what is business review

Quarterly and Annual Business Reviews: Why They Can Make or Break Your Success

The business review is one of the most underrated tools in a services company's arsenal. Quarterly business reviews highlight new ways to help clients achieve their goals, uncover risks and opportunities you're equipped to address and ensure customer leadership sees you as a critical piece of their growth strategies.

If you already do regular annual or quarterly business reviews with clients, you know how valuable they are. If not, you're about to learn what you're missing.

What Is a QBR?

A quarterly business review, or QBR, is when you sit down with customers on a quarterly basis to review how well you're contributing to their success. They ensure customer satisfaction and keep engagements on schedule, at or under budget and on track to meet agreed-on KPIs.

Here, we'll discuss the elements of both annual and quarterly business reviews, sometimes called "executive business reviews" or "health checks."

You can mix and match elements from each category, but in any case, these should be topics of regular conversation with your clients — because you don't want to be just a service provider. You want to be a partner in your customers' businesses such that they see you as intrinsic to their success. That increases client stickiness and opens the door to expanding the relationship.

Get a quick overview of quarterly business reviews and how to use them to solidify client relationships:

Is a QBR really needed?

Not all services businesses need to conduct frequent or in-depth business reviews. If you supply coffee to the breakroom, you can probably get away with a monthly email check-in. But if you provide a business-critical service, like technology, accounting, legal or marketing, you need to understand how your service plugs into the customer's business strategy.

Key Takeaways

• The real work is done at the annual review; QBRs are quick checks of KPIs and the relationship overall.
• Remember the old adage to keep goals S.M.A.R.T.
• Want to reduce churn? An agreed-on, documented set of goals is key.

What Are the Benefits of a QBR?

There are three main benefits of a quarterly business review.

They provide a measuring stick.

A well-defined performance-to-plan analysis gives customers a solid understanding of where they are on their journeys to new revenue opportunities , lowered risk or both — and how your services helped get them there. It also makes the customer equally invested in and accountable for certain shared metrics, such as profit margin. Yes, your service should aid them in achieving goals, but the real work is up to them. Business reviews allow you to track mutual KPIs so both you and the client have skin in the game. On that note ...

They track overall success metrics.

Business reviews should include KPIs with realistic timelines, budget allocations and responsible parties. A "scorecard" reflecting this ensures everyone is clear on expectations and that your services are steadily moving the client toward goals. For example, if you're a digital marketing agency tasked with recruiting new prospects, confirm there's a sales strategy to close the leads you bring in. That way, the blame for a lack of new customers isn't laid completely at your feet.

In that example, a relevant sales KPI is conversion rate, or the percentage of qualified leads that become paying customers. If the goal is, say, a 10% conversion rate and you're sending along plenty of prospects but your client's sales team isn't closing deals, then maybe you can help with sales coaching.

They solidify customer commitment and engagement.

A business review should highlight successes to date and map improvements that can lead to greater growth. This shows the customer that you understand how your individual contributions support its business strategy and that you're looking for new opportunities to engage, which can increase loyalty and minimize your own churn.

How Do You Prepare for a QBR?

The most important step in conducting a quarterly business review is preparation, which starts when the engagement begins. Service providers should gather a ton of critical information in the customer discovery process, but many skip that step.

Gather this data at the start of the relationship to make conducting annual or quarterly business reviews a smoother process.

Gather contacts and an org chart

Identify the people you'll interact with directly and the influencers who will play a part in executing and evaluating the strategy you propose. If you deal day-to-day with an operations manager who doesn't have a finger on the pulse of the company's overall strategy, ask for an introduction to the COO or whomever can define KPIs that tie directly to business objectives. In our previous digital marketing example, a conversation with the VP of sales will reveal how you can better assist in closing deals.

Set business plan objectives

Understand how your customer's goals align with your own capabilities and business objectives. If you're a managed service provider with an SLA for regular data backups, you should know exactly which types of data you're backing up, compliance regulations to which that backup should adhere, how quickly your customer needs to get back online after a cybersecurity incident to meet its own SLAs and more. Be very clear on how your services and success metrics align with customer needs.

Share success stories

Understand what success looks like for your customer. Where have they had wins? Where have previous service providers fallen short and lost credibility? What could they have done differently, and/or what did they do correctly that the customer expects you to repeat?

Learn about unresolved issues you're expected to handle or that your service will touch

Clearly it's important to identify outstanding issues that your team will pick up and run with, but successful firms go beyond that. If you provide digital marketing services to support sales, it's important to know whether the company has a CRM integration underway or if it's revamping its sales training, for example.

Set solid timelines for success

Make a template to assess early wins that looks something like this:

Customer pain point: How we will address it: How we will define success: Timeline for results:

In subsequent business reviews, assess whether the problem is resolved. Demonstrably removing pain points wins trust for upsells.

Know which KPIs will prove wins

Relatedly, and particularly in smaller shops, clients often want to hand over a general bucket of responsibilities without taking time to nail down exact metrics to track over the course of the engagement. Don't ever skip this step. It's vital to both business reviews and the relationship overall. You can't meet a client's needs if you don't know exactly what you're aiming for.

After you've collected the above information in your customer discovery, digest it and create a broad plan for how you'll steadily help the customer achieve the goals you've outlined. Then, turn those findings into an annual plan that you will track against on a quarterly basis. Don't make the plan super prescriptive — you and the customer will review and refine it together as you talk about business goals and conditions change.

Finally, sit down with your customer and conduct the actual QBR.

Annual business reviews vs. quarterly business reviews (QBRs)

The annual review, done at the beginning of the engagement and repeated yearly, can be an onerous process, and it will outline what success looks like. Quarterly business reviews (QBRs) should be much quicker and more to-the-point. Our main advice for both: Come prepared so you can make the most of every minute spent with the customer. Your contacts likely have many service providers demanding their time. Respect that, and you'll stand out.

What Is an Annual Business Review?

An annual business review is where you really get to know your customer's business. Note: The past 18 months showed that goals and tactics can change quickly in a weird and unpredictable business environment, so you may need to perform in-depth reviews more often if conditions change dramatically.

At least annually, sit down with your client for ideally two hours — and no less than one hour. Steps in an annual business review include:

Discuss business objectives.

We can't say this enough: Continually align the goals for your engagement with the customer's business strategy. As clients grow, you want to go along for the ride. If you don't know what "good" and "better" look like, then you don't know where to plug in. Don't be satisfied with what's working today. To capture a recurring customer for the long haul, look for areas in which you can contribute in the future.

Review past business goals.

Look at the previous year's goals, whether this is your first business review with this client or not. If it's your first rodeo, look at the top goals your client set with your predecessor so you know what you're getting into. And if you've done an annual business review with this client before, discuss whether the goals outlined last year have been achieved and why or why not.

Set Top 3 business goals for the coming year.

Focus this discussion on overall business strategy, not just the part your service will play. That breadth allows you to identify opportunities to provide additional services.

Identify opportunities for the coming year.

Which customer segments or sales channels is your customer targeting? Which new verticals or geographic markets are they expanding into? Which new products or services are they announcing? Internally, do they have future products on the drawing board? Challenges with suppliers? Which new systems are they implementing? Again, these insights help you employ your services to drive everyone forward.

Tease out barriers to success.

You never know where you'll uncover a need for additional services or ways to use your expertise to overcome a business challenge. Maybe clients are having trouble supporting new customers or scaling a service. Maybe it's staffing or supply chain visibility or margin pressure — issues that are pressing now and likely will be for the next year or so. Maybe the client's org structure is out of whack and needs fine-tuning. Getting a peek under the hood at what isn't working is just as important as understanding what is — maybe more so, because it presents problems you can potentially solve.

What Should the Content of a QBR Include?

As discussed, you need a mutual understanding of what "good" looks like so your offerings are aligned with the customer's needs. This piece shouldn't take long, because ideally, you came prepared with an understanding of how the partnership will work.

The content of a QBR should include an outline of three areas:

The customer's strategic goals and where they expect your help. In our digital marketing example, the customer's goal might be to get 300 new customers this year from a specific vertical that will help them expand into new markets.

Your own strategic goals and how they align with what's outlined in your SLA or service contract. Say your digital marketing agency is implementing a new marketing automation software or integrating multiple systems into a more comprehensive solution that will serve your clients better. How does that goal tie in to what your customer is expecting?

Joint strategic goals that you and the customer outline together. Perhaps the client's team has determined that to get those 300 new customers, it needs 2,000 marketing qualified leads. Now you know their overall strategic goals and how they expect you to contribute, before discussion in your quarterly business review.

What are SMART Goals?

Here's where you take the knowledge accumulated so far and lay out the areas in which planning, accountability and investments of money and time will drive the engagement.

Outline three to five strategic initiatives that will grow various parts of the business via your direct touch. Typically, these items require action in the short-term but may not show immediate ROI.

If your assignment is to drive new-customer acquisition with your digital marketing services, then you probably shouldn't expect to help the sales team deliver 100 new customers in the first couple of months. What's the goal for the year, and how can you work toward it?

Remember the old adage and keep goals S.M.A.R.T.: S pecific, M easureable, A ctionable, R elevant and T ime-bound.

Maybe your customer wants to double down on cross-selling to existing customers. You can glean KPIs specific to the client with questions like: How much revenue does the team expect from this initiative? How many customers are they targeting? By when do they expect to achieve this goal? Your shared metrics come from questions like: Which specific actions are marketers taking to move that initiative forward? Finally, where do you plug in? Only after outlining these with the customer can you define an SLA, commit to a certain benchmark and gain a solid understanding of how the engagement should proceed over the next year.

Concluding items

This is where you plot a plan of attack. Outline open items that will drive the business toward its goal — there are probably several of these, as the annual review is a kickoff for the coming year. Note any follow-up items that arise from the business review. Maybe you need to look into a new platform or research new technologies. Write those items down to hold everyone accountable.

Then, you and your customer need to literally sign off on the plan. Legally binding in court? Probably not. But the action alone solidifies a joint commitment to the objectives, KPIs and strategies outlined in the review. Plus, it makes it harder for customers to come back during a QBR with new goals you've never heard of and say you've known about them all along. If they try to throw a curveball, you have a mutually agreed-on strategy to point back to.

How Do You Conduct a QBR?

You do the heavy lifting in the annual business review. It isn't a light load, but it makes quarterly check-ins with the client quicker because you've already identified objectives, initiatives and KPIs. QBRs allow you to confirm that you and the customer are tracking toward those items. Unless your customer has a major strategic shift to fill you in on, the review's purpose is simply to keep you on track and help you identify wins, talk about KPIs, review open projects and get set for the next quarter.

Where can I find a QBR template?

We'll detail the elements of a QBR below. We've also distilled them into a handy template:

Get the QBR Template

Wow your clients and cement long-term relationships with our template for a quick yet thorough quarterly business review.

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Lay out the agenda.

Recap wins and misses..

Take a minute or two to talk about wins or success stories, as well as anywhere you or the client might have fallen down on the goals that you put your John Hancocks next to at the end of the annual review.

Discuss rearview-mirror metrics.

Glance at previous quarters to make sure you're tracking toward goals. If you've promised a certain number of MQLs for the year, calculate how many you've delivered, how many you have to go and your momentum. If you're an IT service provider, did you meet or exceed SLAs? How many tickets did you close? How long did it take, on average, to close them? CPAs will want to know whether quarterly taxes have been filed, the accuracy of forecasts and how fast their team responded to inquiries, for instance. Confirm you're tracking metrics that matter.

Review open projects.

Again, this shouldn't take long. Ideally, your project managers are having quick check-ins with customers at least monthly, making the QBR a time to wrap up results and progress with a tidy bow. Show how you're achieving mutually-agreed-on goals.

Then, review areas of improvement you and your team have identified while working through the engagement. After all, it isn't the client's job to identify other areas in which you can help them. Maybe they're done with their CRM integration; now you have a new marketing technology platform to suggest. Moving into a new vertical? Perhaps you have an idea for sales team training or events they should attend to learn more.

If you've identified or hope to identify opportunities for an upsell or cross-sell, bring in the account's sales rep — if the timing is right. The presence of sales can pressure a client into stubbornness.

Talk about unresolved issues.

Some items slowing progress may be on the client side, and some might be in your court. Regarding the latter: Has a hiccup on your end slowed progress? Clients are generally far more forgiving of delayed initiatives when those delays are addressed regularly vs. sprung upon them at the last minute.

Don't assume responsibility for issues on the customer's side that you can't fix. That trap is difficult to escape once you land in it. Are you waiting on the client to complete an integration? Is their HR team taking longer than anticipated to hire for a key role? Address any items that are outstanding, above budget or beyond deadline to avoid surprises. Identify ways you can help, but don't fall on your sword for issues that aren't in your control. Who within the organization is ultimately responsible for the client's initiatives? Who influences decisions that may be holding them up? Refer to the org chart if needed.

Unresolved issues may come up when discussing rearview-mirror metrics and open projects . If so, make a note and come back to them in this section. This advice applies to all sections of the QBR: If changes in business objectives come up in earlier sections of the review, make a note of it, and then touch on/clarify those changes in the appropriate section to ensure everyone is on the same page. There's no such thing as too many notes on your part.

Cover changes in business objectives.

Prepare for your client's business objectives to shift as the year progresses. It might frustrate you, but it will undoubtedly happen. Stay flexible, and talk about objectives on a regular basis so you can prepare for a shifted set of goals in the coming quarter.

Evaluate progress on last quarter's goals.

Map the objectives laid out in your annual business review to a KPI scorecard that holds everyone accountable to moving the engagement forward.

Should you collect customer feedback in QBR?

Essential to the QBR is a quick-and-dirty scorecard that lists objectives and how you’re meeting them. Keep the scorecard short and simple, using an “ABC;” “red, yellow, green;” or “percent complete” scoring system to indicate the initiative’s relation to the goal. The format should be easy to understand at-a-glance.

Again, your contacts have enough service providers to deal with. So don’t waste their time, and come with the scorecard mostly filled out with goals and metrics that you’ve continually tracked throughout the quarter.

See an example of a QBR scorecard in our QBR template .

Discuss pain points in the relationship.

Ask your client: Does your team respond to emails quickly? Are service issues resolved fast enough? Are there any complaints? Where can processes or communication be improved? Have you proven your value this quarter?

Touch on the future state.

Do this, but do it very quickly. You've already talked about changing business objectives and how you can help, so this is just a recap to cement yourself in the client's mind when they're creating a strategy for future endeavors. Do you see additional places you can plug into the customer's business in the future? This could look like expanding the number of departments you touch or appropriate additional services you might be able to provide. You're just planting the idea in the client's head, not making a sales pitch.

Sign the scorecard, and close it out.

At the close of the QBR, sign off on the completed scorecard to hold everyone accountable to the metrics, strategies and goals you're working toward. This level of accountability is invaluable in keeping the relationship even-keeled and on track. Review your call cadence with the client and ask if they have any questions.

How long should a QBR take?

A QBR should take 30 minutes at most. The above may seem like quite a bit to run through in half an hour, but a few elements make it possible: First, you've been updating this information and thinking through each of the points throughout the quarter. Second, you've been keeping track of KPIs in your scorecard and have come prepared to breeze through that piece — if your client is strapped for time, the scorecard is where you should focus your efforts. Third, the more you do QBRs, the better you'll get at them and the faster they'll go.

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The Bottom Line

As a services company, keeping customers satisfied is pivotal in reducing churn. And it's difficult to know whether you're meeting expectations if you don't regularly check in with customers. Without the business review process, you're floating in space without any sense of True North, just guessing about the right actions to take.

