In the world of customer success management, mastering the quarterly business review, or QBR, is a skill that’s critical to long-term success and crucial to sustained relationships. More than just regular meetings, QBRs deep-dive into recent performance, sometimes looking at progress made over multiple quarters or even years.
Skip Ahead:
- Unlock the power of effective and efficient QBRs
- What is a QBR?
- What is a QBR template?
- Choosing the right QBR template
- Comparison of different QBR templates
- Table: Comparison of different QBR templates
- Conclusion and Additional Resources
- Frequently asked questions
Unlock the power of effective and efficient QBRs
QBRs are an essential part of managing business-client relationships, and in this article, you’ll learn about how they can have a significant impact on your business and business-client relationships, what they should include, and how to choose the right QBR template for you. Let’s get started!
What is a Quarterly Business Review (QBR)?
A quarterly business review, or QBR, is a 60-minute scheduled check-in between a business and its clients that occurs every three months. Unlike weekly, biweekly, or even monthly check-ins, QBRs deep-dive into the last quarter’s performance. QBRs typically help customer success managers provide an overview of progress on critical initiatives, present key challenges, clarify expectations for the upcoming quarter, and stimulate an open dialogue about the health of your business relationship.
Why are QBRs important?
Business is a dynamic environment; QBRs help you stay aligned with clients and their constantly evolving needs, which is critical for your long-term relationship and success. QBRs are at the heart of this alignment because they offer customer success managers a structured approach to maintaining and improving the business-client relationship. By conducting comprehensive and efficient QBRs, you can unlock several benefits, which include:
Maintaining alignment
Like all great business strategies, QBRs launch from a foundation of goals and objectives. However, two distinct parties are involved in your relationship: your business will have its own objectives, and your client will have their own unique goals.
A QBR allows you to evaluate your relationship and strategy, assess current objectives, and reestablish those objectives with your client, ensuring that both parties align with what they want to achieve moving forward.
As a business, this ensures that you know what and where to focus your efforts, and the client is reassured that the relationship is working for their benefit.
Performance assessment
Followed by goals and objectives, QBRs typically review past performance next. The benefit of assessing past performance is twofold.
- Track progress over time – Regularly scheduled meetings allow you to measure and track progress throughout your working relationship, giving you and your client a broader overview of progress than what typically occurs in more regular meetings.
- Identify success factors – Because QBRs assess past performance, you can identify what works well and what can benefit from improvement, or perhaps, should be deprioritized moving forward.
Both of these demonstrate to your client the importance of ongoing improvement and their goals.
Identify new opportunities
Like an extension of identifying your success factors, QBRs help businesses remain agile and adapt to any market changes or evolving customer needs that have occurred in the past business quarter. But beyond simply reacting to emerging trends and market changes, QBR meetings are a space to be proactive.
Analyze trends, review feedback, and assess market dynamics. This can help reveal untapped market segments and opportunities for product or service expansion. Further, view QBRs as an opportunity for collaborative brainstorming just as much as a review of past performance. Fostering open and dynamic communication between business and client can help reveal additional insights that may not be immediately revealed otherwise, helping you better understand your client’s goals or needs.
Strengthen your relationship
At its core, a QBR enhances communication and fosters a regular feedback loop between you and your client. While a QBR is a structured meeting, it still facilitates open dialogue, which supports the alignment we alluded to earlier.
Further, your open dialogue will give you a critical window into your customer’s satisfaction, allowing you to understand where they’re happy and where you have room for improvement. Understanding your client’s satisfaction will also significantly impact client retention for the better.
Plan for the future
Finally, as QBRs reflect on the past, they help set the stage for what will occur in consequent business quarters. The final section of quarterly meetings can present plans for the future or introduce recommendations on next steps.
The QBR should focus on upcoming changes, their expected impact on the business or business-client relationship, and how they align with or will impact the broader goals and objectives. This focus on the future will also help you to determine what metrics or KPIs to track over the next quarter and provide a starting point for next quarter’s QBR.
Each of these five benefits of a QBR describes precisely how and why a QBR has a major role in the overall success of your business-client relationship—consider them QBR Best practices. Next, let’s look at how a QBR template can empower customer success managers in their planning process leading up to the high-stakes meeting.
