Hopefully, if youвЂ™ve read this far, youвЂ™ve bought into the tangible value of the QBR for you and your customers, but now you need a plan. Somebody at the C-level reads an article somewhere or attends a conference and suddenly QBRs are your priority. After all, if the customer does not experience success with your product, thereвЂ™s a good chance that customer eventually will churn-and thatвЂ™s not good for either party.ДЄll too often, QBRs fall into that bucket of things management implements without a plan or a purpose. Ultimately, QBRs help you move your customer in the direction most beneficial to them-which naturally will be the direction most beneficial to you as well. They demonstrate to your customer that youвЂ™re serious about providing ROI, and that you expect to do so within a 90-day period. They eliminate the question of whether your customer will renew once the contract or subscription expires.

QBRs open up honest discussions around your customersвЂ™ overall health and what you can do to maintain and improve that status. They allow you the opportunity to highlight the ROI of your product, thus reinforcing your value to the customer. They foster relationships between your executives and your customerвЂ™s executives. QBRs strengthen the partnership between your business and your customerвЂ™s. When done right, QBRs are hugely beneficial to both parties. One highly effective way is to schedule QBRs with your top customers (or your top tiers of customers, as described above). To ensure your relationship-building efforts donвЂ™t fall by the wayside, you may need to take a more structured approach. But no matter what, strong relationships are crucial to your continued success at every stage of growth. ItвЂ™s impossible to scale that kind of one-to-one touch efficiently. As your company grows larger, however, those relationships become more difficult to sustain. Because you likely have fewer customers than larger, more established companies, itвЂ™s easier to maintain individual relationships with each one. YouвЂ™ll have more time and incentive to take a much more hands-on approach. In the early stages of your companyвЂ™s growth, youвЂ™ll probably interact with your customers fairly regularly. This helps build trust, which in turn solidifies your relationship with the customer. In doing so, you step out of a вЂњvendorвЂќ role and into more of a вЂњbusiness advisorвЂќ one. Rather, this is a chance for you to gain a deeper understanding of the customerвЂ™s business and future plans and to strategize as to how you can deliver more value based on those factors. This is not the time or place to talk about support questions or make plans for additional trainings. QBRs should be strategic-rather than tactical-in nature. But as easy as it is to conceptualize, itвЂ™s equally easy to botch. SolarWinds MSP describes it as вЂњa meeting with your client on a quarterly basis where you discuss their business and how you can support them.вЂќ Sounds straightforward, right? Also known as a Business Review or an Executive Business Review, a QBR is, at its most basic, just a once-per-quarter meeting with your customer.

In fact, a strategic, face-to-face meeting is possibly the most effective tool in a Customer Success ManagerвЂ™s toolbox, and also the most delicate-which brings us to the Quarterly Business Review (QBR). In other words, itвЂ™s foolish to think about how big data will replace person-to-person interaction, either one-to-one or one-to-many. It empowers your interactions and enables you to predict their outcomes.

Rather, it informs your decisions on what the right tool is and when is the right time to use it. But data-and the technology that generates it and analyzes it-isnвЂ™t really a tool. ItвЂ™s tempting to think about data as the ultimate tool in the toolbox: a magic bullet that you point at your business challenges and watch them disintegrate.

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