You might think that you know your stuff, but there are always accounts that will say they're dissatisfied one day out of the blue, and you'll wonder where you went wrong. Avoid that by checking in with your clients regularly and using customer relationship management (CRM) software to keep an eye on satisfaction. Plus, doing so ensures you're aligned with customers' overall business objectives so that you can continue to provide value and more deeply enmesh yourself into said strategies. Who doesn't love being needed?

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Blog » Engagement

• Read Time 9 min

How to lead quarterly business reviews (QBRs) customers want to attend

by Darien Aasen

If you were your own customer, would you want to sit through your quarterly business review (QBR)? If you hesitated before answering, then it’s time to rethink your approach. The QBR has become an industry staple—and polarizing topic—in customer success. Many of its critics complain it inflicts death by PowerPoint. Fans of the meeting espouse its bottom-line benefits. In a sense, both sides are right. QBRs, when designed with respect to customer needs, are an effective tool to gain strategic alignment between a vendor and an account. However, many customer success teams squander this opportunity by making it about themselves and not thinking outside the box. And while there isn’t one right way to lead a QBR, there are certainly plenty of wrong ways to go about it. In my years as a customer success manager, I’ve seen what makes a standout QBR and what makes a bad one. Often, it’s the small details that make all the difference.

What is a quarterly business review?

A quarterly business review (QBR), also known as an executive business review (EBR), is a customer meeting typically held every three to six months where vendors assess a customer’s goals, performance, and strategies. Typically, vendors present an analysis of agreed-upon KPIs and business trends to measure the company’s progress against its objectives. The generally acknowledged purpose of a QBR is for the vendor and customer to align on the value the customer has received to date and the potential value they stand to gain in the future. The QBRs I’ve seen and done that really stood out and were most successful had the subtle message of “Customer, be confident in us and what we can do for you.” The meeting should include past, present, and future initiatives while mentioning notable challenges, learnings, benefits, and tangible wins for your customer. If my vendor never spoke about anything negative, I wouldn’t trust them to surface when things went wrong. It’s rare that things to go perfectly, so apply ownership of any problems and focus on the lessons learned and resolutions. The clearer you can be in defining the solution and learnings, the more confidence you inspire as a business partner.

Are quarterly business reviews right for your business?

QBRs are an effective tool for managing customers with annual or multi-year contracts—regardless of auto-renewal agreements. Basically, you need to spend a long enough period of time with the customer to form a substantive relationship. The meeting’s frequency can be correlated with customer segmentation for your business. For example, strategic customers might get a business review every quarter and smaller customers get a review once or twice a year. If your business runs on monthly contracts or individual orders, there is commonly less value in trying to force-fit a scheduled QBR because the customer could leave in 30 days or never order again. You’re not doing yourself or the customer any favors by forcing them into a QBR cadence that is not aligned with their obligation to you or appetite for you. That is not to say they cannot be valuable; relationships can supersede standard obligations. Consider your own business dynamics before rolling out a process.

Who should attend quarterly business reviews?

From the customer side, QBR attendees ideally include executive sponsors and relevant points of contact. While optional, it can be valuable to invite other departmental leaders who interact with your product or its output in some capacity. Even if they’re not your direct customers, these impacted teams can have a strong influence over business decisions, such as renewing, adding licenses, and integrating the product into other areas of the business. A quick aside on roles: In customer success, there are different terms for the same role. There is a buying committee with different requirements and goals and the more you can relevantly include them in these QBRs, the better. You want to have the executive who is accountable for your performance, the people you work with regularly, and others who have significant influence over decisions present during these calls. From the vendor side, QBR attendees should include the CSM as the one responsible for leading the meeting. If you’re conducting a QBR for a high-value customer, you may want to invite someone from your leadership team as a sign of commitment and respect. CSMs in tech-heavy roles may also choose to include a technical resource from both their side and the customer’s side to help facilitate questions and explain the rationale behind specific decisions. A technical resource can be someone from the operations, product or development team. These roles tend to become more involved when discussing future projects or technical issues.

How to run an effective quarterly business review (QBR)

If you’ve never led a quarterly business review before, or you’re looking to revamp your QBR’s format and script, I’ll walk you through my QBR process from preparation and kickoff to conclusion and follow-up. Use these tips to encourage active participation, clear communication, and accountability among QBR attendees.

Quarterly business review preparation: Get the most out of your meeting

To prepare for the QBR, start by getting your hands on every scrap of data you can, even if you’re not going to present it. Why? Because it makes you more holistically ready for the meeting. When I conduct QBRs, I almost always get questions about things that are not directly shown in the slides. If you don’t do the prep work to thoroughly understand everything, then you’re more likely to run into situations where you have to tell the customer “I don’t know. I’ll have to get back to you.” And while it’s not a mark against you, it is a missed opportunity to demonstrate preparedness to the customer. You build your customer’s confidence when you’re able to consistently prove your knowledge of their business. Most of the data you gather should be ready at your disposal, not prepared for display. The difference in these approaches is often an indication of a CSM’s skill level. More experienced CSMs use slides to complement their presentation, not to drive it. As mentioned, I prefer to structure the meeting around past, present, and future initiatives:

• What has happened so far, what have we learned, and how has the customer benefited?
• What is in progress? What’s on hold? How will it help the customer?
• What is planned? What are the areas of opportunity?

There should always be an element of personalization when deciding what information goes into the presentation. Know your customers and what they look for. Be selective. Additionally, don’t shy away from covering service or product problems. Customers will notice and be more irritated by the omission. Instead, when faced with a negative situation, try to present a positive outcome whenever possible. To give you an example, in a prior role, I once had to tell a global head of engineering that we couldn’t meet our deployment deadline for two of their sites. The reason was that we encountered unforeseen workflow challenges because the teams had non-standard processes. As a result, the teams identified multiple other use cases they wanted to pursue beyond the plan. Within two months, these sites were leading the company in terms of adoption and the number of use cases in deployment. After your prep work is complete, build a clear meeting agenda. Share the agenda in advance to let participants know what to expect. This helps set expectations and protects the QBR’s purpose. If the slides complement the meeting, then it will be inherently more interesting and decrease the chance of people skipping.

Quarterly business review kickoff: Keep it short and sweet

While introductions are essential in QBRs, they can derail and delay your meeting when left unchecked. For example, if you have four people from the customer’s side attending plus three people from your side, introductions can take 10 minutes. If any conversations spin off from that, you lose another 10. Now you’re 20 minutes behind and rushing through the presentation you diligently prepared for. One time-saving tactic is to assign a person from each side to handle the task. At the start of the meeting, have your main point of contact introduce their entire team. Coordinate this with them ahead of time to get their agreement. As the CSM, introduce the team members from your side who are attending. This way, everyone gets to know who’s who within a few minutes, and you can move on.

Quarterly business review engagement: Encourage participation during the meeting

Too often, QBRs devolve into a one-sided conversation where the CSM reads off data from the slides. This will all but guarantee a meeting decline the next time around. Get customers to open up and engage during QBRs by following these strategies.

• Use a narrative format. Paint a picture of what’s happened, the current state, and what’s to come. Draw out emotion by contrasting the old way of working with this new, better way. Illustrate how the customer’s hard work and strategies, along with your product—as the supporting role, of course—helped them make that transition.
• Build in opportunities for engagement. Take intentional breaks and frequent pauses. Give customers the space to ask questions. Prepare a list of questions ahead of time to spark conversation when the line goes silent, which inevitably happens to us all.
• Practice the communication imperatives of alignment, control, and affection. Alignment is understanding why the customer cares. Do you have a shared interest and objective? Are you working toward the same goal? Control is offering them a choice. People hate not having options. Invite customers to influence the conversation. Build in areas they can control and comment on. Affection is affirming them through edification and encouragement. If people are sticklers, thank them for being detail oriented. You can convince customers to show up by bringing these needs to the forefront.
• Put customers on the spot. If I’m part of the way through a QBR and no one is engaging, I use a line that gets customers to speak up. It works 100% of the time. It’s super simple. I did not invent it, but I’ve used it ever since I first learned it. After I finish speaking, I’ll say, “I’m going to pause here. I just gabbed at you a whole lot. I take silence to mean either I’m doing an amazing job so there are no questions and we’re all perfectly aligned, or I’m doing an absolutely terrible job. Someone give me something.” If it goes another few seconds and no one says anything, I follow up by saying, “I will wait.” That always gets them. Someone jumps in. I’ve never had it not work. If no one’s participating, consider using that call-out or a similar one to help lighten the mood.
• Ask questions. When you ask the customer questions, it allows them to provide insight and guidance. An example of this would be “Are there things we didn’t cover that you want to discuss?” or “Am I understanding your ideal outcomes or initiatives correctly?” You can also ask them questions about business challenges or areas of opportunity. However, this should not be an interrogation. It’s about showing curiosity, a desire to understand, and a sincere interest in the customer’s success. These insights will change the way you support them and provide value.
• Ask pointed yes-no questions. While you typically want to use open-ended questions as conversation starters, if you find yourself in a meeting with unresponsive attendees, try to elicit a reply using yes-no questions. The idea is that easy answers will act as a springboard to a more engaging dialogue. For example, if you’re presenting recent learnings to a customer, you could pause to ask, “Do you have any questions about how we set up this project?” If they say “no,” then you could follow up by asking, “Do you feel confident that you’d be able to replicate this process in other areas?” It’s harder for them to say yes or no to that. Getting a reply, even if it’s a one-word answer, makes it easier to ask follow-on questions that eventually get the ball rolling.

Quarterly business review conclusion and follow-up: Close out on a positive note

At the end of your QBR, start by taking a minute to recap the positives. Reiterate one or two of the customer’s notable accomplishments. These points should support the foundation of future goals and initiatives. Keep talking points high-level. Don’t summarize everything you’ve just talked about. Save the detailed summary for the follow-up email you’ll send after the meeting. Include in your follow-up email any notable discussion points, questions, and action items. Capturing this information in writing demonstrates accountability. It shows the meeting was productive and makes the customer feel confident that you were listening, that their contributions were valued, and that action will be taken quickly. Attach a PDF of the QBR deck to your email so the customer can refer back if needed. Thank everyone for their time. Give personal shout-outs when suitable. For example, if someone asks a good question or surfaced a concern you were able to address. This helps build the relationship, and again, shows you were engaged in the discussion. It can be as simple as saying: “Matt, I really liked your question and your consideration of [past issue]. It’s resolved now, but I appreciate you making sure we think through these details and take the best approach possible.” Don’t dig too hard though. Only include these types of personal touches when natural. Otherwise, your praise will come off as disingenuous and do more harm than good.

Breaking the traditional mold

While QBRs are a tool that can absolutely provide value, customer success teams tend to get hung up on trying to fit the traditional mold of what a QBR should be. They conduct QBRs because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do, and what the customer expects. Instead of following the status quo, I encourage CS teams to consider if QBRs are the best use of their resources and time or if there are alternative ways to achieve the same alignment. Bottom line: QBRs are what you make them. If you use them to talk about all the work you have done for the customer and the data you want to present and the upsell opportunity you want to promote, then yeah, they will be an hour-long drag. But if you design the QBR to make the customer confident in their decision to partner with you, they can be a huge relational and financial asset to your customer success team.

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How To Run Effective Quarterly Business Reviews

Quarterly business reviews aren’t just routine meetings; they’re strategic checkpoints that help organizations chart the optimal route toward success. Unlike the once-a-year pit stop of annual reviews, quarterly business reviews (QBRs) offer a more dynamic assessment that allows businesses to fine-tune their strategy, recalibrate roadmaps, or even set new goals.

Previously, we discussed the importance of a strategy review . Now, we’ll delve deeper into why a quarterly review is an integral part of strategy governance. 

We’ll cover what you should do before, during, and after a quarterly business review to ensure it’s impactful. 

What Should A Quarterly Business Review Cover?

QBR, essential for strategic alignment and internal information sharing, is a quarterly meeting bringing together department heads, executives, and other business leaders. It involves assessing the business's overall performance, adapting existing initiatives , or developing new strategies as a part of a bigger strategy governance process.

Attendees aim to identify roadblocks, risks, or challenges encountered during the quarter, and to map out strategic initiatives for both short-term and long-term growth. 

QBRs should also focus on gathering insights and key takeaways, not just showcasing results. 

Here are some high-level questions that must be asked and discussed during the meeting: 

• Financial performance: What were last quarter's results? Are we on budget, and what are next quarter's financial projections?
• Resource utilization and operational efficiency : How effectively are resources used? Are there inefficiencies or opportunities for optimization?
• Operational KPIs and alignment: How are operational key performance indicators (KPIs) performing and are they aligned with strategic goals?
• Customer relationships: How did customer success teams perform in the past quarter? Based on customer feedback, have we met customer needs? If not, how can we improve customer experiences and forge stronger relationships?
• Market and competitive analysis: What are the key market trends and competitive challenges? How do these impact our business and strategies? Do we need to adapt existing strategies to attract new customers?

Along with the quarterly reports from department heads, discussions that arise from answering these questions enable businesses to make better decisions and strategies. 

How To Prepare For A Quarterly Business Review?

The success of a quarterly strategy review hinges on meticulous preparation. Here’s how to do it: 

1. Craft a focused QBR agenda

Begin the preparation process by creating a well-structured QBR agenda. Ensure it’s focused and aligned with the strategic goals and objectives outlined in the previous quarter. 

A clear plan sets expectations and allows attendees to prepare relevant questions, discussion points, data, and reports ahead of time. 

💡Tip : Distribute this agenda well ahead of the meeting to give participants sufficient time to prepare.

2. Collect data needed for the review

Collect data demonstrating the results delivered within the specified period, including benchmarking against crucial business metrics and competitor comparisons. This not only validates achievements but also provides a broader industry context.

Business leaders or department heads must provide detailed reports in their areas, essential for a comprehensive business performance overview. 

Some reports to prepare for the QBR include:

• Financial reports with revenue and expenditure forecasts
• Budgets vs. Actuals reports to assess financial performance against planned budgets
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), churn, and retention reports
• Competitive and market analysis reports for an external perspective
• Operational KPIs reports highlighting key performance metrics

Beyond gathering data, analyze it to prepare actionable plans for the QBR. For example, if your data shows a drop in sales, you shouldn’t merely present the related numbers. 

You must identify what factors led to the poor performance and have a clear action plan to reverse it in the next quarter. This ensures that QBR meetings are focused and effective without exposing decision-makers to indecision due to a lack of information. 

👉 How to easily prepare reports with Cascade: 

If you find that too much of your time is spent gathering data and creating reports, consider using strategy execution platforms like Cascade , which simplifies the data collection process using integrations across multiple business tools . 

Whatever accounting, CRM, or business intelligence tool your team uses, you can integrate them all within Cascade, creating a single powerful source of truth. 

Updates from various data sources are fed automatically to Cascade so you can gather accurate information and create beautiful visual reports using the relevant data. 

You can also send automatic notifications to team members using email, Microsoft Teams, or Slack to remind them to update various elements they’re accountable for.

How To Run A Quarterly Business Review?

The quarterly strategy review meeting can be divided into three key steps:

Step 1: Review past performance and goals

Begin with a quantitative analysis of key metrics, such as financial indicators , operational KPIs, and other performance benchmarks. Compare these against targets and previous results to gauge progress towards strategic objectives and assess overall operational efficiency . 

Additionally, review any ongoing strategic projects to monitor their status and identify any impediments to success.