What is a QBR template?
A QBR template is a well-structured document that helps customer success managers ensure a QBR runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible while covering all critical areas required for an impactful session.
Choosing the right QBR template
Effective QBR planning begins with choosing the right template. So, here are seven factors to consider when selecting a QBR template:
- Alignment with objectives – As discussed earlier, establishing alignment on goals and objectives between you and your client is essential in a QBR. Typically, this is the first goal in a quarterly business review, so it should be one of the first components in a QBR template. This ensures every discussion point and metric in the QBR directly contributes to achieving these shared goals.
- Customization capabilities – Ideally, the QBR template you select should have all of the essential components (goals, performance review, identifying opportunity, and an action plan). But regardless of what your chosen template includes, it should be customizable. This means you should be able to change various aspects of the template, whether they’re significant components or smaller items (like swapping one metric for another).
- Ease of use -Choose a template that simplifies the process, perhaps one with intuitive design elements or built-in guidance. All aspects of a QBR template should be easy for all parties involved, meaning it should be easy for customer success managers to structure and create the QBR, and it should be easy for clients to follow and work with the QBR during and after the meeting.
- Clarity and structure – Similar to ease of use, a QBR should be clear and well-structured. This means sections in the presentation should follow a logical sequence and be well-developed. Your client shouldn’t struggle to understand the flow of the meeting, the data, or your interpretation of included data and insights.
- Data integration – Depending on the scale of your business or client and the depth of your relationship, QBRs encompass a wide range of complexity, incorporating anything from just a few KPIs to multiple detailed reports on analytics and key metrics. Not only should you be able to customize a QBR template to fit your needs, you should also be able to integrate with critical business tools, seamlessly integrating data flow and analysis.
- Feedback incorporation – A good QBR will allow for client feedback. While your business can likely gauge how your presentation is received, direct input from the client will avoid any confusion and give you a clear, pointed direction on how to improve for next time. So, ensure the template has a dedicated section for client feedback, encouraging a two-way conversation for continuous improvement.
- Actionable outcomes – As the final section for most QBRs, the goal is to summarize key insights and recommendations from the review, set deadlines for upcoming goals, confirm the next meeting, and establish a clear set of next steps for both involved parties over the next quarter. Aim to find templates that clearly delineate responsibilities and timelines, ensuring accountability and follow-through on both the business and client sides.
Comparison of different QBR templates
Finding the right QBR template can be a challenging task, so we’ve gathered some of the best templates from top platforms and compared them. Here are four QBR templates, each with a unique set of benefits and use cases:
Thinkific Plus’ QBR template is an expert-crafted, highly customizable five-part template perfect for conducting an efficient and effective quarterly review. This template encourages you to begin with goals and objectives, emphasizing alignment as a cornerstone of QBR success. It then flows into a performance review and a look at your customer’s engagement health. You can then further your work with customer engagement in the strategic planning section by highlighting features that align with customer goals. You’ll conclude the QBR template with an action plan that details the next steps for you and your customer.
Key components:
- Overview and alignment
- Performance review
- Customer health engagement
- Strategic planning
- Action plan and next steps
Thinkific’s QBR template is comprehensive and adaptable to a wide range of clients and use cases. Unlike other templates in this list, this template encourages and provides tips on how to customize it to fit your business needs, detailing how to adjust it for brand-specific language and context. Overall, this template will facilitate meaningful conversations and is an excellent choice for all customer resource professionals.
The Asana QBR template is a dynamic template that allows you to create a custom QBR agenda. It prompts users to begin with the previous quarter’s performance, emphasizing successes and challenges. Following last quarter’s recap, users are prompted to address the next quarter’s goals and opportunities for expansion. The agenda template concludes with action items like scheduling for the next meeting.
Key components:
- Previous quarter recap
- Plan for the following quarter
- Action item breakdown
The Asana QBR template is an excellent option for QBRs encouraging open dialogue rather than a presenter-audience approach. The template allows for a high degree of customization, but unlike the Thinkific Plus template, it doesn’t prompt creators to create a proper action plan for the following quarter.
