The Quarterly Business Review (QBR) meeting is an important event for improving sales effectiveness. Over the years, I’ve seen QBRs progress from chest-beating sessions that celebrate the winners and goad everyone else, to more thoughtful and inclusive meetings that can transform an entire company. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of your QBR process.
Done right, the QBR process is an opportunity to motivate the team, improve sales effectiveness and gain alignment across all departments. The entire organization can learn more from the frontline sales troops than almost any other method available. Yes, it can be expensive (in both money and time) to spend a couple of days listening to sales people talk about deals, but there is no better way to understand how your product performs in the real world. For people in marketing, product and engineering it can be a sobering experience.
Worth The Price
While more companies have moved to a remote model, the best QBRs are done in person. Yes, it’s expensive to fly people out, but getting the team fully engaged during this meeting is completely worth it. It transforms the meeting from a one-way reporting function, into a more effective way of shaping the entire go-to-market strategy.
Selling is a team sport. So pull together everyone from Sales (quota-carrying reps, sales development, system engineers, sales operations) as well as colleagues from marketing, product, engineering and customer success. Remember, nothing happens until a customer buys something. You want the entire company thinking about ways to help the sales team close bigger deals faster. That’s key to building a high-performance culture.
Keep in mind what the QBR meet is and is not. It’s not forecasting meeting, it’s not a deal review meeting, it’s not a one-on-one performance review. It’s a territory review designed to figure out what’s working and what’s not within a given region or segment. In the early days, it is best to review all territories and segments together since this has the advantage of encouraging cross-pollination of ideas and best practices across teams.
There should be at least one representative from every major functional area at the meeting so that they hear what’s happening with prospects, customers and competitors. By having a more diverse audience you can brainstorm ideas, develop campaigns or content faster than would happen when information flows second hand or not at all.
Coming off a good quarter, a QBR meeting has a lot of positive energy. People want to celebrate the wins they’ve achieved and often they’re excited about deals in their pipeline. While there’s nothing wrong with celebrating a positive quarter, the purpose of the QBR meeting is much more than that. It helps inspire everyone toward doing better. And after a tough quarter, it assures the sales team that they are not alone facing the challenges. They know they are heard and that other departments are there to help.
The QBR meeting isn’t a rah-rah session. It’s meant to provide a level-set on what’s happening with customers and prospects. So everyone can see where pitches are working and where they are not. What kinds of prospects are excited about the product and where are they finding it too complex and not worth the trouble? Where are deals getting stalled and what techniques have been successful getting them moving again?
While there is a tendency sometimes to judge every deal as a test of the salesperson who owns it, when you review many deals together, you should start to see patterns that go beyond the sales rep. You should then identify actions that can be taken in engineering, product and marketing that help the sales team improve its effectiveness.
QBR Agenda
The head of Sales should kick things off with a recap of the quarterly results, highlighting both good news and bad. It’s worth noting important deals, high achieving regions and teams as well as areas that came up short. A good leader must tread the line between celebrating accomplishment and identifying areas where improvement is needed. Are we behind on pipeline? Did we miss our outbound objectives? Is churn creeping up?
It’s also important to identify root causes. Have in-bound leads declined? Is the product too hard to install? Are competitors turning up the heat on price?
You must set a tone that is constructive and focused on solving problems rather than apportioning blame. There’s no better way to alienate your peers than blaming marketing, product or engineering for a lousy quarter.
The head of Sales should also include a preview of what’s expected in the upcoming quarter in terms of product launches, marketing campaigns, partner programs, sales initiatives, etc.
Each sales rep is responsible for presenting their findings for their territory or region, using a previously agreed upon template. Consistency among presentations reduces the amount of preparation required and makes it much easier for groups outside of sales to absorb the information and draw insights.
Typically this should be a short 6-10 slide deck that includes:
Quarterly results against plan
Highs and lows
Important wins (and lessons learned)
Losses (and lessons learned)
Stop / Start / Continue
Pipeline and key deals for the next quarter
While the sales rep is the quarterback for their presentation, they are presenting on behalf of the extended sales team, and it should include input from anyone working with their customers including SDRs, SEs, CS and so on.
The presentation should capture what’s actually happening in the field. Not how things “should be” but how things really are. Who are the competitors you run up against? What are the common sales objections? What features are resonating? Which are not? What’s missing? What kind of projects are getting traction? Which are stuck without budget approval.
All of these can contribute to a greater understanding of customers, not just within the sales organization, but also across marketing, product and engineering.
The Stop / Start / Continue slide is perhaps the most important. It’s meant as both a self-awareness exercise and what’s needed from the company. Each sales representative should identify behaviors that they want to stop, start or continue. This might range from a realization that they need to do a better job qualifying opportunities earlier, do more outbound calling, call higher into the organization, bring product management into roadmap discussions or whatever. The idea is to make sure sales people understand that they are responsible for their success and they must constantly evaluate how they can improve their own performance.
At a company level, they might ask for more briefings from the product team, more flexibility in contract negotiation, or more hard-hitting competitive materials from marketing.
As sales goes through their presentations, it’s good to capture ideas, action items and open issues.
Since you’ve got representatives from other teams in the room, getting commitment on ideas and suggestions should be quick. I remember one especially productive QBR at Gatsby when sales asked for help in overcoming sales objections in current deal and the first draft was completed and published before the end of day. (Thank you, Sam!)
The other important thing that happens in these meetings is that patterns start to emerge. Individual observations from one or two prospects might not seem significant, but when an issue comes up repeatedly, problems and opportunities become more clear. Product managers might notice recurring patterns across a broader range of deals than found in a single territory.
There is nothing more motivating to the sales team than seeing other departments step up to help them. (If Sales and Marketing aren’t actively working together on these problems, then you’ve got a bigger issue to solve.)
Scaling Up
As your company grows, you will likely need to run separate QBRs for each region or segment, based on their own distinct territory plans. For example, different segments or regions will sometimes have different competitors or different concentrations of industries requiring different go-to-market approaches. If you can review multiple segments or regions together that maximizes the learning potential. Patterns that emerge in one territory, often show up elsewhere over time.
The other thing to watch for as the group scales, is to ensure that all participants are actively engaged. All attendees should have “skin in the game” so they are accountable for taking action, whether it’s creating new features, content or marketing campaigns. No one should be just a spectator. Sometimes the threat of action items is enough to scare off those timid souls who would take up space but not do anything.
The photo at the top is none other than Joe Namath, one of the all-time great quarterbacks of the 1970s.