Participants of QBR should also revisit any commitments or action items discussed in the last quarter’s QBR. If there was a strategic focus defined or an improvement identified, they should evaluate the progress made from the past review to the current one. 

Let’s say you implemented a new sales intelligence tool so the sales team and account managers wouldn’t have to rely on intuition-based approaches. Consider how it affected revenue, the percentage increase in sales, and if this increase offset the tool's cost. 

This approach to discussing the impact of previous initiatives ensures there is accountability and follow-through.

Step 2: Open the floor for a strategic discussion 

The QoQ performance review helps you identify the gaps between actual performance and targets. This exercise paves the way for the critical next step—strategizing to bridge these gaps.

Focus on the 'WHY' behind the numbers. Analyze reasons for successes and failures, challenging assumptions to uncover true causes.

Next, explore new strategies. For example, if market share loss is linked to a competitor's new product, discuss initiating projects or adjusting strategies to counter competitive threats.

Finish with proactive risk management discussions to identify potential obstacles and challenges that may affect future performance.

Step 3: Prioritize and document decisions

Turn insights from the quarterly review into concrete actions . Leaders must collaboratively determine which initiatives to begin, cease, or maintain, aligning these choices with the company's strategic vision and long-term objectives.

For initiatives involving cross-functional teams , assign timelines and key roles to department heads or business leaders. Make sure it’s clear who owns which initiative for clarity and accountability across departments. 

Document every decision, including the underlying reasons, action plans, timelines, and assigned responsibilities. This documentation provides a future reference, fostering transparency and trust among stakeholders.

What To Do After The Quarterly Business Review Meeting?

The true impact of quarterly business review is realized in the actions taken after the meeting. This section outlines crucial steps to maintain momentum and effectively implement decisions made during the QBR.

Relay decisions and develop action plans

Post-QBR, department heads need to communicate the meeting's decisions to their teams clearly and transparently. 

Highlight how these decisions are in line with the company's broader strategy. This approach not only builds trust but also gives team members a clear sense of direction. 

Next, collaborate with team members and leaders of shared projects to create detailed action plans. 

Clearly outline roles and set expectations to ensure everyone understands their part in executing the strategy. Emphasize the significance of each individual's contributions to the broader strategic objectives, fostering accountability and engagement for effective results.

👉 Do it in Cascade: 

With Cascade, you can build an action plan that aligns with strategic objectives and key business metrics, while ensuring every project or KPI has its owner. 

Teams can also clearly visualize the dependencies of their plans with other teams using the Alignment Map . This visual representation provides a holistic view of an organization’s performance. 

Set up processes and tools for progress updates

Without regular monitoring and follow-up, it's easy for initiatives to go off track. Consistent tracking helps identify and rectify issues promptly. 

Strategy execution tools like Cascade make this easier by streamlining communication and collaboration to facilitate a smooth flow of information and efficient check-ins between different teams and leaders. 

Real-time insights and structured team updates ensure that any roadblocks or risks can be addressed proactively to prevent potential deviations from the strategic course.

The post-QBR phase is instrumental in translating decisions into actionable results. Effective communication, strategic alignment, well-defined roles, and the right tools, such as Cascade, collectively contribute to successfully executing strategies devised during the QBR. This sustains the momentum generated during the meeting and leads the company toward its long-term goals.

Quarterly Business Review (QBR) Template

Cascade makes it easy for you to build custom reports for various use cases within your organization. This means you can stop using clumsy spreadsheets and automate time-consuming tasks like data consolidation and report updating. 

With Cascade’s intuitive interface, you can tailor your reports to highlight essential metrics and progress in a clear, concise format.

👉Here’s how:  

• Add an executive summary at the top of your quarterly performance report.
• Add headlines and notes to your data to provide additional context. 
• Organize a certain set of data with a table format which helps to display more details or drill deeper to get more information.
• Present larger amounts of data with charts. 

Additionally, reports in Cascade have a built-in presentation mode that will let you interact with your reports live in meetings. 

If you want to reuse the same report for the next QBR, you can simply duplicate it and select the data you wish to include. This will help you maintain consistency and save time. 

Using these templates from Cascade not only streamlines the QBR process but also enhances the clarity and impact of the presentations.

💡 Sign up for Cascade free and build your first QBR report today. Or get in touch with our strategy execution experts to learn more about Cascade. 

💜You can also watch this free on-demand webinar that walks you through reporting in Cascade. No signup required. 

Simplify Your Quarterly Business Reviews With Cascade 🚀

When you use Cascade to centralize visibility over your organization’s performance, you gain valuable insights and the ability to proactively address potential challenges that could steer you in the wrong direction. 

You can gauge an accurate picture of your strategic performance, which means you can make better business decisions and deliver on the promised results. 

Simplify your QBR process with: 

• Robust reports for data-driven decisions
• Update templates for real-time insights
• Strategy planner to formulate your strategies and action plans 
• Alignment map to visualize how different plans work together
• Over 1,000 integrations to consolidate your existing business tools underneath a unified roof

Ready to improve your QBR? Get a live demo today. 

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Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs): A Quick-Fire Guide

This article will walk you through everything you need to know about Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR): what exactly a QBR is, why they’re essential for success, key stakeholders of a QBR, and provide you with a QBR template.

Let’s get started! 

What is a quarterly business review?

A quarterly business review (QBR) is a quarterly meeting held with your clients and customers to analyze what’s working, what needs work, current results, and action items.

A QBR is a process by many names. It can also be called an Executive Business Review or a Business Review, but in practice, they're all the same thing. 

These reviews are conducted by client or customer success teams to review the previous quarter and set goals for the quarter up ahead, with actions in place to achieve your new goals.

These check-ins help foster customer relationships, reduce client churn, and help both you and your client achieve the results you're looking for. 

Why is a quarterly business review important?

Quarterly business reviews help set your internal team and your clients up for success on a quarterly basis with an emphasis on ROI for the client and customer retention for your internal team. 

According to Gainsight , there are five main benefits of QBRs:

• First, they foster relationships between your executives and your customer’s executives.
• They allow you the opportunity to highlight the ROI of your product, thus reinforcing your value to the customer.
• QBRs open up honest discussions around your customers’ overall health and what you can do to maintain and improve that status.
• They eliminate the question of whether your customer will renew once the contract or subscription expires.
• They demonstrate to your customer that you’re serious about providing ROI, and that you expect to do so within a 90-day period.

Which customers get a Quarterly Business Review?

In an ideal world, all of your customers and clients would be receiving quarterly business reviews from your client success team. But, since time and resources are valuable, you should, at least, conduct quarterly business reviews for all of your top accounts.

A great way to determine who your top customers are is by measuring your CHI. CHI stands for Customer Health Index , which is a way to measure how healthy your accounts are, which in turn helps you retain customers and prevent churn. So, to ensure you retain accounts with high CHI, you should be performing QBRs. 

Now, let’s take a look at who should be included in your QBR meetings. 

Key stakeholders of a quarterly business review 

We’ve already touched on many of the key stakeholders of a quarterly business review. Mainly, it’s important to ensure you’re including key stakeholders from both your side and the client side.

From your team, your CSM (client success manager/customer success manager) should be leading the meeting, sales executives should be included (depending on the importance/CHI of the customer), and anyone else who is dedicated to the client. 

From the client side, you should have your main point of contact, any executives from their side, and any other key decision-makers with who you’ve been working. 

Ensuring that you have every key stakeholder present for your QBR ensures that nothing gets overlooked and everyone is on the same page as you get ready for the next quarter. 

What to include in a quarterly business review 

When you kick off your QBR, you should have a visual deliverable available for your clients—whether it be a presentation, pdf, or a fully built-out client portal (like the one from Dock, below). Provide your clients with something that tells them exactly what they should expect from your team this quarter. 

First and foremost, tell your client what you’re meeting about in the form of an Executive Summary. That summary should include what’s going well and which areas could be improved.

Then as you get into the details of your QBR, you’ll be able to dig into why something went well and how you’ll improve upon the rest in the months ahead. 

A big piece of a QBR is whether or not you’ve hit the KPIs you and your client set for the previous quarter. When you’re bringing up what went well and what didn’t go according to plan, ensure that you’re backing it up with data examples, and putting an action plan in place for how you expect to hit your goals next quarter so that it doesn’t feel like anything is being overlooked. 

Did you know that you can get your QBR template from Dock? 

With Dock’s QBR template, you just have to plug your data into the dashboard. There are pre-built fields for all of the most important areas of a QBR, including: 

• Analysis of the client's business alongside core KPIs from the previous quarter
• Quarterly business review presentations that you can embed in multiple formats, including PowerPoint templates, google slides, pdfs, and more
• Product roadmaps
• Case studies that go over how the client can improve next quarter and beyond
• Onboarding action plans that will drive customer engagement
• Answers to FAQs that you were preemptively expecting to get from your clients 
• Links to upcoming webinars, pricing for new products, essential workflows, and automation

The Dock template includes everything in a traditional QBR all in one place so that you and your client can follow along, look back at the results, and see progress quarter after quarter. 

How Dock can help with your quarterly business review 

When your CSM team conducts a quarterly business review, you want to ensure that they’re not missing any details. Dock can set your team up for success with a QBR template and an easy to execute, repeatable process. With Dock, you can build custom quarterly business reviews for each of your clients and continue to crush your QBRs, quarter after quarter. 

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Quarterly Business Review: How to extract benefits beyond transparency

Leads our agile work in Central Europe and our Enterprise Agility Center in Budapest and helps institutions across industries to shape growth strategy and transform themselves in the digital age

October 5, 2020 In previous research, our colleagues have outlined the importance for agile organizations to create both stable and dynamic practices . A periodic business review, prioritization of different activities, and alignment across organizational units (frequently called tribes) are often together referred to as Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs). QBRs can be the cornerstone of an effective agile organization, linking overall strategic direction to agile organizational units and team-level backlogs.

When done well, QBRs can bring immense value to an organization by creating vertical and horizontal alignment. However, inefficiencies often occur due to limitations in the ecosystem around the QBR—even if the narrowly defined process is done well. There are five reasons behind these suboptimal operations:

• QBR ownership: The QBR and the broader ecosystem surrounding it are at the heart of an agile organization and must have a proper owner. This role spans three main activities: managing the QBR process, ensuring proper content quality, and continuously improving the QBR. A dedicated squad is required during QBR cycles, combining agile, IT, finance/budgeting and strategy expertise, and a strong and respected leader.

Broad dependency alignment: During the QBR process, these units set Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and plan what they will deliver to achieve them. Ideally, a substantial portion of the unit backlog can be delivered autonomously by the owner of the group, while a smaller fraction requires broader alignment. The QBR should serve as a forum to understand those dependencies and resolve them while not making the process highly technical and administrative.

For instance, one LATAM company organizes a quarterly fair where each unit leader presents its initiatives and all other leaders are responsible to challenge them and understand potential dependencies.

Traditional budgeting: Agility brings a paradigm shift in the logic of budgeting. Instead of projects, agile organizations use cross-functional teams as budgeting units. Agile organizational unit leads must assume resources are relatively fixed, and their job is maximizing impact, generated via prioritization. This is important, because if agile organizational units are subject to traditional project and business case-based budgeting logic, then QBRs cannot function properly. If fully agile budgeting is not realistic in the short term, companies can opt for a hybrid approach.

For example, a leading bank uses QBRs to review budget status against delivered business results—and potentially make adjustments in a transparent and fast way during the QBR meeting, if circumstances require.

KPI and OKR misalignment: OKRs are among the most fundamental elements of QBR logic, used by many organizations to set aspirational targets with motivating narratives to rally people behind a common vision. In the QBR, these units must define OKRs from strategic company aspirations. Yet, organizations often struggle to draw a connector line between the newly introduced OKR concept and end-of-year key performance indicators (KPIs).

A Western European bank defined the value driver KPIs for each agile organizational unit and derived OKRs that helped to achieve these relatively fixed end-of-year KPIs.

Disconnect from IT processes: In an ideal agile environment, agile organizational units can release standards and an IT architecture vision. This is rarely the case in large corporations due to legacy architectures and monolithic systems. Given that planning for major monolith IT systems often requires 12+ months, QBRs often need to co-exist with IT release planning.

One European telco solved this by synchronizing the timing of IT release planning with QBRs, and then used them as a complementor forum—refining and breaking down the upcoming portion of the high-level IT roadmap.

Building proper QBR practices and enabling the ecosystem takes time and effort. However, once these pain points are addressed, the QBR can truly act as the nerve center of the organization, transmitting key impulses and strategic signals.

The authors would like to thank Gabor Takacs for his valuable contribution to this blog post.

Learn more about our People & Organizational Performance Practice

Quick Guide to Doing a Strategic Business Review

Chris Leadley

[email protected]

A Strategic Business Review is an audit, or health check, of a company’s current financial and operational position.

The aim of a business review is to find areas in the business that need to be corrected and then work out ways to do it.

By carrying out your own business review you can look into areas that are concerning you and develop real, workable solutions to the problems before it’s too late.

It is part of working on your business rather than in it.

Gain valuable insight into your business with a business review

Identifying, understanding, and solving problems in your business is critical in delivering sustained growth and profitability.

A systematic analysis of the key areas of your business can help to highlight performance issues, helping you to understand what your problems are and why it is important to fix them in order to drive the success of your business.

What areas need to be covered by a business review?

A thorough analysis of the following key aspects of your business should be undertaken:

The review should also examine other critical issues that may affect your business, including:

• Competition
• Market dynamics
• Creditor and stakeholder expectations and objectives
• Legislation affecting the business and industry in general
• Lender considerations

Identifying and understanding the issues in your business is the first step in its transformation. The next step is creating the step-by-step plan, process and action solution needed to solve those issues.

The business review plan

Once you have completed the business review you need to create the plan on how you intend to address and fix the issues found in each of the key areas.

Fixes may include updating your marketing plan, developing a cashflow forecast, or applying for finance to invest in new equipment.

The plan should detail how the fixes will be applied, who will manage them, the resources required, and when they will be done by.

Need help to review your business?

If you want some help to carry out a business review get in touch today. Email [email protected] or call us on 0800 975 0380

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How to: Monthly Business Review

A monthly business review is one of the best ways to make sure your strategic plans stay on track. But how do you avoid getting stuck spending too much time preparing and a too much time in a meeting that may or may not be adding value? This post will give you a roadmap to follow.

What is a Monthly Business Review?

A Monthly Business Review (MBR) is a meeting where you come together to review actual performance against your strategic plan. The primary purpose of this meeting is to provide an opportunity to reflect on the previous period and see if you are still on track to achieve the targets and if necessary, implement corrective actions before it is too late.

Monthly Business Reviews are one of the critical rituals of a company that wants to be excellent at execution.

Why is a Monthly Business Review important?

• Focus: A monthly review of the business will ensure you stay focused on the established vital few priorities.
• Ownership: By encouraging individuals to take ownership of the metrics that are part of the MBR and to commit to corrective actions when required, the level of individual ownership and commitment will increase.
• Reflection: A scheduled period of reflection is critical for learning.  A monthly cadence insures you have 12 periods of reflection in a calendar year.

Focus: Improves communication

Engaging people across your business and providing a specific format where individual KEY metrics are reviewed and discussed will reinforce the focus that those metrics represent.  The purpose of any goal or target is to focus the energy and attention of the goal seekers.  The monthly cadence is a good interval to provide this strategic reminder.

Ownership: Engage individuals to take responsibility

A monthly business review has the potential to pull in greater insight from across your business. Whether you’re sharing information company-wide or sticking with select leaders from each department, it immediately expands the scope of expertise.

