, or emphasizing?
• Market insights: Broader forces like pricing shifts, distribution trends, and innovation patterns
• Sales and share data: How is the category growing or evolving over time?

For instance, a health beverage company may look at what flavors or formats are gaining share, what consumer needs are rising, and how major players are expanding shelf space. All of these allow that brand to spot movement in the category and plan accordingly.

Why Are Category Insights So Valuable in Business Planning?

When planning your next fiscal year, internal performance only tells part of the story. Category perspective reveals the full picture. Here’s what makes it so powerful:

1. It highlights where the category is heading. Are consumers trading down? Seeking premium options? Are competitors focusing more on digital or in-store?

2. It helps you prioritize investments. Seeing whitespace areas or unmet needs can guide product development, marketing budgets, or distribution strategy.

3. It grounds strategy in shared evidence. With cross-functional teams looking at the same data, alignment forms more easily—and debates focus on action, not interpretation.

In short, integrating category insights into business planning gives you a stronger sense of reality, helping your decisions become not only proactive but also market-driven.

Short-Term Research Can Unlock Big Wins

One common myth is that category analysis must be big and resource-heavy—but many teams unlock powerful insights using focused, short-term sprints. These planning research efforts can be led by internal teams or supported by insight-focused partners like SIVO.

In fact, many organizations partner with On Demand Talent—experienced professionals ready to support your consumer insights or strategy teams when internal resources are limited. These experts can step in during pre-planning season to lead fast custom audits or synthesize existing data into usable recommendations.

The result: You gain clarity on what’s shifting in your world and why it matters, long before big strategic decisions are made.

Understanding your category isn't just useful—it's essential. And in the pre-planning sprint, it's your foundation for a smarter year ahead.

A pre-planning sprint isn’t a full-scale planning session – it’s a focused window of time where teams begin to explore early signals from the market, consumers, and competitors. The goal is to use category insights to identify trends, risks, and opportunities ahead of Q4 strategic planning. Structuring this sprint thoughtfully ensures it delivers meaningful direction without being overwhelming or time-consuming.

Here’s how to create an effective pre-planning sprint built around insights:

Start with a Clear Set of Questions

Begin by aligning your cross-functional team on the key business questions that need to be answered. These could include:

• What consumer behaviors have shifted over the past year?
• Where are competitors gaining or losing market share?
• What market forces might disrupt our plans?

Clear questions focus your sprint and guide what types of data and insights to gather.

Run a Quick Yet Targeted Category Audit

This is the heart of the sprint. Conduct a short research audit over 2–4 weeks that pulls together:

• Consumer insights (recent surveys, usage trends, purchase drivers)
• Category insights (growth patterns, innovations, saturation risks)
• Competitive landscape shifts (new entrants, pricing moves, messaging)

Aim for breadth over depth here – you’re building directional understanding for strategic planning, not an exhaustive report.

Summarize Findings into Actionable Themes

Once your data is vetted and synthesized, translate it into simple, plain-language themes the broader team can act on. For example: “Private label is accelerating due to inflation” or “Millennials are shifting preferences to X.” These themes will become the starting point for deeper exploration in Q4.

Use Collaborative Workshops to Interpret and Align

Wrap up your sprint by bringing key stakeholders together to review and discuss the findings. Collaborative interpretation – not just presenting data – creates real buy-in and shared understanding as you enter the annual planning season.

Structuring your pre-planning sprint this way transforms insights into early building blocks for strategic planning. It reduces guesswork and gives your team the directional clarity needed to enter Q4 with confidence.

In today’s fast-moving marketplace, businesses rarely make decisions based on one data stream alone. Category insights are strongest when they reflect multiple perspectives – from internal sales numbers to consumer behaviors and external market shifts. That’s why one of the most valuable parts of a pre-planning sprint is connecting the dots across data sources.

Why Integration Matters for Strategic Planning

Pulling together data from different silos helps your team build a fuller picture of what’s happening – not just inside your business, but in the category and competitive landscape around you. This leads to more stable assumptions, clearer strategy choices, and an insights planning process that’s rooted in reality.

Start with What You Already Have

Before conducting new research, inventory the insights and data your organization already possesses. This might include:

• Customer satisfaction or Net Promoter Score (NPS) trends
• Sales data segmented by region or product
• Past qualitative research (e.g., shopper interviews, focus groups)
• Category and market reports from prior quarters

Mining these resources helps surface existing evidence and avoid duplication.

Use Insight Triangulation to Validate Themes

A helpful technique in this phase is triangulation – using multiple data points to confirm (or challenge) early hypotheses. For example:

If your sales data suggests declining performance among Gen Z consumers, look for supporting evidence in recent consumer insights or social listening. The goal isn't always to find “proof,” but to pressure-test patterns from multiple viewpoints before embedding them into the strategic planning process.

Tell a Clear Story Across Categories and Consumers

Once the data is integrated, simplify. Weave together category insights, consumer feedback, and trends into 2–3 compelling summary narratives. For instance: “Our product is losing ground in premium categories because our value proposition feels outdated to key consumer segments.”

These data-backed stories help leadership teams prioritize effort and resources. They act as a shared foundation for decision-making in annual business planning.

Remember – connecting the dots is less about having perfect data and more about surfacing directions and insight themes early. With that clarity in hand, your team can enter Q4 planning more aligned and ready to act.

Many organizations know they need to tap into category insights during the pre-planning phase – but limited internal bandwidth or missing expertise can slow momentum. That’s where leveraging On Demand Talent offers a powerful solution.

What Is On Demand Talent?

SIVO’s On Demand Talent connects businesses with experienced consumer insights professionals, ready to jump in and support your strategic planning process – often within days. These aren’t junior hires or general consultants – they’re seasoned experts who understand how to quickly distill insights and elevate decision-making.

Why Use On Demand Talent for Your Pre-Planning Sprint?

• Speed: Without the long lead times of hiring, businesses can access professionals quickly and stay on track with tight timelines – ideal during Q3 pre-planning.
• Expertise: Bring in specialized skills (like synthesis, trends tracking, or category analysis) that your internal teams may not have in-house.
• Flexibility: Scope On Demand Talent to specific needs – from a quick insights audit to facilitating working sessions or connecting consumer data to business strategy.
• Quality: SIVO’s talent pool is made up of senior-level insight experts who are up to speed and ready to contribute immediately.

An Example in Action

Imagine a mid-sized food brand entering pre-planning season. Their insights team is tied up in product testing and has no time for strategic synthesis. They engage an On Demand Talent professional through SIVO to lead a 3-week category assessment. The expert synthesizes internal sales data, competitive findings, and past research into 4 direction-setting themes – giving the brand’s leadership team a strategic head start before Q4 discussions even begin. (This is a fictional example.)

A Smart Alternative to Traditional Hires or Freelancers

Unlike generalist contractors or platform-based freelancers, SIVO’s On Demand Talent is deeply embedded in the world of consumer insights and business planning. They’re adaptable, objective, and highly aligned with the strategic tempo of the organizations they support.

Bringing in temporary expertise allows your team to increase velocity without overextending. And because it’s flexible, On Demand Talent can extend or scale down as your needs evolve heading into the new fiscal year.

For organizations seeking sharper, faster insights to guide their strategic planning – without overloading internal teams – On Demand Talent is a high-impact option.