Table of Contents
The fast-paced enterprise business world is disrupting the traditional idea of a Quarterly Business Review. Learn how to plan and prepare for the perfect QBR meeting of the future.
A QBR is an enterprise tool used by businesses to strengthen relationships with the customer. Usually conducted by the Client Service Manager (CSM) once per quarter, QBR offers an opportunity to showcase how you can add value for the customer and align your services to their enterprise business goals.
For an effective QBR meeting you should:
- Highlight the value your product brings to the customer
- Review and evaluate previously set objectives
- Set new targets to meet for the future
- Establish the customer’s trust and belief in your product and create interest in other opportunities of future collaboration
The future of Quarterly Business Review requires you to put in some extra work. Without preparation, the QBR will be just another fruitless meeting. A concrete set of goals will elevate the QBR meeting to the next level and ensure that you add value to the customer’s business and uphold a stellar image of your enterprise services.
Plan for successfully QBR
1. Start with a QBR Agenda
Without a structure, your QBR meeting can quickly spiral out of control. Creating a Quarterly Business review agenda will ensure that it stays right on track. The agenda contains a list of strategic topics to be discussed. These topics can be further elaborated with information including analytics and graphs. You will also mention the place and time of the meeting in the agenda. The QBR meeting agenda is to be sent to all the participants in advance so they can properly prepare for the meeting.
QBR Meeting Agenda
KanBo’s QBR meeting template helps you to present value to customers with goals, metrics, documents, benchmarks and more during your cyclic QBR meetings. Build an action forward plan to make the QBR meeting a success.
2. Involve your colleagues
QBR meetings work on building trust and transparency with the customer and that is impossible without full transparency and trust within the organization. The QBR meeting contains useful growth statistics, ROI results, and more to win the customer over each quarter. It is not possible to collect this reserve of information without the involvement and collaboration of people from different levels of the organization. Hence, having tools that can help you improve communication and coordination within the organization can prove to be highly useful.
3. Show increases
QBR is not only about presenting summaries about the success of individual projects but can also be utilized for presenting the organization’s growth and success as compared to competitors. Developing a big picture in combination with the success of individual projects gives a great image of the organisation. This is not only important for highlighting the importance of the clients’ contributions and value to the organization but also shows the organization’s effectiveness, so the client knows they invested in the right place. Collaboration or purchase of services is a form of mutually beneficial investment in the company.
The customer – receives a service or product of the highest quality.
The company – Shows that the remuneration received is utilized for constant development and growth.
4. QBR meeting
When it comes to the meeting itself, you require a host of skills that can impress customers and shareholders. After you have done all the research and preparation, it all depends on how the information is presented and laid out in front of clients. It is also important to define new goals for the next quarter and you may even want to discuss expansion opportunities.
QBR in the Future
QBR meetings have served businesses well up till now but as the world becomes more dynamic and things change in the blink of an eye, is it enough to meet, summarize and set new 3-month goals? In the face of disruption, how can the collaboration between the CSM and the client be improved? How to build a pipeline that is mutually beneficial for all the parties. i.e.
According to McKinsey:
“Multiple companies conducted ad hoc quarterly business reviews (QBRs) two to three weeks before the regularly scheduled cadence to review the priorities of their business units. For instance, MSD Japan CEO Oosthuizen emphasized the importance of the QBR process to align the company’s recovery strategy across all business units and allocate the resources properly to what mattered most.” (source)
The client – receives the highest quality service or product.
The company – shows that the remuneration received invests in the right way and is constantly developing.
For this to be possible, it is necessary to enter and build relationships with the principles of trust, transparency and responsibility. It will reveal how true the previous declarations and relationships were. The existing schemes for the preparation of quarterly statements and summaries are being abandoned in favour of collaboration in real time. Does this mean the death of QBR? In its current form, yes. However, at the same time, a new, higher level of collaboration is coming to life, one whose starting point will be QBR.
KanBo’s QBR meeting template helps you to present value to customers with goals, metrics, documents, benchmarks and more during your cyclic QBR meetings.
KanBo is a work management platform that paves a new way towards the future of technology in business, transforming how people work and collaborate in a dynamic world. Using the solutions offered by KanBo, the collaboration between the Client and the Company is radically changed to reach new levels of mutual collaboration. During the QBR meeting, one of the elements is to present the changes on several levels:
- Who should be involved in the QBR meeting?
The Best team for the QBR meeting is made up of people, delegated both from the client and the company, like:
- sales manager
- contact at the customer’s organization
- marketing manager
- financial manager
- C-level executive
In this way, an interdisciplinary team is created, working together in real time on the objective of the Quarterly Business Review.
For initiatives presented in the Quarterly Business Review, dedicated areas are created (KanBo Boards), which are built for a specific purpose – it is described and defined at the same time as the tasks to be performed.
- How to work during the QBR meeting as an interdisciplinary team?
KanBo Board is the place where the interdisciplinary team can Work in a visual way during, before and after QBR. Define the process and workflow using Lists, the Cards correspond to the tasks to be performed. Add people to the task, set date and communicate in the context of the Card.
- Where to keep all information related to the QBR meeting?
All information is store in a dedicated QBR Board in KanBo. Data is available for everyone involved in the QBR in any location in the world at any time. KanBo makes it accessible in real time. This ensures that the client and the company always have the same information. A visualization of work and context-based communication is introduced to replace emails and telephone conferences.
- What about the QBR documents?
Each document added to a board or card during QBR is simultaneously made available to QBR Team Members. Automatic versioning makes each change visible to other people in real time and no information can be lost. The transfer of documents via email is converted into document sharing in QBR KanBo Board.
- What about the initiatives from the QBR meeting?
The Key Initiatives that result from the QBR meetings should be placed on the Board in which the interdisciplinary QBR team works. It is a board that presents all the initiatives taken, divided into quarters and milestones. The visualization and context is the key discipline of KanBo.
Conclusion
As you can see, the work model presented here includes all the elements that are presented during QBR meetings. All common initiatives are included in the Business Roadmap and are reflected in the form of a Kanban Board. The people involved in the project, while performing their tasks, fulfil the informational obligation. Everything is done in real time, which equips businesses with the ability to make faster decisions while being sure that they make decisions on the most current information availavle. The information collected on the Boards gives a clear picture of the facts as they are now. They show the realization of the work as it really is.
KanBo’s revolutionized form of QBR requires businesses to enter a higher level of collaboration, built on foundations of transparency, trust and responsibility. In this way the QBR meeting becomes a catalyst for change – and change is the only thing nowadays that you can be sure of!
Do you have questions?
Maybe we have an answer!
If you have any questions regarding the topics we discussed in this blog, go ahead and send them to us.