The more that every leader and employee knows what’s going on with everyone else, the better you can align and produce effective goals. It also provides the opportunity to identify potential solutions or issues from outside your core team’s responsibilities.

Reflection: A scheduled time to learn and react

It’s easy to let operations and processes become stagnant and standard. Without a regular performance review, any potential problems may remain to fester well beyond when they’re first identified. You don’t want to waste company time and resources on things that are ineffective, but it’s difficult to change course without first processing it.

By setting aside the monthly time for a monthly business review, it provides the opportunity to commit to learning and adjusting anything and everything. This isn’t based on off-hand information but on solid information and data that helps you identify and evaluate what’s most important for your business.

How to conduct your Monthly Business Review

Agenda for a monthly business review.

The Agenda for a Monthly Business Review should include Goals, Metrics, and Projects, but your primary focus should be on the Metrics.  Specifically you should be reviewing each metric and its Target vs. Actual performance.  If the actual performance is not where it should be, you should be looking to ensure that there is a plan to fix it in the next period.

A simple formula to follow for a successful Monthly Business Review:

• State the Strategic Goal or perspective
• Identify the Key Metrics
• Identify the Target Value and the Actual Value
• Express the status as a color: Red/ Yellow/Green
• Add a brief comment for each metric explaining the reason for the color code.

Questions to ask in a Business Review

The following questions are appropriate for a Monthly Business Review:

• Is the strategy or goal still important and relevant?
• Is the chosen metric still the best way to measure our progress?
• What is our progress toward the established target?  (Indicated with color Red, Yellow, Green).

If target is Green , ask:

• Is there anyone who performed exceptionally that should be recognized? (This is a great opportunity to provide kudos)

If the Target is Yellow , ask:

• Do we know why we missed the target?
• Is a corrective action required?

If the Target is Red , ask:

• What is being done to bring this metric back to green?

Best Tools & Resources to Conduct a Monthly Business Review

Download this Business_Review_Template PDF to help you more easily and efficiently manage your Monthly Business Review with metrics and targets in place.

Moreover, you are prompted to use these resources from KPI Fire to conduct better business reviews and maintain your CI projects:

• Balanced Scorecard Examples
• Should you be using a Balanced Scorecard?
• Using the Balanced Scorecard Feature in KPI Fire

If you haven’t done so yet, now is the time to download your free DEMO version of KPI Fire to easily and efficiently plan, execute and manage your Monthly Business Review.

Watch as Keith Norris, CEO of KPI Fire takes you step-by-step on how to use KPI Fire to make your Monthly Business Review the most important meeting of the month…

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About the author: keith norris.

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What Is a Quarterly Business Review and Why You Should Do One

A quarterly business review, or QBR for short, is a meeting between a business and its key stakeholders and customers. It assesses the company’s performance over the past quarter and plans for the next one.

This meeting can be beneficial for businesses of all sizes, as it allows them to track their progress and make changes. In this article, we will discuss the advantages of quarterly business reviews and how they can help your business grow.

Quarterly Business Review (QBR) Definition

A quarterly business review (QBR) is a formal meeting between a company and its key customers. The purpose of a QBR is to review the health of the business relationship and identify any areas of improvement.

QBRs cover the previous quarter’s performance, goals for the current quarter, and any challenges or opportunities that have arisen.

During a QBR, both parties should share feedback and suggestions to maintain a strong relationship.

By setting aside time to review the state of the relationship, companies can ensure that their vendors or customers are satisfied. And that any potential problems are quickly resolved.

Why is QBR is important? 

A Quarterly Business Review is an important part of customer success. It’s an opportunity for customer success managers to review the business and identify areas for improvement.

QBRs also help to build relationships between customer success managers and their customers. By reviewing the customer’s business and identifying areas of improvement, companies show their commitment to the customer’s success.

QBRs give customer success managers a chance to share best practices with their customers and learn about new technologies and approaches that can help their customers succeed. As a result, QBRs are an essential part of customer success.

When are quarterly business reviews needed?

As a business begins to scale, it can become increasingly difficult to keep track of all customers and their specific needs.

In these cases, quarterly business reviews (QBRs) can be an essential way to check in with customers and ensure that their needs are being met.

QBRs provide an opportunity for businesses to ask for feedback, identify potential areas of improvement, and nurture relationships with key customers.

They can also be used to troubleshoot problems, set goals for the future, and review progress made over the previous quarter. As a result, QBRs can be extremely valuable for both the customer and you.

How to conduct a QBR 

At the QBR, you will review your goals and performance for the quarter. Discuss any challenges or changes in strategy, and set an agenda for the next quarter. The QBR is an opportunity to course-correct and make sure that your business is on track to meet its objectives.

To prepare for the QBR, start by reviewing your goals and performance. Take a close look at your numbers and identify any areas where you fell short. Then, take some time to reflect on your strategy. Are there any changes you need to make?

Then, set an agenda for the next quarter. What do you want to achieve? What are your priorities? By preparing for the QBR, you can ensure that it is a productive and valuable exercise for your business.

QBR presentation tips

When it comes to giving a quarterly business review presentation , there are a few key things to keep in mind to make the meeting engaging.

Be sure to prepare your slides and deck in advance, including all relevant KPIs. This will ensure that the presentation runs smoothly and that attendees have all the information they need.

Make an effort to keep the meeting engaging by incorporating interactive elements such as polls or Q&A sessions.

Respect attendees’ time by keeping the presentation concise and to the point.

The benefits of conducting a QBR

A quarterly business review is an opportunity for a company to take stock of its progress and relationships with customers and stakeholders.

By bringing everyone together to discuss recent successes and challenges, a QBR can help to build stronger relationships and create a more united team . You get to properly understand what’s in it for the customer .

Additionally, a QBR can help to set the future direction for a company by identifying areas of opportunity and outlining a plan for how to capitalize on them. It gives you goals to discuss in the next quarterly business review.

The QBR also gives a chance to collect customer feedback that the customer success team and sales team can use to improve products. The quarterly business review session gives a chance to existing customers to have their voices heard.

These business reviews also help avoid marketing myopia as you get to see the market from the eyes of a customer.

Finally, conducting a QBR can build more trust with customers by demonstrating that the company is committed to its success.

By reviewing the past quarter and planning for the next one, companies can ensure that they are making the most of this valuable opportunity.

QBR vs. EBR

Though both Quarterly Business Review (QBR) and Executive Business Review (EBR) involve presentation and discussion of a company’s performance with executives, there are key differences between the two.

The quarterly business review presentation takes place on a quarterly basis. While EBRs occur less frequently, usually only once or twice a year.

QBRs usually involve a wider range of departments and team members, while EBRs are more focused, with only key decision-makers in attendance.

Additionally, QBRs are generally shorter in duration than EBRs. Because they occur less often, EBRs tend to be more comprehensive in nature, with greater opportunity for strategy development and long-term planning.

Both QBRs and EBRs serve as important forums for communication and review. But the frequency and focus of each type of meeting differ according to the needs of the business.

Quarterly Business Review: Summary

The Quarterly Business Review, or QBR, is a meeting that takes place between a company and its customers to review the progress made over the past quarter. It is an opportunity for both parties to identify any areas of improvement and to set goals for the next quarter.

QBRs can be beneficial for businesses of all sizes, as they provide a structured forum for feedback and collaboration. QBRs can help build strong relationships between companies and their clients. QBRs can be an invaluable tool for ensuring continuous improvement and success.

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How to Run a Quarterly Business Review Meeting [+ QBR Template]

Strengthen customer relationships. Keep everyone aligned. Improve retention. Communicate your value. The QBR is a big customer meeting with big goals. Learn how to ace it.

A methodology for amazing meetings. Say goodbye to boring, long, and unproductive meetings.

Over the course of a customer’s relationship with your business, their needs and goals will almost certainly change and evolve. Fluctuations in the market, shifting consumer demands, and business successes and failures all shape outlook and operations.

If you’re not checking in with customers on a regular basis, it’s easy to miss when these changes affect how your customer interacts with your products or services. Depending on how their goalposts move, the value of your offerings can also change.

Quarterly business meetings, or QBRs, are one way to ensure you have a pulse on developments. Regular QBR meetings support customer success and provide valuable insights for your business.

• What is a QBR Meeting?
• Why should I conduct quarterly business reviews?
• What to cover in a QBR Meeting
• Customer Success and QBRs
• How Customer Success Managers Ensure Productive QBRs
• Quarterly Business Meeting Template
• Perfect Your Quarterly Business Review With Meeting Software

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<span class="h-circle">1</span> What is a QBR Meeting?

Not to be confused with a sales pitch, social get-together, or executive business review, a QBR meeting is a strategic session held every quarter in the interest of customer success . A quarterly business review should cover the customer’s current business goals and address how you can support them in reaching those goals.

Quarterly business reviews allow you to maintain an ongoing understanding of your customer’s business needs. With this understanding, you can strategize the best application of your offerings to meet their goals.

In this way, QBR meetings look much more like advising and strategizing sessions than simple updates and reviews. Instead of going over key performance indicators and recycling the same ideas, you’re working with the customer to ensure their future business success.

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<span class="h-circle">2</span> Why should I conduct quarterly business reviews?

There are many benefits to conducting QBR meetings with customers. These include:

1. Strengthening customer relationships.

Meeting every three months creates an opportunity to touch base, connect, and reinforce your business relationship with customers . This isn’t just an opportunity to be social, however. It’s also an opportunity to have important conversations that lead to real action and results for your customer.

2. Keeping everyone aligned.

With regular QBR meetings, it’s easy to check in on business needs and goals and make whatever adjustments are needed to meet them. It also keeps your customers updated on your own business and product developments so they can plan to make the most of your offerings.

3. Increasing retention.

Stronger relationships and alignment mean better customer retention . It can even rise exponentially if you introduce quarterly business review meetings when they weren’t previously happening. All the added attention on customer needs is sure to help with achieving results and creating sticky customers.

4. Communicating value.

Not only are you demonstrating investment in customer success with QBR meetings, the adjustments you make based on communicated needs also show that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to help them reach their goals. If your offering already does most of the work for you, it’s also a recurring opportunity to showcase that ROI.

5. Providing insights.

Conducting quarterly business reviews does more than support your customer’s success. It also provides you with important insights. Is your company consistently delivering on promises? What adjustments have been made based on QBR meeting discussions that could be applied more broadly to ensure better customer experiences for everyone?

The more you know about your customer’s business, and the more you leverage that knowledge to better serve them, the more trust you build. Establishing a regular cadence for checking in on deliverables and requesting feedback makes QBR meetings the perfect practice for ensuring wins all around.

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<span class="h-circle">3</span> What to Cover in a QBR Meeting

It can be easy to get sidetracked in a quarterly business review with social niceties and the desire to pitch new ideas. However, these aren’t main functions of a QBR meeting.

Rather, your objective is to center the customer and find out where you’re meeting expectations, and where you have room for improvement. This makes the QBR meeting a perfect place to lay out a plan for making those improvements.

In terms of what gets talked about in a QBR meeting, here are some common topics:

Previous goals

One main function of a quarterly business review meeting is to track all the progress towards goals. These can include goals around implementation, product usage, or anything else your customer feels is important. Check in on which goals have been met, which are on track, and which need a recalibrated route since the last QBR meeting. A QBR presentation may be helpful here.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

While reviewing goal progress, you and your customer will likely look over KPIs to measure success. Dedicate time to reviewing past performance over the last few months or even year. This is also a good time to look at fiscal performance and quantify your customer’s ROI.

It’s important the customer understands what challenges are in the way of any unmet goals. Without clear communication of obstacles, it can appear that your business is simply not putting in the work to ensure customer success. Be upfront and clear about what’s holding you back to maintain trust.

Opportunities

Of course, wherever there are challenges, there are often also opportunities. Plan ahead of your quarterly business review meetings to bring opportunities to the table after talking about challenges. Explain how these opportunities can be leveraged for your customer’s benefit.

Based on existing progress, challenges, and opportunities, you and your customer will likely need to update your shared goals for the next QBR meeting. Ensure that you clearly understand their business needs and goals so that you can create an executable plan for success.

Once new business needs are understood and goals defined, make sure everyone in the room is clear on what happens next. Plot out the first few steps towards success, and assign tasks to people qualified to tackle them. Prepare to track the progress of these steps to report at the next quarterly business review.

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<span class="h-circle">4</span> Customer Success and QBRs

The relationship between quarterly business review meetings and customer success is undeniable. A regular QBR meeting helps ensure customer success by:

• Building trust. Over time, delivering on next steps and other agreed-upon action items in QBRs will demonstrate trustworthiness to your customers. This trust empowers customers to lean into your offerings, knowing they’ll deliver. With that confidence, they increase their chances of success.
• Offering regular check-ins. If things aren’t going as planned, quarterly meetings make it possible to catch problems early and make a plan to address them. With this practice, it’s nearly impossible to fall too far off the path towards customer goals. If they do, it won’t happen for long. Keeping them on that path with regular check-ins and adjustments makes it easier to hit milestones consistently.
• Providing an opportunity to own issues. If issues come up on your end, a QBR meeting provides the perfect context for owning and addressing them. Once you’ve learned from these experiences, you ensure smoother sailing ahead by working to prevent the issues from happening again. All of this fuels customers towards their goals.
• Regularly acknowledging achievements. It’s sometimes easy to forget how far you’ve come when all you can see is how far you have yet to go. Quarterly business review meetings make it easy to look back on previous meeting notes and illustrate progress over time, boosting customer confidence.

Again, these regular meetings let you and customers touch base often, assisting your customer health index along the way. With the right approach and agenda, you can achieve clarity on important issues on an ongoing basis, lighting the way to success.

<div id="5"></div>

<span class="h-circle">5</span> How Customer Success Managers Ensure Productive QBRs

Ultimately, the responsibility of ensuring productive quarterly business review meetings falls to the customer success manager (CSM). Whether they delegate the meetings to members of the team, assigning each one or more customers, or conduct meetings themselves, the CSM needs to be invested in QBRs to get the most out of them.

Without a QBR meeting, it’s hard for a customer success manager to predict potential pain points and bottlenecks for customers. By contrast, keeping a quarterly business review on the calendar with every customer gives customer success managers a regular touchpoint to ensure delivery of more value and renewal.

While it can be hard to introduce a QBR meeting to customer success management when it’s not already a practice, getting the manager on board makes all the difference. Your first QBR will also serve as a first step towards creating a structured approach to customer success, prioritizing one to one touch with your clients, and better understanding their future goals.

To get started, you’ll need great scheduling software and a quarterly business meeting template.

<div id="6"></div>

<span class="h-circle">6</span> Quarterly Business Meeting Template

Every good meeting starts with a solid agenda. If you’re looking for a free resource, try our customizable quarterly business review meeting template contributed by Nick Mehta, CEO at Gainsight.

This template includes important and helpful agenda sections, along with how Gainsight incorporates customer health and product usage data into their QBR meeting. ‍

‍ You may also want to incorporate your own agenda items, such as the the following.

Common QBR Meeting Agenda Items:

• Reviewing the agenda and confirming objectives
• Check-in and sharing good news
• Reviewing last quarter
• What to stop, keep, and start doing
• Reviewing the annual plan
• Making an execution plan for the next quarter
• Communication Plan

Create your quarterly business review meeting agenda early, filling in necessary details to ensure that both your team and the customer know what to expect. Share it well in advance of the meeting, ideally when you schedule it.

You can invite everyone to offer feedback on the agenda to get the best results. This way, your customer can raise any issues they’re having that you may be unaware of.

