Customer QBR’s & EBR’s are a thing of the past
Before thinking about how to deliver a good QBR ask yourself… should you have them at all?
I remember when I was at school, being sat in one particular maths class, not having a clue what was going on. Everyone around me seemed to understand the work, and I didn’t get it. That was, until someone over the other side of the class raised their hand and said to the teacher “I don’t understand, it doesn’t make sense”. ‘Thank goodness. I’m not the only one’ I thought to myself.
I had that exact same feeling in my professional life recently. As someone involved in the thriving Customer Success discipline and community, I often hear a lot of…
“EBR’s are important because they enable me to track my customer’s business objectives and plans”
“I’m a strategic advisor and EBR’s are a great way to engage with my customer”
“You have to have an EBR, its the best way to provide value to your customer”
Then, another person in the class raised their hand and said something to the contrary. More precisely, Dave Jackson (currently CCO at Deepcrawl) posted something on LinkedIn. ‘Thank goodness. I’m not the only one’ I thought to myself. I share his LinkedIn post, with his permission, and wanted to delve into the topic further.
TL;dr — I don’t think QBR’s/EBR’s are all that useful. They don’t provide the right value to time investment ratio, for either customer or vendor, to justify having them.
I’ve never said it openly before, because it goes against the status quo of what everyone in Customer Success believes a CSM should do. I don’t think EBRs add the value that we as vendors think they do.
Reality of the Definition
The term EBR and QBR are often used interchangeably but for the purpose of this article I mean the same thing, if both references are used.
EBR = Executive Business Review
QBR = Quarterly Business Review
So, essentially, a Business Review between a customer and vendor.
The reality is, how often do you either (a) manage to get an executive to attend your Business Review for 30–60 minutes, or (b) manage to conduct a Business Review quarterly for each of your assigned customers?
Rhetoric question, but I’m going to assume the answer to both is ‘rarely’, if you have any more than a dozen customers assigned to you.
Right before I was going to hit ‘Publish’ on this post I saw this post from Christian Jakenfelds, who regularly posts on the topic of Customer Success on LinkedIn. Christian shares a similar view about the cadence of the business review meeting
Let’s stop calling it an EBR, QBR, or even a BR, let’s just call it what it is… a customer meeting. If you have to put a name on it, that differentiates it from any other meeting, call it a Solution Review meeting, as at least that has some semblance of co-ownership and mutual benefit. You both want to review that your solution is meeting the customer’s need and providing them with enough value to continue an ongoing relationship.
It may not be quarterly, you may not even get 2 or 3 scheduled in a year. In an ideal world you would have an interested senior leader involved, who has authority and influence and able to help encourage disciplined usage of your tool, but the role of a non-senior champion can often be just as powerful. That non-senior champion, your influencer, will be the person the Executive speaks to when the renewal is approaching or next years budget is being written.
There are so many variables but, in its most basic form, your fundamental goal when meeting with a customer should be to share something meaningful and valuable every time you take up some of their precious time.
Jeff Breunsbach is another thought leader in the industry who regularly posts on the realities and finer points of the CS discipline. As Jeff quite rightly implies, if the EBR isn’t geared towards the customers need, you’ll find soon enough that they just won’t happen at all.
Reality of the Scale
A few years ago I asked the executive sponsor of one of my assigned accounts “how many tools are in your tech stack?”. Wearily the response came back… “25”. Then I asked “and where do we fall if you were to rank them in order of spend?”. The reply “there are only two vendors we spend less with” [btw, they were spending a lot with us]. It was at that point we agreed I would support them with everything they needed, and I would regularly send them information I would have included in a QBR.
We never had a QBR again, and they are still a customer now.
In my tool stack right now I use… Totango, Retool, Chorus, Stripe, Intercom, Salesforce, Productboard, Dropbox Paper, Trello, Delighted, Profitwell, Metabase, CloudApp, Baremetrics, Mixpanel… and those are just the 15 tools that I use in Customer Success. In total, our company currently uses 231
None of the 15 companies has ever approached us about an EBR. Not one. Am I bothered? No.
To illustrate the scale of the problem, this is the chart that Dave referred to in his LinkedIn post. Over the past 4 years, Okta identifies the number of apps their customers are connecting through Okta, by industry.
Alternatives to a Business Review
The way you engage with your customers should be flexible enough to meet their needs and the way they work, as well as to provide you with a meaningful conversation on a topic that is of interest and value to both parties.
The alternatives to a formal Business Review will differ depending on your product, the discipline or industry you operate in, the size of commercial agreement you have with the customer, and will definitely differ based on what your companies philosophy to customer success is.
InVision had a great approach to engaging with customers. Talking about the InVision product was just one of three topics Customer Success Managers would focus on with customers. They called it People, Practice, Platform. As a truly strategic partner to their customers, and with a wealth of domain expertise and thought leadership, InVision were able to engage with customers at a deeper level by helping to develop the people who worked in Design, as well as helping to identify and recommend how the Design discipline at their customer could be matured and evolved. This was all before talking about the product.
Being in a Product Led Growth (PLG) environment, the Zeplin founders, leaders, and Product Crew all hunger and thirst for product feedback, ideas and validation on the product roadmap. The majority of the meetings we hold with customers are product-focused and, at a high level, are most commonly centred around sharing product roadmap insights and getting feedback on future initiatives to feed our research or, at a deeper level, digging into recent or upcoming features and getting a view of how this would or could add to the value of the product.
One of the things I dislike about the contents of the old school QBR is the inevitable cliche-filled line of questioning… “so, tell me, what are your main priorities? what are the pains you experience that we can help you solve? what are you focused on this year?” blah. Generic. Boring. I’m sure you’d get sick of answering that question if you were asked it by more than a handful of vendors, and left in suspense as to whether they could actually do anything to effect the answer. As a specialist in your industry, you should already know what your customers biggest pains and priorities are.
QBR’s almost become redundant when the customer develops their own expertise in your product. The focus of your interactions with the customer should be more about helping to achieve their self sufficiency and self mastery.
Reality of the Business Model
Here’s where I add my caveat to this article.
At Workfront, customers were spending hundreds of thousands, and millions in some cases, of dollars on our software. The stakes were higher, the interest was keener, and of course both the vendor and customer wants to ensure that value is demonstrated, tools are solving problems, and are adding to the business and to the individual. In this world, I do think that a regular business review is not only desirable, but essential. Without a regular cadence of meeting with your top quartile of customers, you’re leaving yourself wide open to risk.
Where I am right now is a high volume, lower ARR value, SaaS business. Customers do not spend millions of dollars on our product (yet). Tools, like many of the ones I listed earlier, are product-led growth, rather than sales-led growth, and have low barriers to purchase and even lower barriers to disposal.
Where I work with high value customers , even in a comparatively lower ARR value model, it would still be desirable to have a regular cadence of meetings with my customer… but only if it was focused on what they wanted from us and was providing value back to them.
The best thing a regular meeting can do for you and a customer is to help you both develop a trusting relationship. When a successful relationship is in place, a customer knows that they can rely on you when there is a big need, a big ask, or a big pain that needs to be addressed. They are effective because they focus on a purpose. When the need arises, show up, own it, and solve. Thats worth infinitely more than a robotic cadence or deck.
