For any business, it is important to set up touchpoints with customers. These touchpoints are also known as Quarterly business reviews. Quarterly business review is an important aspect that all customer success managers need to plan for.

Also known as business reviews or executive reviews, these QBRs are highly effective in knowing the exact impact of the company on the business. QBRs help track how the mutual agenda is working and understand the flow of work.

Executives are the ultimate decision-makers and will decide if they want to give the sign-off for the quarterly business review. Executive sponsors are generally C-Suite level executives, vice presidents, or high-ranking professionals.

Executive Involvement in QBRs

Executive sponsors in the B2B business need to be involved in QBRs. Your QBRs must be effective. This means you need to create executive sponsorship for key accounts. If your executive is involved in QBR, the chances of customers being involved are also high. Executive sponsors will help a lot at the time of renewal.

Questions executive sponsors will have at the time of QBRs

The executive sponsors are usually busy people. Before inviting them to a quarterly business review session, you must keep their valuable time in mind.

Asking yourself important some questions will put you in their shoes before choosing to attend the meeting.

• What value will an executive sponsor gain from this meeting?
• Is the meeting compulsory?
• Will there be any increase in revenue or upsells with this product or service?
• Is there a problem that will be discussed in depth at the QBR meeting?
• Can the QBR meeting help improve the ease of doing business?

QBR meetings need to include topics such as-

• how the company is planning return on investment in the product
• value proposition and expansion of revenue from the product
• winning use cases and product updates
• prove value realized
• results of the product features
• business goals and KPI mapping
• reports of implementation and major issues in the same

The key to doing that would be developing a good relationship with executive leaders and product users. Once users love the product, convincing the executive to listen to their success story and review their business goals will be simple.

Which Customers need QBRs with executives?

QBRs are best suited for critical and important clients. Preparing for a QBR meeting can be tough; hence, it is important to do it only for important customers. Customer segmentation will help know the top segment of the customers and plan reviews accordingly.

Segmenting customers is a wonderful way to know the cream, and QBRs can be assigned to top executives only from the segment. These top customers deserve and need more attention from the company. You can find out opportunities in the business and ensure all business goals and KPIs are on track.

3 Steps for CSMs to build a QBR process and get executive sponsors to attend

A quarterly business review is one where a company plans its next steps and forecasts. The executive team needs to know how the process is going forward and focus on new initiatives. A QBR is a formal review of the process between CSMs and representatives. The QBR process reviews customer success and renews contracts regularly to meet upcoming challenges.

1. Ensure the process for QBR is simple and efficient

The customer success QBR process can be made easy for executive sponsors if we keep certain points in mind. When putting together the QBR document, you must-

• Keep reports and metrics in hand
• Know the designations of those attending
• Agenda of the meeting or the QBR
• Format of the QBR and tools that will be used

2. The entire customer success team must be part

The highest executives in the business must be a part of the QBR. The goal of the QBR session needs to keep the business on track. You need to have a business plan that showcases the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats involved.

3. Have a plan in place

You need to have a strict process in place to reflect on what is possible and repeatable. This will allow you to grow faster and develop better. You need to skip unnecessary steps and have a successful strategy in place. You must apply past QBR learnings to the current strategy. You need to check the hits and misses of the last quarter and know where to improve. You can create plans for upcoming quarters and coach the entire team to do the same.

Key aspects that need to be covered in a QBR

• Your QBRs need to translate business goals into specific elements like: What are the tickets like the volume, type, average time to resolution, and any tickets that need to be resolved?
• Overall health score, health score trends, and methodology for results
• Customer lifecycle stage and what the next stage is
• Value component and realization

You must convince the executive sponsor that the QBR meeting is worth their time. This is important since they will get value from it, but they may not be aware as yet. You must keep track of the executive sponsor’s time and ensure they build the required value.

You must identify the core KPIs of the business and then map these goals with the product goals. This can then be related to the progress towards each of these goals and then represented as a percentage. Quantify this value and then showcase its value.

Bottom Line

Every CSM needs to understand and research the business and its pain points. You must show the value of the meeting and quantify the same. CSMs need to do the job properly and deliver as per executive requirements. This is the base of the relationship to one of true partnership. ICSMs must keep QBRs as a priority for executive sponsors by demonstrating value.

---