Your team can also share documentation on KPIs and other metrics. They can even put together a quarterly business review presentation in advance to expedite the meeting and make the most of everyone’s time.

Ideally, a strong QBR presentation will keep decision makers on both sides of the table well-informed of current issues as well as future opportunities. Followed by strong action items, you can end the meeting on a positive note with key stakeholders.

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<span class="h-circle">7</span> Perfect Your Quarterly Business Review With Meeting Software

Scheduling, sharing agendas, and tracking action items for frequent meetings like QBRs is much easier with meeting software built for those tasks. Fellow is a meeting notes app that simplifies your quarterly business reviews with ease.

Access free meeting templates , collaborate on agendas, and assign action items all in one place with an easy-to-navigate interface. With Fellow, meetings don’t just get easier—they get more productive.

Don't let unproductive meetings slow you down

See the impact of fewer, shorter meetings, increased accountability, and enhanced productivity with Fellow.

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A Guide to Running Outstanding Business Reviews

How to run a business review that elevates the most important issues, has a lower burden for content preparation, and generates impactful actions

In my past life as a Chief of Staff, I was involved in our business review process. It was the "Leadership Meeting", which ran weekly on Tuesday mornings, and was one of the most tense, and time consuming we had. But it was also one of the most valuable, as it was where we decided to focus our attention and resources.

The tension was inherent: We were surfacing and discussing the most critical issues facing the business - and couldn't always find good solutions.

But many of the problems we experienced were solvable:

• Preparation was unnecessarily time consuming
• Discussion had a tendency to drift from underlying issues to data quality
• Actions we agreed on weren't always followed through

This article summarizes my experience, and that of other data leaders I spoke to in order to understand how to run a great business review. Thanks to Justin Wagg from Quip, Dai Renshaw from Nala, and Cliff des Ligneris from GetYourGuide for their contributions.

Building a shared understanding and choosing where to focus

Most organizations have this kind of review meeting, though the names, format and cadence vary. It could be called a weekly business review (WBR), a management meeting or performance review.

However, the aims are broadly the same:

• Review business performance - check in on progress against the company’s most important metrics so everyone in the leadership has a common understanding of performance
• Identify risks and issues - find where the business is likely to miss goals or suffer harm as a result of internal and external factors
• Take action - find the most important areas where devoting management attention is likely to deliver a large impact, and assign these to members of the team

Business reviews are typically inefficient

To understand why it’s worth investing in making business reviews more efficient, consider a relatively typical process. This is similar to the process we ran.

The steps to complete a business review are:

• Update Data: This tends to be a combination of copy-pasting screenshots from BI tool, and updating spreadsheets manually to update charts and tables. Prep may be distributed among a number of different stakeholders and their direct reports, with differing data skills.
• Add Commentary: Business leaders add commentary to explain what is going on in the data this week. Much of this is similar week to week, but some is very specific. This adds richness to the document and the later conversation. This is typically done in a document creation tool (eg Word, Notion, slides)
• Publish: Convert the document to a distributable format (eg PDF), or sharable link
• Distribute: Share the document, eg via email or Slack
• Run meeting: Use the document as the basis for discussion, recording actions and decisions
• Complete actions: In the following week, actions are (or are not) completed

"In my experience, teams typically end up taking screenshots of the same charts in Metabase and dumping them into separate slides." – Dai Renshaw, Head of Data, Nala

There are common problems that make business reviews painful

Let's dive into the problems in a bit more detail.

Content preparation is slow and misses important detail

Good management meetings require good content. This means clear data on the business’ top metrics, as well as adding the knowledge and richness from departments or leadership.

• Data is often prepared manually, which is time consuming: Updating a single slide in our business review could take 30 minutes, to pull the data from the BI tool, wrangle it in a google sheet, update the chart and tables. We had 20-40 slides in our business review pack.
• So much time is spent on data prep that drilling into issues is de-prioritized: Charts that screamed the need for attention often had no accompanying investigation. This limited our ability to choose the next best action, and instead necessitated a "investigate and report back" action.
• Content is only ready just before the meeting, which means pre-reads are not possible: If you are receiving information for the first time in the meeting, you can only offer snap reactions rather than a more considered (or researched) response.

"Readers get lost without appropriate commentary around metrics, using a medium that supports text really helps here." – Justin Wagg, Head of Data, Quip

Meetings lose focus

• Data deviates from the most important metrics : Content has a tendency to expand, and can get into more detail that is necessary or practical for a short meeting.
• Conversation gets sidetracked into lower importance issues : The causes meeting overrun or failure to spend sufficient time on important items.
• Discussion end up focussing on data quality : The result of errors from manual updates, or lack of context provided with the data.

Actions don't get completed

Problems fall into two buckets:

• Actions are not recorded : It typically falls to a participant to take actions, and some may be missed.
• Actions are recorded, but not completed : Typically because the actions are posted to an ephemeral medium like Slack or email, which can easily lead to them being forgotten amongst other priorities.

Streamline your content and focus on meeting outcomes

Addressing these problems means changing how you prepare and run your business review meetings. Things to consider:

Automate data preparation

Set up automated reports that create the right outputs without needing to download and update spreadsheets manually. Tools like Evidence connect directly to your database and pre-populate the data for review.

Focus on the most important metrics

Use the existing, or identify the “North-star” metrics for the business. Focus on these and frame the content around them.

"I stick to the north star metrics only (agreed by the business separately), and their first order drivers (which I defined myself). For example revenue is basket size multiplied by the number of orders, so I include both those metrics too." – Justin Wagg, Head of Data, Quip

Empower a meeting moderator

Select a person in the meeting to act as a moderator. This need not be the most senior person in the room and is not a position of greater authority when it comes to decision making.

The responsibility of the moderator is to keep the meeting focussed. They can both identify when meetings are becoming bogged down and should move on, and take a role in managing the overall content, which can sprawl if not actively managed.

Be systematic about actions

Actions too often start and end their journey in communication tools, like email or Slack. These tools are poorly suited to managing actions as they quickly drop out of the top of people’s inboxes.

Explicitly assign actions to owners, and review their status at the start of the next meeting. It can be helpful to use a tool with task tracking abilities, to ensure they are resolved successfully.

Tools you can use

Choosing the right tool can significantly reduce the burden of meetings where you review data.

The management meeting requires blending two types of content:

• quantitative performance data
• qualitative explanatory knowledge

This can be difficult, as most tools are typically designed to make creating one of these content types easier.

• BI tools can quickly return metrics that describe business performance, but they do not typically support easily adding text in a natural way. This makes using them as a basis for discussion difficult.
• Document and presentation creation tools make it easy to collaborate and explain, but generally support data poorly. Most businesses must manually calculate and insert tables, charts and screenshots each time they prepare a report.

Business Reviews with Evidence: A Management Meeting Template

Evidence is built to make narrative driven reporting easy. It's ideally suited to creating business reviews:

• You can connect Evidence to your data warehouse and add KPIs, charts and metrics that are automatically updated
• It has first class text support , so you can add narrative, context and explanation using markdown.
• It outputs high finish reports designed to be 'executive ready'

This means Evidence saves almost all the time you’d spend preparing content, as well as time spent on formatting slides and content: It looks professional by default.

We’ve put together an example template for running a weekly management meeting.

Steps to start your business review process with Evidence

To create your own business review document:

• Install Evidence and connect it to your data source . Evidence supports most popular data warehouses, as well as data files like CSVs.
• Create a templated page for the correct frequency of your review. For example, if you run a monthly review, create a page called [month-number].md .
• Populate the templated page with your Northstar metrics , adding appropriate context and explanation to each metric, chart or table. It can be helpful to organize by department or team.
• Deploy your Evidence site . Host it somewhere your team can access it.
• Share it with your team : This could be a link to the site, or you can export the report as a PDF and share it via email or Slack.
• Gather commentary from your team . Depending on how you share and run your meeting, this could be inline in the site, or in the email or slack thread where you shared the report.
• (Optional) Track Actions in Evidence : You can use Evidence to track actions, and be reminded of them in the next meeting.

If you want to give Evidence a try, head over to our getting started guide to get up and running.

• > How to Conduct High-Value Monthly Business Reviews for Continuous Improvement

How to Conduct High-Value Monthly Business Reviews for Continuous Improvement

Posted by Maggie Millard

Dec 13, 2023 5:07:59 PM

Imagine a monthly ritual that doesn't just review performance but revolutionizes it. Monthly business reviews can redefine your approach, elevate critical metrics, and propel your organization toward unparalleled growth. The journey to peak performance starts with a commitment to regular reflection. 

For example, Salesforce implemented a practice of monthly business reviews to assess key performance indicators (KPIs), customer feedback, and strategic initiatives. This disciplined approach contributed to a remarkable 25% increase in customer satisfaction within a year, demonstrating how regular and effective monthly reviews can drive positive outcomes and achieve transformative improvements in customer-centric metrics.

Join us as we explore the untapped potential that awaits your monthly business reviews.

What is a Monthly Business Review?

A monthly business review (MBR) is a structured and recurring process in which an organization assesses its performance, reviews vital metrics, and evaluates progress toward strategic goals every month. This strategic practice involves gathering relevant data, analyzing financial and operational results, and discussing key performance indicators (KPIs) to gain insights into the business's overall health and trajectory. The monthly review serves as a platform for informed decision-making, aligning teams with organizational objectives, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

Why is a Monthly Business Review important?

Conducting monthly business reviews offers a range of overarching benefits for organizations, contributing to their strategic focus, management and overall success:

Improves communication and better business conversations

MBRs promote open communication and transparency. By sharing performance data and insights during these reviews, team members build trust and ensure everyone shares the same understanding of organizational goals.

MBRs help align various departments and teams with the organization's strategic goals . By consistently reviewing progress toward key objectives, teams can ensure their efforts are directed toward overarching strategic priorities.

MBRs provide greater insight into resource utilization and efficiency. Organizations can optimize resource allocation by identifying areas of overallocation or underutilization, ensuring that resources are deployed where they can have the most significant impact.

Engage individuals to take responsibility

MBRs foster a culture of accountability by linking individual and team performance to organizational goals. This engagement is crucial for creating a sense of ownership and responsibility among employees.

MBRs provide a foundation for continuous improvement through regular performance review and data analysis. Organizations can identify areas for enhancement, implement targeted initiatives, and track the impact of these efforts over time.

Regular reviews enable the early identification of issues and bottlenecks. This proactive approach allows organizations to address challenges before they escalate, minimizing the impact on overall performance.

A scheduled time to learn and react

MBRs provide a regular real-time assessment of the organization's performance. This allows for timely responses making adjustments to emerging challenges and capitalization of opportunities, enhancing the organization's agility.

Reviewing key metrics and performance indicators in MBRs regularly ensures that decisions are based on up-to-date and relevant information. This informed decision-making is crucial for effective and responsive management.

Adaptability is crucial to success in dynamic business environments. MBRs facilitate adaptability by allowing organizations to reassess their strategies, pivot if necessary, and respond effectively to changes in the internal and external landscape.

Reviewing customer-related metrics regularly ensures established companies have a consistent focus on customer satisfaction and loyalty. This customer-centric approach is vital for sustaining and growing a loyal customer base.

How to conduct your Monthly Business Review 

Conducting effective business reviews on a monthly basis requires a systematic and structured approach. Here's a step-by-step guide on how an organization should conduct MBRs:

Set an Agenda and Establish Meeting Guidelines

Develop a structured agenda and use monthly business review templates for the MBR meeting. The agenda should include sections for reviewing financial performance, operational metrics, progress toward strategic goals, and other pertinent topics. This agenda helps maintain focus and ensures that all relevant aspects are covered.

Invite key stakeholders to participate in the MBRs. Attendees may include department heads, select leaders, executives, and other individuals responsible for meeting the core team's responsibilities or for contributing to strategic objectives. Ensure representation from different functional areas.

Questions to ask in a Business Review

During a Monthly Business Review (MBR), leaders should ask a range of questions to gain insights into the organization's performance, progress toward strategic objectives, and areas for improvement. Here are some key questions leaders may consider asking:

Financial Perspective:

• How did we perform against our financial targets this month?
• Are there any significant variances in financial performance, including revenue, expenses, or profitability, that need attention?
• What impact did our financial performance have on overall organizational health?

Customer Perspective:

• How is customer satisfaction trending, and what feedback have we received?
• Have there been any changes in customer needs or preferences that we should address?
• What initiatives are in place to enhance the customer experience, and how effective are they?

Internal Processes Perspective:

• What improvements have been made in our key internal processes?
• Are there bottlenecks or inefficiencies that need to be addressed?
• How well are we meeting our operational targets, and what adjustments are necessary?

Learning and Growth Perspective:

• What initiatives have been implemented to foster employee development and engagement?
• Are there skills gaps or training needs that require attention?
• How does the organizational culture contribute to learning and growth?

Strategic Initiatives:

• What progress have we made on our strategic initiatives and projects?
• Are there any roadblocks or challenges hindering the execution of strategic plans?
• Are our strategic initiatives still aligned with current market conditions and organizational goals?

Risk and Opportunities:

• What potential risks could impact our performance, and how are we mitigating them?
• Are there emerging opportunities that we should capitalize on?
• How well are we adapting to changes in the external business environment?

Employee Engagement:

• How satisfied are employees with their work environment and roles?
• Are there any concerns or feedback from employees that need to be addressed?
• What initiatives are in place to promote employee well-being and professional development?

Continuous Improvement:

• What lessons have we learned from our experiences this month?
• What specific actions will we take to improve performance in the next month?
• How can we enhance our Monthly Business Review process for better outcomes?

Long-Term Strategy:

• How does our performance this month contribute to our long-term strategic goals?
• Are there adjustments needed in our long-term strategy based on current performance?
• What investments or changes should we consider for sustained success?

Review your financial statements

Financial statements, including the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement, offer a comprehensive view of the company or organization's economic performance. The leadership team can assess revenue generation, profitability, and overall financial stability.

Financial reports provide solid information that aids leaders in making data-driven decisions. Financial statements provide the necessary information for effective decision-making, whether it's resource allocation, investment decisions, or cost-cutting measures.

Using financial statements during an MBR also enables comparing budgeted and actual performance for specific accounts. This analysis helps leaders identify any variances, track and understand the reasons behind them, and make informed decisions to align future activities with budgetary goals.

Reevaluate your milestones 

Clearly articulate the objectives of the MBR process. Identify the key performance indicators and metrics that align with the organization's strategic goals. These metrics should be measurable, relevant, and tied to overall performance.

Relevant data and performance metrics should be collected before the MBR. This data may include financial metrics, operational metrics, customer feedback, and progress on strategic initiatives. Use this information to conduct a thorough performance analysis.

Review your long-term goals and strategy 

Assess progress on strategic initiatives and projects. Discuss any challenges or roadblocks encountered and identify solutions. Ensure the initiatives align with the organization's key objectives and long-term strategic goals.

Provide time to discuss any company issues 

Encourage open-ended discussion during the MBR. Allow participants to share insights, raise concerns, and propose solutions. Foster a collaborative environment where different perspectives are considered.

Use the MBR to identify potential solutions for areas for improvement . Analyze performance gaps and discuss actionable steps to address deficiencies. This proactive approach contributes to continuous improvement.

Set a consistent schedule for the MBRs. A predictable cadence ensures that teams are prepared for reviews and that the organization can adapt quickly to changing circumstances.

By following these steps, organizations can conduct purposeful, collaborative monthly business reviews, contributing to continuous improvement and strategic alignment. Regular and well-executed MBRs are crucial for enhancing organizational performance and for team adaptability, making sure everybody is on the same page.

