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Quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are essential for managed service providers (MSPs) looking to strengthen client relationships and showcase the value of their services. Held every three months, these meetings offer a strategic opportunity to review performance, address challenges, and align on future goals. For MSPs, understanding the significance of QBRs and how they work can help you demonstrate value and foster deeper partnerships. This guide will delve into the key elements of a successful QBR and provide practical tips tailored specifically for MSPs to ensure your meetings are both effective and impactful.
What Is a Quarterly Business Review?
A quarterly business review is a meeting scheduled with a customer once every three months. It’s a high-level meeting that focuses on value more than progress or technical details. It gives both MSPs and their customers a chance to adjust elements of their business relationship moving forward.
Significance of QBRs for MSPs
QBRs give MSPs a chance to evaluate the value of their partnership and identify opportunities to improve that value. Reiterating the amount of time and money your customers have earned as a result of your services drives loyalty and commitment while keeping your long-term strategic plans in focus.
This quarterly meeting is an essential tool for customer success managers. When pursued strategically, it provides deep insight into the customer’s business and its plans for the future. It can establish your MSP as a trustworthy consultant whose advice is worth listening to.
Objectives of Conducting a QBR
The main goal of your QBR is to ensure both you and your customer’s organization’s interests are aligned as each company grows. Market changes, leadership transitions, and strategic differences can interfere with longstanding business relationships in unpredictable ways. QBRs give both MSPs and their clients a channel for announcing these changes well before they take place.
When pursued with care, QBRs help MSP clients maintain healthy relationships and discuss opportunities to improve managed service outcomes. The result is a better, more profitable relationship that serves each company’s long-term objectives.
Why Is It Important to Schedule QBRs with Clients?
QBRs provide clear benefits to MSPs that value profitable long-term relationships. Here are some of the most important reasons why you should make QBRs part of your customer success strategy.
Enhancing Client Relationships
QBRs give clients an opportunity to provide ongoing feedback on the quality of MSP service. Listening to their experience and resolving friction provides clear benefits to the relationship and encourages further investment.
Building Transparency and Trust
These meetings demonstrate that your organization is committed to unlocking value for its customers. The regular schedule tells customers that they can expect results within a 90-day period. It also shows that you encourage feedback within the same time frame.
Identifying Opportunities for Growth
Opening up candid discussions with your customers can lead to valuable opportunities. You may find ways to leverage your managed service portfolio to help them achieve their goals.
Preparing for an MSP QBR Meeting
Running your first QBR can be intimidating. However, taking time to plan the meeting can make a big difference in its outcome. With the right preparation, you can highlight successes and solicit customer feedback in an open and trusting environment.
Here are a few things you should do before your QBR meeting starts:
Gather Relevant Data and Metrics
Your organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution is the best place to start. You will probably find a great deal of high-level information here, but not too much detail into your customer’s day-to-day routine. That’s okay — this information will establish a good baseline.
For more in-depth data, look through monitoring tools and helpdesk software for records that apply to your customer. This is where you might find pain points, friction, and other areas of improvement that you can bring up and address during the meeting.
Invite the Right Stakeholders
Make sure your QBR involves the right people to represent your customer’s organization. Ideally, you should have a C-suite executive or other high-level decision-maker present. You should also consider including a financial representative for your client, and your main point of contact for day-to-day operations there.
Sometimes, getting everyone in the same room is inconvenient. While it’s ideal to get everyone together, these meetings can still be successful without having every stakeholder present each time. Remember that the next one is only three months away, so it’s okay if a key stakeholder misses them from time to time.
Set Clear Meeting Agendas
The QBR doesn’t have to be a strict and formal affair, but it should have some structure. Use the data you gathered to identify customer successes and pain points, and list all the issues you’d like to bring up beforehand. Make sure you also devote time to listening and learning more about your customer, as well.
We’ll cover more details on what to include in your meeting agenda in the next section.
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What to Include in a Quarterly Business Review Meeting
Every QBR agenda is unique. It reflects the priorities of the customer involved, as well as your history together. Some QBRs focus on past performance and metrics, while others are forward-looking. Ideally, you should have a balanced perspective that includes both.
Here are some things that most QBR meetings should cover:
1. Performance Metrics and KPIs
Discussing the latest performance metrics is a good way to start the meeting off productively. Compare this snapshot of your current relationship with past performance and future goals. This should establish a solid understanding of where your two organizations stand and where you should go next.
