The customer success team always understands the importance of demonstrating value to every client in a well-organized and timely manner.
However, the business landscape of both the client and service provider can always be in a state of fluctuation. So, meeting your clients frequently makes sense, isn’t it? That’s what quarterly business review (QBR) is all about.
QBRs are the perfect time to showcase your business perspective and the business impact you’ve had on your clients. This is a critical exercise that bridges the gap between your clients, your product/services, and your company.
Over nine months, the LoginRadius’ customer success team has been engaged to arrange the QBR’s with all its clients, and we’ve done some brainstorming to synchronize processes for better outcomes.
Let’s understand the crucial aspects of quarterly business reviews and how companies can collaborate and scale business growth.
What is a Quarterly Business Review (QBR)?
A quarterly business review can be defined as a once-per-quarter meeting between a vendor (like a technology partner like us) with their clients.
During a QBR, both the client and vendor discuss how their business impacts the client, what the processes are being followed, and brainstorm ideas to provide a competitive edge.
Though it can be pretty challenging for some clients to visit the vendor’s location physically, remote QBRs are swiftly becoming part of the customer success best practices.
What are the Objectives of a Successful Quarterly Business Review?
QBRs offer endless opportunities to clients and vendors since we don’t see customers as a deal rather a long-term relationship. It’s one of the best ways to ensure consistent growth with the clients by conducting a quarterly business review.
Let’s have a quick look at some of the essential objectives of a successful QBR:
- Review Past Performance: One of the crucial aspects of conducting a QBR is to review the past performance and key metrics that help analyze overall growth. Moreover, examining the spend volume, KPIs, and SLAs also help in tailoring future strategies for maximum ROI.
- Assessing Progress: QBRs are the perfect time to assess progress towards strategic goals. Both the client and vendor can carefully evaluate the overall improvement of the pre-defined goals.
- Demonstrating Positive Contribution of Your Solution: Another crucial aspect of QBRs is that you, as a vendor, get a chance to prove the positive contribution and impact your solutions are making to the client’s business. This helps in building trust and lasting business relationships.
- Setting Result-Based Goals: Result-based goals are always honest in execution and can be measured over time. You can discuss your previous goals with your clients and let them check if your benchmarks are achieved. Further, you can set result-based goals for the future as well.
- Forecast Future Trends: Vendors can explain the future trends that can help their clients stay ahead of the curve. Showing them your action plans to achieve the same could be a game-changer in terms of building trust in your clients since they’re getting more than what they’ve asked.
Stages that LoginRadius Covers in QBR
A QBR is undoubtedly a single chance that allows you to bolster your image among your clients and their stakeholders; make sure you prepare well with valuable content and information.
LoginRadius understands the value that each client brings to our organization, and hence, we’re now emphasizing building lasting relationships with our clients through QBRs. Here are the stages of QBR that we cover:
- The Usage Overview
- Overall Growth of the Business
- Support Review
- Challenges and Feedbacks
- Expansion and Forecasting
What Should be the Content of the QBR?
If you’re not sure about the purpose of QBR and its value to your business and clients, you first need to understand the aspects defining the need of a QBR. Here’s what your QBR must contain:
Agenda
You need to create an agenda for the meeting and make sure you circulate the same to all the attendees in advance so that they’re well aware of the purpose of the QBR.
Demonstrate Value
Keep a list of business outcomes your clients have achieved through your product/services in the previous quarter. Demonstrate the client with correct performance metrics and numbers.
Share Goals
Once you depict their achievements through your product/services, it’s the right time to show them what more their brand can achieve in the future. It’s crucial to share future goals and your benchmark plans to chase them.
Portray Your Action Plan
Since sharing goals alone won’t build trust and confidence with your client, you have to portray your action plan well in advance. Also, make the type of collaboration you would need with the client’s team to achieve your goals.
How to Add Value to the QBR?
We believe that the key to the successful conduction of a QBR lies in adding value to the QBR. It’s important to understand that the client can derive value from the session and eventually build trust in your team. Here’s what you need to consider:
- Let Customers Speak: Presenting your thoughts and action plans is a must, but it is equally important to let your customers portray their point of view. Allow them to speak and listen to their opinion, agenda, and further plans.
- Ask Questions: It’s crucial to ask questions shortly and crisply every time you present a plan. This will help the client better understand your strategies, but eventually, they’ll feel more valued and engaged.
- Stretch the Discussion if it’s Adding Value: If you think your client is gaining value from your thoughts and action plans, you can stretch the discussion further by sharing your plans and goals with them.
The Bottom Line
A quarterly business review benefits both the client and the vendor since they get a chance to connect and learn how things are working and prepare an action plan for the future.
It’s the job of the customer success team to correctly deliver the expectations and smartly use QBRs to transform their clients’ businesses.
Moreover, you can help cement the relationship since you get a lot of feedback from your client's team that further helps plan things better.
Enterprises that aren’t yet leveraging the true potential of QBRs must quickly put their best foot forward in conducting the same for ensuring better and lasting relationships with their clients.