The monthly business review emerges as a linchpin in the fabric of strategic management, offering organizations an invaluable opportunity to navigate the complex business terrain with precision and foresight. By delving into financial statements, key performance indicators, and strategic initiatives, the leadership team gains a panoramic view of their organization's health, enabling them to make informed decisions, adapt to changing landscapes, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. The importance and value of the monthly business review extends beyond the boardroom, reaching into every facet of the organization, from promoting accountability and transparency to aligning teams with overarching strategic goals. As businesses navigate the dynamic currents of today's global landscape, the monthly business review stands as a compass, guiding them toward sustainable success and resilience in the face of evolving challenges.

How KaiNexus can help 

KaiNexus provides a centralized platform for managing improvement initiatives. It allows organizations to gather and consolidate relevant data, including progress updates, KPIs, and the status of ongoing projects, for monthly business reviews.

KaiNexus facilitates collaboration among teams by providing a platform for communication and feedback. Enhanced collaboration ensures that relevant stakeholders are engaged and actual performance is aligned with organizational goals, which benefits the monthly business review.

KaiNexus offers customizable dashboards , helping organizations tailor data presentations to their needs. These dashboards are instrumental in conveying relevant information during monthly business reviews.

In addition to these helpful features for customers, the KaiNexus blog and website offer valuable tips and tools for anyone looking to optimize business performance and achieve operational excellence. You can subscribe to this valuable content for free.

Topics: Leadership , Improvement Process , Improvement Methodology

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What is a Business Review: Tips for an Effective Business Review

Table of Content

A yearly business review is a vital part of a company’s growth strategy. Not only does it help you to maintain customer relationships but it also aids goal setting.

If you’re not already conducting a business review, read on to find out why it’s so necessary. Along with this, we’ll also provide some tips for getting the most from it.

What is a Business Review?

In short, a business review is an annual or quarterly meeting. The company sits down with clients to look back at the previous period to assess their KPIs, risks, and future growth. Essentially, it’s a meeting to make sure everyone is happy with past and future performance in the customer relationship.

Business reviews can happen both annually and quarterly. Ideally, you should do both for the following reasons:

A business quarterly review (QBR) is more of a quick check-in to ensure everyone is meeting KPIs and staying on the right track. While it’s not as in-depth as the annual review, it allows customers to suggest things they do (or don’t) like without too much time between meetings.

On the other hand, an annual review is a chance to dive deeper into the previous year’s performance. It gives everyone a chance to reflect on what happened and how KPIs were met. You might also look at budgets and goal setting for the coming year.

Why is a Review Important?

A business review is vital for your customer relationship. While your business might be in regular contact with clients, a review is more of a formal sit-down to discuss things in a set environment. As such, it ensures:

• Everyone understands what’s going on.
• By extension, nothing is missed or overlooked.
• Your clients can comment on budget and performance regularly.
• You and your clients are in constant communication in the right way.

Benefits of a Quarterly Business Review (QBR)

Some of the benefits of a QBR might already be obvious in regards to a customer relationship. Even so, here’s an explicit list of why a business quarterly review is a good idea.

Track Overall Success Metrics

Almost all business relationships will be based on some kind of KPIs. Reviewing them quarterly ensures you’re staying on track and that both sides can offer feedback. If you were to only do this annually, you might find you’ve wasted time (and money) by getting off track.

Show Off ROI

ROI (return on investment) is arguably one of the most important parts of any customer relationship. After all, if your clients are paying for a service, they’ll want to see what their money gets them.

Where better to do this than at a QBR? Again, this could be done annually, but sometimes it’s better to meet more regularly. For example, you’re a digital marketing agency and you recently justified a large ad budget. The client will probably want evidence of an ROI as soon as you have some. This is what a business quarterly review can do.

Create Clear Direction

Similarly, a QBR helps to create clear direction in the customer relationship. Meeting every 3 months or so means you stay on track with your goals and timelines. You can also use QBRs to address goal setting for the coming period, whether this means sticking with the same goals or adjusting them slightly.

Either way, there’s no better method for sticking to a direction than meeting regularly to discuss it.

Forge Stronger Relationships

All this boils down to one thing: building better relationships with customers. Offering to meet regularly helps establish trust because it shows you’re honest and open with your work. Rather than hiding potential negatives, taking them to quarterly meetings and wanting feedback helps you look more professional.

Tips for an Effective QBR

So a business quarterly review is just a simple meeting, right? Not necessarily. You should always plan properly for these meetings, so here are 5 tips for an effective QBR.

1. Make an Appointment in Advance

Set up a QBR well in advance so everyone has time to prepare. In fact, why not schedule the next one at the current meeting? This means it’s in the calendar, and you know when you need to be ready.

Also, arrange a brief call a week or two before the meeting. Doing so allows you to ask your client if they want you to bring anything or discuss particular topics. As such, you can be prepared for the meeting well in advance.

2. Share Success Stories

This should be obvious, but make sure your client knows what’s gone right. Tell them what and why things were successful, and be sure to mention the people who helped.

3. Learn from Unsolved Issues

But at the same time, make sure you discuss unsolved issues. These could be unmet goals or differences in expectations. Either way, use them as learning experiences for the next quarter.

4. Avoid the Past (Make Decisions for the Future)

This might seem strange at a business review, but don’t focus too much on the past. You can discuss KPIs, providing you use these to inform the coming quarter. Mention what went well (and what didn’t) but it’s what you’ll do moving forward that’s the important thing.

5. Set Timelines for Success

The bottom line of any goal setting is timelines. You should always have a clearly-defined period for achieving a goal. It doesn’t have to be by the next QBR, but it should be reviewed then. Either way, work together to agree on timelines before signing off on any goals or projects.

Communicate with Your Customers Using Textr Team

Communication is vital in the run-up to a business quarterly review, or at any point in the customer relationship. Make it as easy as possible by using Textr Team .

You can text and call in the same app and use customer tagging and team groups to build better relationships. There’s also call recording for effective reviewing, and IVR is coming soon!

So, download the app on mobile or for your web browser today to begin your 7-day free trial. See what Textr Team can do for your customer relationships!

About the Writer

B2B marketing specialist with expertise in lead generation through text messaging. Unlock your business potential with his proven strategies.

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Published September 08, 2020

What is a quarterly business review (qbr): 5 choices that make or break it.

What is QBR? And why should you do one? Learn how to make the most of your Quarterly Business Reviews with the top 5 choices that are must for a QBR.

QBRs are all about planning. But some choices you make can either make the meeting one to remember or one that your customer never wants to attend again. So, to help you host a QBR meeting that’s value-packed and worth your customers’ time, we’ll cover what it is and five choices that can make or break it in this post.

What is QBR? 

A QBR is a quarterly business review you hold with your customers.  These meetings allow you to discuss your customer’s business, how your product adds value to it, and their future goals. In a typical quarterly business review, you go through all the progress made in the last 90 days, outlining your plan for the next 90 days. This forms an essential part of the CSMs responsibilities for helping a customer reach their Desired Outcome .

However, the value of your QBR all depends on how you conduct it, what choices you make, how deeply you evaluate its agenda, and how thoughtfully you execute it.

1. Is it really needed?

Yes and no. Not every customer is the same. So, whether your customer needs a QBR or not is on a case-by-case basis. Overall, make sure you’re looking at it to add value to their business. Not as another meeting with no real structure or purpose.

2. Should it be held quarterly or as needed?

Another question you must ask yourself is at what frequency should you hold these business review meetings. Should they be held quarterly, monthly, or on an as-needed basis? It depends on the complexity of your customer’s business.

If you are constantly monitoring customer usage, then you may find various blind spots. You should not wait for a quarterly review meeting to have these pointed out.

You can call for a meeting with a specific plan and demonstrate how they can achieve more value from your product. This meeting can be scheduled for a shorter interval on an as-needed basis.

Whereas, when the customer’s business outcomes take time to reflect in their quarterly report, a QBR can be beneficial. This is primarily relevant in a complex B2B scenario where business goals are measured and achieved in months or years.

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3. should you have smart or vague goals.

Understanding QBR’s importance, you probably see that you must have a clear goal in advance. Know the purpose of a quarterly business review, and you are more likely to succeed.

One of the best goal-setting exercises is mentioned in the book The Power of SMART Goals . It talks about setting up SMART goals , which are:

Your goal is not just “retaining customers” but a 90% retention rate , for example.

The goal is not just “to reduce the cost of acquisition” but to reduce it to 10% of the existing cost by the end of 2022’s final quarter.

If the churn rate is 30% then having a goal of reducing churn to 5% within a quarter is unrealistic. An achievable goal must be to reduce it to 20% within a quarter.

(This is just an example. Your context defines the achievable goals you can have).

Result-based

Result-based goals are what makes them real in execution. Process goals, such as conducting a workshop, are not result-based. When results can be measured based on the feedback of your actions, you can check if your benchmarks are achieved.

Finally, there should be a timeframe within which you plan to achieve your goal. If no time frame is given, then you could take a huge amount of time to achieve the goal. A specific period brings in the aspect of accountability to your plan for achieving goals.

4. What should be the content of a QBR?

You want to go into this meeting prepared, so content is valuable.

So, what should your meeting contain?

Create an agenda for the entire meeting and circulate it to all the attendees in advance through email .

Demonstrate Value

During the last quarter, what business outcome have your customers achieved through your product? Demonstrate value using data.

Share Goals

After showing what they have achieved, the best strategy is to show them what more they can achieve in the future. Share the goals and benchmarks you plan for them to achieve.

Share Your Action Plan

Sharing goals alone will not win confidence, you’ll also need to share your action plan. An action plan will help keep everyone on the same page on the next steps and helps keep all parties accountable.  

5. Should you collect customer feedback in QBR?

Customer feedback is a valuable part of QBRs. With that being said, you shouldn’t wait until a QBR to see if your customers are having problems if you noticed changes in their usage. However, this feedback could help you address your customers’ problems with your product before the situation escalates.

What are the different common mistakes that CCMs make while conducting QBR?

Here are some of the common mistakes that CSMs make while conducting QBR:

Directly jumping into the facts

Every point you should cover in your QBR should lead to a discussion. While you might have a lot that needs to be covered, your customer might have a lot to unpack. But you can’t help them get to the root of the issue if you’re not having an active discussion with them.

Conducting a QBR without a solid plan isn’t beneficial to your customers. If anything, they might not attend the next one if they don’t see the value in it. So, create a plan for the meeting, ask questions, and ensure the right people are attending, so your customer can get the maximum value from it.

Concentrating only on the past

 While there should be some focus on past performance, most of the meeting should focus on future goals.

Not allowing for enough participation in the review

Some CSMs unintentionally turn QBRS into monologues. Only covering the points they have and never leaving enough time for their customers to share their thoughts. The best QBRs are a two-way conversation and strategy session between you and your customer.

No follow-up

You can’t assume your customers will remember everything that was discussed during your QBR. Even if they were engaged throughout, people forget and miscommunication do happen. So, you should follow up with your customers after each meeting. Not only does this leave a positive impression on your customers, but it’ll help all parties get a clear picture of the points discussed during the review. It should allow customers to clear their doubts and ask questions with a more open line of communication.

What are the different QBR templates that CSMs can utilize?

Most CSMs aren’t sure where to start when planning for their QBR. So, below, we’ll share some email templates you can use for your QBRs.

Inviting QBR for existing customers

CSM can utilize this email template to invite existing customers to their first QBR. While sending this through email , remember to explain the importance of your customers attending. Also, inform them that this is the first of many quarterly business reviews that you are going to host soon at regular intervals.

Hello <<INSERT FIRST NAME>>,

Thank you for being our continued user of <<NAME OF THE PRODUCT>>.

To ensure that you derive the maximum benefits from our product, we invite you to join us in a Quarterly Business Review session.

Through this review session, we will get the opportunity to share what is working for you regarding our product and what needs to be improvised.

This is the first of many QBRs that you will attend with us. We assure you that all the sessions will provide invaluable insights into our product.

Please provide a suitable time for you to connect for the session.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards,

<<INSERT THE NAME HERE>>

Inviting QBR for new customers

This QBR invitation is for new customers who have just completed their onboarding session.

Hello <<INSERT THE FIRST NAME HERE>>

It is heartening to see you conclude the onboarding process for our product.

To always assure you of our best services, we are inviting you to our first quarterly business review session.

During the session, you will have the opportunity to learn more about our product and voice your opinion about what needs to be improved.

We are confident once you attend this QBR session, you will be a regular attendee of the sessions moving forward.

Please let us know the best time for you to attend the session.

We will wait for your reply.

Follow up after QBR with action items

This email will help you connect with the existing customers and ask them to share their opinions about the session and product. This is where you exchange meeting notes and ask them whether they would like to receive a copy of the quarterly business review presentation .

Hello <<INSERT THE FIRST NAME HERE>>,

I t was great seeing you attend the QBR session. We hope you enjoyed being a part of it, and we will continue to improve on our product moving forward.

Here are some of the notes that we felt would be useful when we connect again.  

• Discussed items (list)  
• Action items for both parties  
• Attached performance reports (Reviewed during meeting)  
• QBR video recording for virtual meetings (in case it is required)  
• Milestone dates if any agreed during meeting  

In case you are looking for a copy of the presentation, please feel free to revert to this email, and we will be happy to provide that to you.

We will be conducting QBR sessions regularly in the future. But do not hesitate to email back if you have any doubts about our product.

Follow up after QBR with no action items

This email will help CSMs follow up with the existing customers and ask them whether they would like to get a copy of the presentation. This email is not to exchange meeting notes , rather it is to ask your customers whether they still have any doubts or queries related to your product that can be deliberated upon.

It was a pleasure having you in our QBR session. We hope it was fruitful for you, and we will continue to move in the right direction in line with the points discussed.

If you wish to get the presentation copy, feel free to revert to this email, and we will be happy to send it across to you.

Also, if you have any doubts about the product, do not hesitate to post your questions and send them here. We will be conducting another QBR session in the near future.

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

Q.1: What things need to be included in the QBR?

A: Here are some of the things that need to be included in the QBR:

• The complete scrutinization of execution of product usage objectives
• The overall performance of the company covered the past fiscal year
• Discussing strategic objectives and challenges
• The things that need to be done for the future
• Upcoming product enhancements and growth opportunities

Q.2: What questions should you ask your customers?

A: Here are some of the questions that should be asked:

• What do you wish to achieve in the next quarter?
• Are there any changes to the strategy since the last time the review was organized?
• Has our product or service helped achieve your objectives?
• Are there any things that you would like to see more often?
• Can we make any particular changes in the review to get better results?

Q.3: What is the importance of QBRs?

A: QBRs allow the companies to strengthen their relationship with their existing customers. It helps build a repo between the two parties, highlight the product’s ROI (return on investment), and understand the value it derives in the eyes of the customers.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, when deciding the ends and outs of your QBR meetings, remember that no one-size-fits-all. The choices you’ll make for one customer may not work for the next customer. And vice versa. But if you plan each QBR with the intent of helping your customers succeed, you’re on the right track to creating quarterly business reviews that are valuable and memorable.

You might also like:

• Customer Success is Not Just Account Management –  Includes steps to start building a fantastic customer success program in your company.
• To understand how SmartKarrot helps SaaS companies keep and grow loyal customers, Request a Demo .

Anshi has over 12 years of experience in demand generation, digital marketing, and managing global teams. In her prior role as head of marketing operations for a high growth US healthcare tech organization she transformed marketing from cost to revenue center.

