Inside a QBR

Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) serve an amazing purpose for a service provider and its customers. As the name suggests, these meetings, which can happen every 3 months, give progress visibility to the customer, discipline to the service provider, and allow the relationship to evolve higher.

A QBR can contain whatever information is valuable for the success of a specific project or for advancing the customer/service provider’s relationship. The one-hour meeting’s audience should include business unit leaders from both sides and other higher-up decision-makers at the customer who can help unlock issues or open up other doors to continue to build trust between the parties.

Potential QBR sections include:

• Project description: project goals and initiative strategic rationale
• Target business metrics/KPIs and progress: tracking towards those objectives
• Team composition: existing and future changes/needs
• Budget data: uncovering financials to keep everyone on the same page
• Blockers or needs/requests: requirements from both sides and steps to resolve those
• Suggested POCs/POVs: innovative endeavors that can help de-risk customer projects or create business value
• Next year’s planning: direction and effort alignment
• Co-marketing efforts: success visibility internally at the customer and potentially external to the organization
• Upcoming events relevant to the customer: visibility into other activities that can add value to the customer
• Ideas for other business units: an opportunity to expand the relationship into other customer BUs
• Service provider overview: commercial update
• New service provider capabilities/updates: new service provider updates that align with the customer’s business or potential needs

Notice that a QBR contains historical and forward-looking project-related data and overall business impact information. The goal is to add value to the customer’s business. At the end of the day, the service provider stakeholders (customers) want to succeed and unlock their annual bonuses to get promoted.

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