The Pitch quarterly business review template takes the form of a presentation with compelling and minimalist visuals. The template begins with an overview of the previous quarter’s performance, prompting creators to include KPIs and core metrics in their presentation. Following this overview, the template features highlights and challenges and immediately flows into next steps. Next steps are broken down into the following quarter’s goals, KPIs, and a timeline.
Key components:
- Performance assessment
- Learnings
- Next steps
- Q&A
The logical flow of this template promotes a smooth agenda and allows users to input their own data without a need to reorganize the template. Overall, this template is easy to use and interpret, making it an excellent choice for your next QBR.
Mural is a visual work platform that allows users to organize their workflows, projects, or brainstorming sessions into visual representations. Mural’s QBR template is consistent with the platform’s nature and offers a three-step template. Step one prompts users to begin with their goals and objectives for the business-client relationship and beyond. The presentation then focuses on performance by highlighting current goals, progress, and lessons learned. The third and final stage in the template, “Evolve,” prompts users to refine their goals based on last quarter’s performance and outline actions to take.
Key components:
- Aim
- Measure
- Evolve
Overall, Mural’s QBR template is a highly visual and customizable template. This template is ideal for professionals who can utilize the fun and playful visuals of the Mural platform and bring freshness to what can easily be a dull corporate meeting. However, the high customizability of this template may not be suitable for those needing a more drag-and-drop solution.
Table: Comparison of different QBR templates
| Template Provider | Pros | Cons |
| Thinkific Plus |
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| Asana |
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| Pitch |
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| Mural |
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Set your customers up for success.
The best way to keep your customers happy is to make sure they’re getting the results they want from your product or service. That takes knowledge, and beyond quarterly business reviews, Customer Training LMS Software can help you build that knowledge effectively at scale.
A Customer Training LMS Software will help you further support customer retention by keeping them engaged between QBRs. Learn more about how you can achieve this with Thinkific Plus.
Conclusion and Additional Resources
Thank you for exploring quarterly business reviews with us.
If you’re ready to take the next step and get personalized guidance to streamline your customer success process with online learning, get pricing details, and a live demo of Thinkific Plus, don’t hesitate to reach out to our experts.
Request a call with a member of our Thinkific Plus solutions team today, and let us help you unlock the full potential of your online learning journey.
Frequently asked questions
What is a QBR?
A QBR, or quarterly business review, is a strategic, in-depth meeting held every three months. The goal is to report on the past quarter’s performance, realign over common goals and objectives, identify new opportunities, and establish an action plan for the following quarter.
How often should QBRs be conducted?
QBRs, as suggested by their name, occur once every business quarter or once every three months. This frequency allows a business and its client to maintain alignment over objectives and goals and assess performance on key initiatives with enough time between meetings to make meaningful progress. However, businesses in fast-paced sectors or industries prone to volatility may benefit from more frequent business review meetings.
What are the key components of a QBR template?
The key components of an effective QBR are:
- Overview and alignment – Begin your meeting by establishing common goals and objectives, ensuring alignment between business and client over key metrics and performance indicators.
- Performance review – Follow objectives and goals by reporting on last quarter’s achievements and challenges.
- Customer health and engagement – Use the customer’s engagement with your product or service over the last quarter to inform your strategies moving forward, improving customer engagement and satisfaction.
- Strategic planning – Develop a forward-looking strategy based on last quarter’s performance, setting realistic and measurable goals for the upcoming quarter in the final stage of the QBR.
- Planning for action and next steps – Finish the meeting with a clear and actionable plan for the following quarter or a commitment to formulating a plan should any information be shared during the meeting that warrants a change in the initial strategy.
No two QBRs are the same, and the components that make your QBR a success may change from client to client, industry to industry, or even season to season. Download your free QBR template now and start your QBR planning process with a template that can accommodate a wide range of variability and your unique needs.
How can QBRs improve customer success?
QBRs strengthen your relationship with your customers by keeping you aligned in strategy and goals and fostering open communication. QBRs help to evaluate progress, identify challenges and new opportunities, and formulate a personalized plan of action based on your customer’s needs.