Published September 08, 2020, Updated May 11, 2023

• Customer Success ,
• Quarterly Business Review ,
• what is QBR

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The Do’s and Don’ts of Executive Business Reviews

The goal of Executive Business Reviews (EBRs) is to demonstrate your unique value to the customer and convey a sense of how important the customer is to you.

When approached thoughtfully, they can help build bridges between your company and your customers, show ROI, remove barriers and forge strong connections that will last throughout the customer’s lifetime. 

Our CEO, Nick Mehta has an entire blog post on how he meets 500+ customers every year and why it matters. The short answer is that Customer Success (CS) CS leaders and their teams need to understand that EBRs are opportunities to improve the trajectory of a customer relationship and grow your business over time.

Let’s start with the basics.

What’s a Good EBR Cadence? 

For an EBR to be impactful and effective, it should be:

• S pecific to the customer 
• T imely , which also means that having a business review every month is not necessarily a good thing
• A ctionable for both the solution provider and the customer
• Ensure joint A ccountability in the relationship
• Offer R ecommendations where you see gaps

(An easy way to remember the above is through the acronym STAAR)

A good cadence for an impactful EBR depends highly on the account ratio per CSM. Generally, one good EBR is better than four standard EBRs where only usage and adoption are discussed. Our recommendations based on CSM to account ratio are:

 < = 1:10, we recommend quarterly EBRs

1:20 to 1:30 we recommend yearly EBRs;

1:40 to 1:50 we recommend once in 18 months, 

>= 1:50, we recommend Digital EBRs.

Now, let’s dig into some EBR do’s and don’ts from a CSM perspective.

✅ DO Give Yourself Enough Time to Prepare  

I can’t stress this enough. Make sure you and your teams have enough time to prepare for an EBR. It’s important to gather customer inputs, align on the agenda, run it by your adoption champions, and share it with all the leaders joining the EBR.

❌ DON’T Rush an EBR

• Don’t schedule the EBR coming out of PTO. You will not be well prepared and will not have the time to do the above.
• Don’t walk into the EBR without running the content by your champions within the customer company or without receiving approval on the agenda from the customer and your leaders.
• Don’t send prep notes or surveys too close to the EBR. Make sure you give everyone ample time to read and respond.

✅ DO Understand Customer Goals 

Understand your customer’s goals, and I mean, really understand them using:

• Account Plans: Use the detailed account plan made with your sales counterpart to inform the EBR.
• Surveys: Use a standard prep survey to gather inputs from your stakeholders prior to the EBR. Make sure you understand the priorities of the highest persona attending the EBR and be prepared to show how those priorities can be accomplished.
• Interviews: If possible, run short (30-minute) interviews with a subset of users (maximum five) across the customer’s organization (individual contributors and managers) at least a month before the EBR. This will help you uncover any enablement, change management, or operational issues that have direct implications on the value derived from your solution. 

Use all the insights gathered to inform the EBR and show the customer how they can gain (even more) value. Anticipate objections or feedback and be prepared to answer them. Prepare your leaders as well. This is a good opportunity to suggest to the customer that they buy relevant services to accelerate and unlock value, enforce processes, invest in change management and enablement, etc. 

❌ DON’T Conduct an EBR Without Knowing Customer Goals

An EBR is not the place where you uncover customer goals. Also, don’t walk into an EBR not knowing how the customer feels about your partnership. 

✅ DO Structure the EBR

Everyone’s time is valuable, especially executives at a customer company. A good EBR will be well structured and will include the following elements:

• Consider breaking the EBR into executive or strategy-focused (the “what”) and operational segments (the “why”) to make the most of each stakeholder’s time. 
• Include introductions and icebreakers because it’s important to always be human-first, even at work.
• Include high-level thought leadership and/or industry trends to frame the conversation. This section should be presented by your CS leadership with the goal of conveying the message that you’re in touch with market needs.
• Company Updates: Confirm your understanding of the customer’s organizational updates and strategic initiatives.
• Customer’s Voice: Consider having the customer review their success stories, vision, and goals. Have your project owner/adoption champion from the customer present accomplishments in front of the customer executive, affirming the positive momentum of the partnership.

❌ DON’T Run Standardized EBRs  

The structure of the EBR can remain the same, but the messaging needs to be tailored to the specific customer. A run-of-the-mill EBR can be easily replaced by automated email/sharing live links of the customer data with the customer. If you’re asking for time from executives and people from both sides to attend, make sure that the content and the discussion are worth everyone’s time. 

• Don’t make assumptions about what the customer is looking for. Always confirm.
• No executive wants to know how your product works without knowing how it aligns with their goals. Always present the business value. 
• If you can’t write a thorough Account Plan in detail, you are not ready for the EBR.
• Nobody wants to be buried in content. You should be focused and have a maximum of three main themes for the EBR. Five slides for every 15 mins will suffice.
• Don’t be too rigid with the EBR. Let it flow based on the conversation.

✅ DO Demonstrate Value and ROI

Ask yourself: Why did your customer purchase your product? How well have you fulfilled that need over the last quarter/year? 

• Present data to show the value of your solution.
• Use adoption and health scores to uncover areas of opportunity.
• It can also be valuable to present benchmarking data. Companies treasure the ability to see how well they’re doing in comparison to their competitors. If you can correlate their success to your product using hard metrics, they’ll be much more likely to continue doing business with you.

❌ DON’T Start From Scratch Every Time

You’ll be surprised at how often you can reuse/repurpose some of the content. At Gainsight, one of our CS Ops team members curates the content for a master EBR deck on a regular basis by looking at the most well-received EBRs. For any given EBR, we typically pick and choose specific slides (almost 70-80%) that make sense for the customer from this master deck. 

✅ DO Provide Recommendations

Frame your talk track around individual stakeholders’ ‘interests vs. talking about features and functionality. Focussing on the product without mapping it to customer goals is the quickest way to lose your audience. 

Recommendations must be thoughtful and specific. A few sources can help guide the section:

• Customer interviews and surveys conducted prior to the EBR.
• Current gaps that are stopping the customer from unlocking the full value of your solution.
• Current products or roadmap items that the customer isn’t using but can help fulfill the customer’s need. TIP: While showing the product, demonstrate the product instead of using screenshots and slides. 

❌ DON’T Upsell / Cross-sell Unless There’s a Real Need

Trying to sell your solutions for the sake of selling hurts your credibility as a CSM. Don’t talk about the feature function of your products unless it aligns with specific customer goals and outcomes.

✅ DO Write an Executive Summary and Lock in Goals

Having a really strong executive summary that calls out the problem that you’re solving for the customer, the value delivered to date, the progress made, and next steps towards unlocking more value is really important.

• Lock in solid goals for the next quarter (or until your next EBR) as your next steps.
• Send a follow-up email the same day or within 24 hours (even if you want to send a detailed follow-up later) thanking them for their time.

✅ DO Be Human-First

Your customers are human-first. Always treat them with respect and encourage a spirit of collaboration. Never make your customer stakeholder look bad or throw anyone under the bus in front of their executives. Focus on the roadblocks, not the people. Always remember, you can win in business while being human-first.

As a next step, check out our master template and use it to help you prepare for your next EBR.

For more on how to conduct excellent EBRs, check out this blog— How to Put the ‘Executive’ Back in Executive Business Review .

More Related Content

5 ways to increase executive attendance at quarterly business reviews, how to put the ‘executive’ back in executive business review, the power of the quarterly business review – qbr.

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What Is A Business Review?

BUSINESS REVIEWS

Persons concerned about the legality under the antitrust laws of proposed business conduct may ask the Department of Justice for a statement of its current enforcement intentions with respect to that conduct pursuant to the Department's Business Review Procedure. See 28 C.F.R. Section 50.6.

The Department believes that the business review process provides the business community an important opportunity to receive guidance from the Department with respect to the scope, interpretation, and application of the antitrust laws to particular proposed conduct. The Department realizes, however, that if the business review process is not timely, the value of the process, and therefore its utilization, may be diminished.

Two of the most frequent types of business review requests the Department has received have involved proposals to form joint ventures or to collect and disseminate business information. Because of the nature of these requests, the Department often finds it difficult to opine on such matters based solely on the information typically provided with the initial requests. Consequently, the Department must subsequently seek additional information. This inevitably adds time and expense to the business review procedure.

In an effort to expedite the business review process with respect to these two types of requests, the Department will offer parties seeking a business review determination the option of providing certain specified information and documents contemporaneously with their initial business review submissions. Where the specified information and documents are provided, and where such submissions provide an adequate basis upon which to determine the Department's enforcement intentions, the Department will make its best effort to resolve the business review request within sixty to ninety days.

This program is subject to the following conditions:

• The request must comply with the procedures for business reviews specified in 28 C.F.R. Section 50.6.
• Parties invoking this expedited procedure must represent in writing that they have undertaken a good faith search for the documents and information specified herein and, where applicable, have provided all responsive material.
• The expedited procedure should not be interpreted as a representation by the Department that it will not request additional documents and information where necessary to assess the conduct under review.
• The Department is unable to commit to a rigid deadline for processing business review requests. The time frames specified herein are targets, not deadlines.
• This program is being implemented on a pilot basis. The Department reserves the right to alter the expedited review procedure at any time.

Parties seeking review determinations are welcome to submit such additional information as they deem appropriate to assist the Department in understanding the proposed conduct.

INFORMATION AND DOCUMENTS TO BE SUBMITTED

A. JOINT VENTURES

Information sufficient to show:

• The name of the venture, the address of its principal place of business, and its legal form and ownership structure;
• The persons or firms expected to participate in the venture and the nature of their contribution;
• The purposes and objectives of the venture, together with any limitations on the nature or scope of its activities or operations;
• The products or services the venture will develop, produce, market or distribute;
• The extent to which participants in the venture currently develop, produce, market or distribute products or services that will be developed, produced, marketed or distributed by the venture;
• The identity and competitive significance (described in terms of market shares, capacities, etc.) of all persons or firms that participate in the relevant product and geographic markets in which the venture will operate;
• Any restrictions on the ability of participants in the venture to compete with the venture, individually or through other entities;
• Any restrictions on the flow of information from the venture to its owners;
• The ten largest customers (actual or projected) for any products or services that will be offered by the venture in the relevant geographic market and an estimate of their annual purchases;
• The requirements for entry into any relevant product or geographic market in which the venture will operate, together with the identity of other persons or firms believed to be positioned to enter within one or two years; and
• Any business synergies, efficiencies or other benefits likely to flow from the venture.

All documents: 1. Reflecting or effectuating formation of the venture, including charters, by-laws, articles of incorporation, and partnership, joint venture or asset purchase agreements, or the most recent drafts of such documents;

2. Discussing, reflecting or representing the business plans or strategies for the venture;

3. Prepared within two years prior to formation of the venture, discussing, reflecting or representing the business plans or strategies of any venture participant with respect to any product or service that will be offered by the venture; and

4. Discussing or relating to the legality or illegality under the antitrust laws of the venture, or the impact of the venture on competition or the price of any product or service.

B. INFORMATION EXCHANGES

• The persons or firms expected to participate in the information exchange;
• The purposes and objectives of the information exchange;
• The nature, type, timeliness, and specificity of the information to be exchanged (a sample of all information to be exchanged should be provided);
• The method by which the information will be exchanged;
• The characteristics of the market(s) in which the information will be exchanged, including the product(s) or service(s) related to the information to be exchanged, the homogeneity of the product(s) or service(s), the pricing and marketing practices typically employed by firms in the market(s), and the availability of information concerning market conditions, individual transactions and individual competitors;
• The identity and competitive significance (described in terms of market shares, capacities, etc.) of persons or firms that participate in the relevant product and geographic markets, but will not participate in the information exchange;
• The ten largest customers in the relevant geographic market for any product(s) or service(s) involved in the information exchange and an estimate of their annual purchases;
• Any safeguards that are planned to prevent disclosure of firm-specific information to competitors; and

All documents:

• Reflecting or representing the agreement(s) among the parties to exchange information or the most recent drafts of such documents; and
• Discussing or relating to the legality or illegality under the antitrust laws of the information exchange or the impact of the information exchange on competition or the price of any product or service.

Working From Home

What Is A Business Review? Why Should You Be Asking For Them?

What is a business review, why should you be asking for them.

Does your business or company need reviews? And who provides these reviews for you?

As a business owner whether you are managing a large franchise like McDonald’s or the tiniest of “Mom and Pop Shops” your customer reviews can make or break your business.

Today the first place people look is to the internet when they are trying to find everything and the first thing they look at is the reviews.

Investigating why customer reviews are essential to your business success and profitability today is vital. Many corporations, franchises, chains, and local businesses’ outsource this to SEO Experts to keep their rankings high.

My article today is going to help you stay informed of why you as a business owner large or small need to heed this advice finding a way to get these reviews from your customers.

Why You Want Reviews

A business review is a critique of a business as a whole by its customers. Customers will include elements in business reviews such as order experience, delivery, cleanliness, customer service, quality of product/service, etc.

Business reviews are written by customers as the result of their experience with that company or business, as well as with the product or service you are providing for them.

What exactly reviews can do for your business is in the snippet above.

Most people think of reviewing a business mostly for restaurants or the service-based industries. All businesses’ need to be aware that having reviews from their customers can increase their bottom line profitability by listening to their customers.

All companies or businesses’ love hearing about all the good reviews from their customers. These reviews boost their credibility making others want to visit their establishment or use their products and services.

We all know that you can never please all of the people all of the time right? What happens when you start getting bad reviews? How is this going to affect your business?

Exactly business is going to take a downslide and quickly if these reviews are found online. Ignoring just one bad review might seem like it is not a big deal, but that could be your warning there are more on the way.

Even if that one customer was just having a bad day taking it out on your business you need to respond to them getting to the core of the issue.

Taking this time to find out if the customer was just having a bad day or maybe there is an issue with your business you were unaware of.

An immediate solution can be implemented stopping any further damage to the reputation of your company or business. This will also enable you to invite that customer who provided the bad review back showing a solution has been established.

When hiring personnel for your company/business be aware that these individuals do represent you their appearance, attitudes, and mannerism will and can affect your profitability.

Even those who work remotely away from an office representing you whether over the telephone or in person. These people need to understand that their actions will affect a businesses survival or possibly having them close their doors.

How to Get Reviews

Now that you know how important reviews are to your company/business exactly how do you go about getting them?

Businesses today that do not have a website presence online need to get one immediately. Without a website on the major search engines (especially Google), you are losing customers on a daily basis.

The most logical way is to ask your customers for a review directing them to your website if possible. But you have other options that can give them a nudge toward leaving you a review helps to boost the business profitability.

Considering the vast use of mobile smartphones today having an Opt-in on SMS works wonders to give customers the nudge to leave comments on a review.

It could be simply a few questions for them to answer about your business creating a positive review of the product or services offered.

Placing your website URL on the back of your receipt so customers can visit your website with a link to review your products and services. But also can be a reminder to leave you feedback for future analysis.

Yelp is not exactly new but people do use it to find reviews of places they are looking to visit. Placing a check-in offer on Yelp could help with having people visit then leave you a great review.

Never be afraid to ask your customers for a review, especially, if you have employees trained in the art of asking. This will help get the positive feedback needed to increase the popularity of your products and services.

Who Should Handle Reviews

Large corporations, such as, Amazon, have a team of personnel trained in handling “Reviews” or “Customer Complaints” would be what most people call them.

Reviews for a business not only affect the foot traffic or profitability of the business, but also the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of a businesses’ website.

Making sure to respond to all the reviews customers have left for you is vital. This includes the bad ones working with that particular customer can result in a new review from them changing their review to a good or even great one.

