QBR Script and template

For a time while I was VP Client Success at my last employer, I also served as interim VP Marketing. This meant I was working with CSMs on both sides of the table, which gave me a unique perspective on QBRs.

First, I didn’t attend all of them. I was way too busy. And not all marketing vendors had substantial impact on the business, so many QBRs just weren’t worth my time. I ignored most invitations.

One vendor, however, absolutely nailed it, and they were key to our strategy. They provided comparative data, showing how our results were performing vs. other companies, especially our competitors. They highlighted specifically where we were doing well and where we were lagging. Then they proposed very helpful changes and improvements, some of which included greater investment. Of course, I had to weigh their proposals against other priorities, but we did increase spend where we could. And the annual renewal was automatic—the value was unmistakable, and they had earned my trust. They demonstrated interest, they knew their business and ours, and they were genuinely trying to help us get better results. They weren’t just trying to find tricky ways of selling us more stuff like almost all other vendors.

Food for thought.

I work in the cyber security domain, and we have automated the creation of a significant part of the QBR (we call it service review) using PowerBI. The main goal of the service review is to create more awareness of cybersecurity threats and improve their monitoring and response actions. We are now adding more guidelines for CSMs to leverage their knowledge and expertise to provide recommendations and agree with customers on the next steps/ actions to make their organizations more secure. We try not to make it less of a script and more of talking points to drive a meaningful discussion.

Hi,
I'm happy to share how we do QBRs.
Just reach out to me.
We are a SaaS business so it's very dependant on the original business case.

It's super helpful keeping deployments of track.

I work in EdTech and we call them "Implementation Reviews" and introduce them as a way to "progress monitor" their implementation of the product. Using language the buyer can relate to makes it easier to get them scheduled.

We survey the end-users using an anonymous survey and use the data to celebrate successes and identify any training opportunities, as well as expansion opportunities.

We have a call at the beginning of the school year for every customer to kick the school year off and set the dates for our mid-year and end-of-year reviews at that time. Getting them on the calendar early is the key with busy district leaders.

This is our second year of doing implementing this process and find it to be very effective, especially with larger customers.

I heavily suggest the COR framework from Kristi -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_AUuGm766I

Hi Eva,

I built several automated QBR reusable templates where every quarter the data would auto refresh. The pipeline was Salesforce (Opportunity Data) -> Snowflake -> Tableau -> Google Slides. We had a Book of business summary where we calculated Up For Renewal base, renewed base, GRR, NRR . The next slide was the historical trends and slices by deployment, tenure, demographics, etc. Under Insights Slides , we broke the performance by Conversion analysis, churn indicators, customer health, industry and ARR segments. Under forward looking, we had Quarter +2 forecasts to upsell, cross-sell , retention and expansion $ outcomes. Feel free to PM me as i can show the presentations as well.

@Heather Wendt - thanks for highlighting this. There's actually a link at the bottom of the latest GGR podcast to a free resource that addresses this with a ton of specific tools, tips and guidance!

Here's the GGR link: https://podcast.gaingrowretain.com/e/focus-on-your-customer/

-Bob

@Bob London would love to hear what you have here!