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As a business owner or sales consultant, your quarterly business review (QBR) is a critical tool that helps bridge the gap between your customers, the product they purchased from you, and your company.
But what exactly does it do for you—as the customer? What are the benefits of partnering with a company that conducts QBRs? How can these meetings help support the needs of your business and employees?
A quarterly business review is effective if both the business and client understand its importance. It also helps if the right people attend the QBR to contribute effectively in the discussions and influence decisions based on the outcomes of the QBR.
If you are not sure about the importance of a QBR pertaining to your organization’s needs, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, you’ll learn why partnering with a company that holds QBRs is an essential tool that ensures collaboration and overall growth within your company.
What is a Quarterly Business Review, and Why is it Important?
In simple terms, a quarterly business review is a once-per-quarter meeting between a vendor (such as an office technology provider like us) with their customer. During a QBR, both parties discuss how the vendor supports the customer’s business and how they can better support their business and employees.
For example, during our QBR with our customers, we go over things such as:
- The current state of our customer’s technology products
- Any recent changes in their business that affect their technology devices or services, such as expanding their team or adding a new location.
- Reviewing their IT roadmap to assess where we are at with current projects and deadlines
Related Article: Managed IT Services: The Key to a Successful IT Roadmap.
- Addressing any inconsistencies or setbacks in their partnership with us
We’ve briefly outlined below some of the main reasons we believe so much in quarterly business reviews with our customers and how these one-on-one meetings grow the relationship and partnership we share with them.
1. Strengthen Relationships With Customers
More times than not, once a deal is signed, the communication between the sales rep and the customer begins to fizzle out. We’re a little different at AIS, and holding a QBR is one of the things that sets us apart.
We don’t see our customers solely as deals but as more of a long-term partnership. One of the best ways to ensure continual growth with our clients is by holding a quarterly business review with them.
A quarterly business review is a critical customer relationship management strategy that we’ve implemented for years now. These meetings help us identify what’s working, what’s not working and allow us to review your work and map out your strategies for success.
2. Review Specific Goals Of The Organization
While your monthly reports review progress made within the month, a QBR helps you review your progress in line with your annual or overall goals. A QBR ensures your teams work towards the same outcomes and solutions—specific to your business needs.
A quarterly business review helps you see where you are, identify gaps in performance, and develop strategies to put you back on your roadmap. From your QBR, you can determine the changes you need to make in your blueprint to achieve your set goals.
3. Keeping Focus: Set and Reset Goals
During your QBR, you engage in an open discussion about your business health and how your vendor can contribute to maintain or improve that status.
At AIS, we help our customers develop a different viewpoint from their initial onboarding meetings, as goals and projects are constantly changing. You may also need to reset plans depending on the business environment.
If, for instance, you were working with a company with an on-site working model, they may have reconsidered and begun a hybrid working model with some employees working remotely and others working on-site. If you were offering IT services like us, you might need to reset your cybersecurity goals to cover remote and on-site devices.
Related Article: Working From Home (WFH): Office Technology You Never Knew You Needed.
4. Celebrate Successes and Achievements
From a vendor standpoint, your communication more often involves giving recommendations, informing stakeholders about changes in the industry, or setting priorities. You rarely get platforms to discuss your wins and celebrate them—right?
We use part of our QBR meetings to highlight small successes that we sometimes tend to overlook in our annual reports with our customers. This could be something like a low-cost campaign with a high ROI.
When we both identify and celebrate these successes, we increase your chances as a company to boost your overall performance in other areas, too.
5. Identify and Analyze Challenges
We can all agree that challenges, large or small, affect your overall performance. However, most businesses overemphasize areas without challenges and fail to analyze the challenges that can impact their performance.
Some of the challenges may be due to issues out of your control. Nevertheless, discussing them helps everyone to understand how they limit you and analyze ways of circumventing them. When you acknowledge your challenges, you can better brainstorm solutions with that particular vendor.
6. Discover New Opportunities
As a customer, you may have contracted a vendor like us to handle one aspect of your business, such as repairing and maintaining your IT systems and devices.
As you brainstorm the best IT solutions to maximize your uptime, your vendor should understand that you suffer frequent downtimes because they lack a data backup policy.
From your discussions, you may decide to invest in a company’s data storage and recovery team. A QBR aims at ensuring you find value in the products and services you invest in each month.
The Final Say: The Importance of A Quarterly Business Review
What we really like about a QBR is that it benefits both the customer and the vendor. A one-on-one quarterly meeting allows both parties to connect and learn how the vendor can better support the customer and their employees.
If your current technology provider isn’t meeting with you regularly, now is the time to say something! To learn more about QBRs and the partnerships we share with our customers, make sure to reach out to one of our business technology consultants today. We’re here to give you peace of mind to help you win more business.