A single bad review of your business does not mean that there is a problem, but taking the time to investigate the reason for it could stifle more of the same in the future.

Would not an ounce of precaution today to prevent this from happening again be worth knowing you are not looking at a serious business flaw?

Over 64% of all consumers search Google daily for reviews, FACT. Which means 6 out of 10 people are looking at reviews on the internet.

Negative reviews will affect a customers decision too, 94% reported they have avoided a business due to the negative reviews they found online.

Building trust with active management handling reviews the good along with the negative can and will affect your business. 85% of customers will disregard reviews older than 3 months. 89% read the responses of customer reviews by the business.

When you take into consideration there are more than 4 Billion consumers online today these figures begin to make more sense. Knowing what kind of impact reviews have on your business having a person trained in handling reviews is a must.

In Conclusion

You as a business owner whether large or small now have facts to base why it is important for your business to have consumers give you reviews.

In today’s technology-driven world an online presence is essential to build a well-established business; consumers can trust ensuring your profits now and into the future.

Are you a business owner without an online presence? Do you not have a means of getting consumer reviews?

Taking your business to the next level is not difficult, you can contact me directly at [email protected]

Interested in learning how to do this yourself? Or possibly you would like to begin your own online business? Then all you need to do is click the box below “Create Your Free Account Now” No Credit Card Required with no obligation to upgrade.

Please leave all comments, suggestions, or questions you have for me in the space provided below. I answer these usually within 24 hours.

Thank you for stopping today to read my article about “What is A Business Review”.

Best wishes to your future success,

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Embracing Business Practices That Actually Improve the World

• Caitlin McElroy,
• Roberta Roesler,

What organizations need to know about adopting “regenerative” practices that actively help ecosystems and communities — not just minimize harm to them.

The science is clear that the track we’re on is not good enough to prevent further catastrophic effects from climate change. We’re beyond a point where we can merely aim to do less bad; we need to actively regenerate the areas that have experienced significant degradation. Regenerative businesses aim to improve ecosystems and communities, rather than simply minimize harm to them. But in this rapidly expanding, philosophically attractive, and still unsettled space of regenerative business, those who want to take action on regeneration are working from many definitions and approaches. The authors unpack some of the competing definitions of regeneration and show how certifications can help organizations ensure their regeneration strategies and practices support a truly regenerative future.

At the COP28 conference late last year, regeneration emerged as a focus for business leaders. Regenerative businesses aim to improve ecosystems and communities, rather than simply minimize harm to them. It’s no wonder it’s a hot topic — the science is screaming at us that the track we’re on is not good enough to prevent further catastrophic effects from climate change. According to the Stockholm Resilience Centre, we’ve already crossed six of the nine planetary boundaries , “ processes that are critical for maintaining the stability and resilience of [the] Earth system as a whole.”

• Char Love is global director of advocacy at Natura &Co and executive in residence at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.
• CM Caitlin McElroy , PhD, is a departmental research lecturer at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford.
• RR Roberta Roesler , PhD, is head of make-up development, process, and formula sustainability at Avon International and was previously global R&D director for regeneration and circularity at Natura &Co.
• EF Eve Fraser is a climate policy analyst at the NewClimate Institute and was previously a research assistant at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford.

Partner Center

About SoFi Invest

• Overall Rating
• Pros and Cons
• Ways to Invest
• How SoFi Compares
• Related Terms
• Methodology

SoFi Invest Review 2024

Paid non-client promotion: Affiliate links for the products on this page are from partners that compensate us (see our advertiser disclosure with our list of partners for more details). However, our opinions are our own. See how we rate investing products to write unbiased product reviews.

Get up to $1,000 in stock when you fund a new account.

$0 ($1 to start investing); $5 fractional shares; $2,000 for margin trading

0% for active trading and automated investing

• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. No minimum to start investing
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. No account or trading fees, and low fees to own funds
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. Access to Certified Financial Planners at no additional charge
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. IPOs available
• Check mark icon A check mark. It indicates a confirmation of your intended interaction. SoFi 1% IRA match
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. No tax-loss harvesting, an advanced investing technique where you sell a stock or mutual fund at a loss for a tax benefit
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. No option for stop-loss orders when actively investing. SoFi's active investing account only uses market orders
• con icon Two crossed lines that form an 'X'. Currently only available to US residents

SoFi Invest us a great platform for US investors who are looking for an intuitive online trading experience, an open active or automated investing account.

• Promotion: Get up to $1,000 in stock when you fund a new account.
• App store rating: 4.8 iOS/4.1 Android
• Consider it if: You want an easy-to-use platform paired with rock-bottom pricing.

SoFi Invest is an all-inclusive online brokerage for both passive and active investors. Buy IPO stock, build your nest egg, or invest in alternative investments like venture capital, private credit, and commodities. Cryptocurrency trading on SoFi Invest is no longer available. 

The easy-to-use platform provides investors with portfolio-balancing tools, financial planners, and curated content from SoFi's educational content hub. As one of the best robo-advisors , SoFi's cost-effective automated trading platform offers goal-based investing strategies, simple diversification, and auto-rebalancing. 

You can trade stocks, ETFs , fractional shares, IPOs, options, commodities, and other alternative investments. Retirement-focused investors can earn a 2% match on all SoFi contributions through Tax Day on April 15. Stocks, fractional shares, and ETFs are available for commission-free trading with SoFi Invest.

But if you're simply looking to start investing, SoFi has all you need, with complimentary access to Certified Financial Planners ( CFPs ). Only US residents are eligible to open an account.

Who is SoFi Best For? 

SoFi Invest is best for traders wanting to invest in commission-free stocks, ETFs, and options. It offers a good selection of accounts, including a self-managed brokerage account, a robo-advisor , and retirement savings accounts (both active and automatic options available). 

Educational resources and financial advice from SoFi make it ideal for beginner investors looking for low-cost trades and strong financial planning resources. It's also a great option for folks with other SoFi accounts as it is easy to move money between SoFi Checking and Savings and SoFi Invest accounts. 

However, SoFi doesn't offer tax-loss harvesting. Advanced traders can only access stop-limit orders for whole shares during market hours. It's also not great for traders wanting to invest in cryptocurrencies as SoFi no longer supports crypto-trading. The remaining SoFi crypto accounts migrated to Blockchain.com.

SoFi: Overall Rating

Sofi invest pros and cons, is sofi invest trustworthy.

SoFi has received an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau . The BBB uses a grade range of A+ to F when evaluating company trustworthiness and considers several factors — including customer complaint history, licensing and government actions, and advertising issues — when reaching a final rating.

The BBB says its ratings don't guarantee a company's reliability or performance.

December 6, 2023, FINRA sanctioned four firms (M1 Finance, Public Investing, SogoTrade, and SoFi) to pay $2.6 million for allegedly failing to establish, maintain, and enforce a supervisory system. The brokerages agreed to pay the $2.6 million without admitting or denying the charges. 

Ways to Invest with SoFi

Active investing account.

SoFi Active Invest is a brokerage account that gives you 100% control to buy and sell commission-free stocks, ETFs, and fractional shares. Options trading is also available a multiple trading levels (SoFi currently offers long puts and cover calls and buy writes) and with no contract fees. 

As the name implies, this account is best for active traders wanting to pick and choose their portfolio of investments. Those with a SoFi Active account are automatically eligible to become a SoFi member, which grants you access to product discounts, exclusive events, and more. 

As a member, you can also invest in initial public offerings (IPOs) for no minimum, which are shares sold by privately owned companies to the general public.  In addition, members can access broader portfolio diversification n and growth potential by investing in alternative investments like commodities, foreign currencies, real-estate, and pre-IPO unicorns. Access short-term money market funds, interval funds, and professionally managed mutual funds. 

SoFi Automated

SoFi Automated Investing accounts to invest your funds in a pre-built portfolio of SoFi ETFs and ETFs from other brokerages like Vanguard and BlackRock. SoFi assesses your risk tolerance, time horizon, and investment goals to create your investment portfolio .

Automated investing solutions by SoFi include goal-planning strategies like saving for a home, retirement, getting married, planning to travel, or setting up a college fund. For no extra cost, automated accounts come with one-on-one guidance from financial advisors to help you reach your goals. 

Access investment planning tools like automatic portfolio rebalancing (every quarter), recurring deposits, and portfolio diversification tools. Regarding account types, SoFi Automated Investing supports individual investment accounts, joint accounts, and IRAs.

You only need $1 to start investing. There are no advisory fees with SoFi Automated Investing. 

Retirement savings accounts

All SoFi active and automated IRAs are now eligible to earn an automatic 2% match on contributions. That means every dollar deposited into your account will receive a 2% match from SoFi. Match contributions won't count toward your annual contribution limit. 

Like other automated accounts, SoFi's robo-advisor creates a customized portfolio of stocks and bonds based on your risk tolerance, time horizon, and retirement goals. However, IRAs are also available as active investing accounts.

Retirement account options include: 

• Traditional IRA
• Rollover IRA

You'll also get access to a handful of financial tools and planning resources, including SoFi financial planners, goal-building tools, auto rebalancing (for automated accounts), and member benefits. 

Margin trading accounts

If you're eager to invest but don't currently have the funds to make the purchase, you can open a margin trading account and take a loan from SoFi that finances up to 50% of your next investment purchase. SoFi can also loan you cash at a 10% annual interest rate. The payback feature assists you in paying back your loans on time. 

Toward the bottom of the webpage on margin trading, SoFi warns against inexperienced investors opening a margin account due to the increased risk associated with margin trading. Investors are also required to have at least $2,000 in their accounts.

Investment options

SoFi offers stocks, bonds, fractional shares, ETFs, options, and IPOs with a focus on building long-term wealth. Investment options will vary based on the kind of account you open. For example, only folks with an Active Investing account can access IPO trading. 

Most of SoFi's investing portfolio diversification focuses on low-cost Core ETFs and Thematic ETFs, like:

• SoFi Select 500 ETF (SFY): Assets from 500 of the largest publicly traded US companies
• SoFi Next 500 ETF (SFYX): Assets from 500 mid-level US companies
• SoFi Weekly Income ETF (TGIF): Mix of investment grade and high-yield fixed-income securities 
• SoFi Weekly Dividend ETFs (WKLY): Assets from global companies that consistently pay dividends
• SoFi Web 3 ETF (TWEB): Fast-growing technology companies building the next generation of the internet 
• SoFi Smart Energy ETF (ENRG): Companies that focus on sustainability and building cleaner, reliable energy systems
• SoFi Be Your Own Boss ETF (BYOB): Companies developing new ways to improve access to goods, services, and work 
• SoFi Social 50 ETF (SFYF): SoFi's top 50 stock options

Available alternative investments include a range of commodities, venture capital , real estate, foreign currencies, private credit, hedge funds, and pre-IPO unicorns.

Low fees are one of SoFi's biggest perks. It doesn't charge advisory or management fees, and certain trades are commission-free (stocks, ETFs, and fractional shares). There technically isn't an account minimum to open a SoFi Invest account. But there is a required $1 minimum to start investing for all account types. 

Fractional shares can be bought in quantities of $5. So even though it isn't technically an account minimum, you won't be able to purchase fractional shares of a stock or ETF unless you have at least $5 in your account. Similarly, you need at least $2,000 to open a margin trading account.

Margin trading charges a 10% annual interest rate on your margin loan that is accrued daily and is deducted from your account once per month. Your interest rate is calculated daily by automatically multiplying your outstanding margin debit balance by the 10% annual interest rate and then dividing by 360. 

SoFi — Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

SoFi Invest is a popular investment platform suitable for active and passive investors looking for low-cost trading options. Access commission-free stocks, ETFs, and fractional shares with an active SoFi Invest brokerage account. SoFi Automated, the platform's robo-advisor, offers personalized portfolios diversified across a range of low-cost ETFs. Plus, automated accounts get access to one-on-one financial advice so you can better reach your goals. 

SoFi Invest sticks out as one of the best investment platforms for its beginner-friendly interface and low-cost trades. Whether you're looking to hand-pick assets or get an automatic diversified portfolio recommendation, SoFi helps investors reach their goals through low-risk investing strategies. 

There's no minimum to open an active or automated account with SoFi, but you will need at least $1 to start investing. You'll get commission-free trading with SoFi Invest, but only for stocks, ETFs, and fraction als. Options have no contract fees, but you may have to pay a commission. Fractional shares can only be bought in $5 quantities. There's a $2,000 minimum requirement to unlock margin trading. 

SoFi Invest is one of Business Insider's top picks for beginner investors due to the platform's low fees, educational hub, easy-to-use interface, simplified trading strategies, and range of financial products. Whether you're looking to hand-pick stocks, save towards retirement, or diversify your portfolio with commodities — SoFi has got you covered. 

Experienced investors can use SoFi's integrated financial services ecosystem to access a suite of financial and estate planning features. Active investing accounts allow for hands-on portfolio management, with the ability to trade options contracts and IPOs. However, SoFi Invest does not offer as many advanced charting tools and features as other investment platforms. 

Along with investing through SoFi, you can also invest in SoFi. SoFi Technologies , Inc. stock is under the ticker (SOFI) on the Nasdaq. If you're considering investing in SoFi stock, review the company's history and market performance to ensure it's a good idea before buying.

You can earn up to $1,000 in stock when you fund at least $25 in a new SoFi Invest Active account within 30 days of opening. After meeting the requirements, you can choose one promotion piece to identify how much you'll win. There's a 0.028% chance of earning the $1,000 bonus and more than an 85% chance of earning only $5. 

How SoFi Invest Compares

SoFi Invest vs. Robinhood

SoFi Invest and Robinhood are competitive investment options for low fees, simple user interfaces, and IRA matching contributions. However, each platform offers different account types and investment choices.

Robinhood and SoFi Invest are the only online brokerages that offer matching bonuses on IRA contributions. Currently Robinhood provides a 1% match (3% for Gold members), so SoFi's new 2% match has it beat. 

While both are great for traders of stocks, ETFs, margins, and fractional shares, SoFi offers a wider range of account types (e.g., automated investing accounts and more IRA options). Robinhood Investing doesn't offer a robo-advising option or SEP IRAs. 

If you're interested in margin trading, Robinhood offers a lower interest rate for Robinhood Gold members (ranging from 8%) compared to SoFi. But non-Gold members will have to pay up to a 12% interest rate, making SoFi the better option. 

Robinhood review

SoFi Invest vs. Wealthfront

SoFi and Wealthfront mainly differ when it comes to investment types and features. SoFi and Wealthfront Investing both offer self-directed and automated accounts. However, Wealthfront also offers 529 plans, a high-yield bond portfolio, and crypto trusts.

With a Wealthfront brokerage account, you can invest in stocks, fractional shares, ETFs, index funds, and bond ETFs. Self-directed Wealthfront accounts have a $1 account minimum, but automated accounts have a much higher $500 account minimum. So, if you're seeking out a robo-advisor specifically, SoFi could be a better option.

But unlike SoFi, Wealthfront does offer tax-loss harvesting and additional features like US direct indexing and smart beta tools. 

Wealthfront review

Methodology: How We Reviewed SoFi Investing

When reviewing investment apps, we use Personal Finance Insider's rating methodology for investing platforms to compare and examine pricing, account types, investment availability, and overall customer experience. Each platform receives a rating between 0 and 5.

Investment platforms offer varying assets, financial tools, fees, and other resources. Some investment apps are better for more advanced investors or active investors, while others may better suit beginner investors and passive investors. SoFi Invest was evaluated with a focus on how it serves in each category.

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