All too often, Business Reviews stop at a project status update and miss what really matters: the impact for the customer and alignment on the future. To help you, Elliot Ghnassia, CCO of Sociabble, shares his best practices for turning your QBRs into engaging, compelling meetings your customer will look forward to!
What are the role and objectives of Business Reviews?
It's an important topic. To understand the Business Review (BR) as a whole, you can approach it from two angles: the CSM's and the customer's.
As a CSM, you want to secure the renewal of the partnership, gauge the level of risk and talk things through with the customer. But the most useful approach is to look at the Business Review from the customer's point of view, which is to align the partnership with the project's current and future business impact, relative to the investment and strategic needs.
In other words, we're supposed to be there to help customers deliver value. So it's essential to demonstrate the positive impact of their investment, whether immediate or longer term, particularly at a time when many customers opt for budget cuts if the expected results aren't achieved: a major churn factor in B2B.
How do you make the Business Review a must-attend meeting for the decision-maker?
I think there are three main areas to consider to make a Business Review an unmissable event:
#1. The first area: why the Business Review matters
We often see that the customer doesn't really understand the point of the meeting. There are five essential elements that give a Business Review its value, whatever the type of project:
- Stepping back to look at the big-picture results
- Business alignment of the project with the budget
- Availability and cost of resources
- Consistency with changing needs
- Future prospects
At Sociabble, to help our customers see the point of a Business Review, we challenge them by framing the topic so they ask themselves: does it make sense to hold this kind of meeting without an expert by our side, able to bring perspective and benchmarks and to identify areas for improvement?
#2. The second area: context
The other factor to take into account is context. You need to distinguish between situations where the project lead can be considered a champion and those where they're a detractor.
If you're dealing with a champion, you can easily work together to create an engaging, memorable Business Review that makes the decision-maker want to attend the next ones. The champion can share as much information as possible about the ultimate decision-maker, such as their favourite topics, expectations, challenges and pain points.
In the opposite case, the project lead isn't motivated or is reluctant to hold the BR with the decision-maker. A colleague reminded me of an effective technique for dealing with this: the SPIN method, which works through questions and can just as well be used to handle customer objections.
#3. The third area: how the Business Review runs
The final point for making the BR unmissable is to offer a customer-focused, high-level conversation. Once you've got the decision-maker in the room, you need to hold their interest by focusing on strategic information rather than operational detail.
What are the tips for staying high-level during the Business Review?
Before getting into the heart of the matter, I first recommend keeping the business objective in mind. It's a prerequisite, an underlying thread that guides the whole Business Review and keeps it high-level! That means identifying the strategic objectives for which the customer chose your company.
Next, you need to distinguish between the objective itself and its context.
The reason: one objective can have several contexts, which can completely change how you approach a decision-maker. For example, a customer whose goal is to improve employee retention may be operating in two very different contexts: rapid growth requiring new talent or, on the contrary, talent leaking to competitors, which means recruiting more to close the gaps.
If you don't know the context, it's very hard to have a relevant conversation with the decision-maker and understand what drives them. To stay high-level during the Business Review, I also recommend:
- bringing up historical ROI and forecasts as early as possible in the conversation,
- highlighting the customer's successes,
- dealing with operational topics in a project committee ahead of the BR,
- taking a continuous improvement approach by talking about future prospects.
How important is the future in the Business Review?
If you focus only on the past in a Business Review, the reality is that you're conducting a project post-mortem! Renewing the partnership is something that happens in the future, but the past is a tool that serves the future. It helps you better understand and tackle the challenges and opportunities ahead, and so build a stronger, longer-lasting partnership.
Should you share the slides with the champion before the BR?
At Sociabble, we usually share the presentation with the champion before the Business Review. But if we're dealing with a detractor, we may choose not to share it to avoid friction: after all, it's the decision-maker we need to satisfy.
What's more, the essence of an effective Business Review lies in the quality of the discussion; the slides are just tools. The best BRs are those that prioritise a business-focused conversation, and very often customers want to schedule another session to take the discussion further.
When and how should you present the Business Review?
People generally talk about the Quarterly Business Review (QBR), but that imposes the meeting frequency on customers. That's why it's better to be flexible and agree on a frequency that works for the customer and for the project's progress, whether that means a monthly, quarterly or even annual BR.
As for the structure of the Business Review, it varies from one company to another. At Sociabble, we generally build it around four steps:
- Encourage customer feedback before even talking about objectives. If the project is in trouble, it's better to skip this step, as it could be counterproductive.
- Deliver a high-level executive summary (ROI, successes, areas for improvement).
- Put messages into context with detailed data where needed. You can skip this step if you have an excellent rapport with the decision-maker.
- Set out short- and long-term prospects to get the customer involved.
How do you move away from a top-down approach and make your customer accountable?
The Business Review is a conversation: the opposite of a top-down approach where the customer simply listens, as in a traditional presentation. As soon as you raise a topic, you need to ask for feedback quickly and clarify everyone's roles so the decision-maker, who has the big picture, naturally becomes part of the decision-making process.
In addition, the AMPM method (Activity Measurement & Performance Measurement), developed by Sue Nabeth Moore, is very useful for making customers accountable and challenging goals that are too ambitious compared with the resources available and the actions required. A summary of the discussion is then added to a Success Plan, which is updated from one Business Review to the next.
What results should the customer and the CSM expect from the Business Review?
The results expected at the end of the Business Review, together with the customer, are mainly about confirming a shared view of and alignment on the actions to take, the risks, current and future needs, and the added value perceived and delivered.
Internally, you'll want to confirm the potential renewal of the partnership, the opportunities, the actions and the KPIs to track to keep the process under control.
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