Service Level Agreement
Take time to review your service level agreements (SLAs) and address any compliance issues that may have come up. Maintaining SLA compliance contributes greatly to the trustworthiness of your organization. Make sure you and your customer communicate clearly about SLA expectations and any adjustments moving forward.
Operational Metrics
Operational metrics can provide insight into how smoothly your working relationship is going. Consider talking about uptime measurements, incident response times, ticket resolution, and overall system performance insights. Find out if your customer has unmet operational needs.
Security Metrics
Security is an important topic for MSPs and customers in every field. Take a moment to review security incidents, detection and response times, and compliance. Bring up supply chain risk and work together to manage that risk effectively.
Ticket Metrics
Make sure to measure the number of tickets raised and closed in the last 90-day period. Look for metrics that tell you how smoothly the ticketing process actually works for end users. Response and solution times are a good place to start. Consider incorporating qualitative data about the user experience, as well.
Financial Metrics
Your QBR should cover cost savings, your customer’s ROI, and budgeting status. Any discrepancies in budgeted expenditure versus actual spending should be discussed. If you are over or under budget, now is the time to talk about it openly and come up with a plan to calibrate spending more effectively.
Other Technical Metrics
You may also want to talk about the status of upcoming software patches, warranties, and hardware lifecycles. These technical details can become problems if they are ignored until the last minute. QBRs are an opportunity to be proactive about infrastructure management and the technology roadmap well ahead of time.
Data Analysis and Interpretation
It may also be a good idea to identify some trends and benchmarks to measure your success by. Look for the latest data on industry standards for guidance on how well your MSP is performing compared to other alternatives. Consider creating charts, graphs, and other visuals to present this data in a digestible format.
2. Client Feedback and Satisfaction Surveys
It’s important to collect clear and honest feedback from your customer on the quality and value of your service. Open-ended feedback is valuable, but you should also consider a structured survey that can help identify specific pain points to address in the next 90 days. Consider analyzing this data over time to better understand how well your MSP actually responds to real-world customer needs.
3. Strategic Recommendations and Action Plans
The final result of your QBR should be an actionable set of initiatives you can put into place before the next meeting. This might include replacing hardware, upgrading software, or conducting end-user training. It could mean implementing new products and services into your portfolio or reviewing internal tasks to strengthen performance metrics.
JumpCloud for MSPs enables you to securely and efficiently provide your customers with seamless access to resources to make work happen.
Best Practices for Conducting QBR Meetings
The better prepared you are for your QBR meeting, the easier it will be to run. Take some of the following tips into consideration when managing QBR meetings.
Maintain Regular Meeting Schedules
Getting multiple stakeholders on board for a meeting can be challenging. Consider scheduling the meetings on regular dates throughout the year. Share these dates and get buy-in well ahead of time so you can ensure the right stakeholders show up.
Encourage Stakeholder Participation
Treat the QBR as a meeting, not a presentation. Don’t be afraid to reach out to customer stakeholders ahead of time when planning for it. It may take effort to get stakeholders to contribute, but the reward is worth it.
Focus on Client-Centric Discussions
It’s easy to fall into the trap of discussing your MSP services more than your customer’s actual needs. Be aware of this pitfall and try to steer the conversation toward your customer whenever possible. Help them open up about their goals and strategy so you can support them more effectively.
Follow Up on Action Items
After the meeting is done, take time to list out the action items discussed. Complete any tasks you can conveniently finish immediately and report back on the rest. This helps build accountability and ensure a consistent dialogue between stakeholders.
Common QBR Challenges and Solutions
Even the best-prepared customer success managers can run into issues with QBRs. Look out for these common difficulties you may encounter when planning and executing these meetings.
Addressing Client Concerns Effectively
Don’t make the mistake of assuming you know the customer’s needs before they express them. Consider sharing your agenda with the customer team beforehand and asking if there is anything they want to add to it before the meeting starts. You may be surprised by new concerns or requirements you didn’t think of before.
Avoiding Data Overload
Focusing too intently on data and metrics can lead to a bit of information overload. If you tend to spend time diving into technical details, you’ll need to resist that urge during your QBR. Using high-quality visualizations will help you make brief, salient points without turning the meeting into a technical presentation.
Continuous Improvement and Follow-Up
Simply identifying areas where you can improve isn’t enough. You must also commit time and resources to execution. This may require buy-in from other stakeholders in both organizations. Make sure you communicate these dependencies ahead of time and follow up on them as you complete tasks.
Final Thoughts
The success of your QBRs relies heavily on the quality of the data you can gather during preparation. Having transparent access to device usage and security data makes planning and conducting these meetings much easier. For MSPs, this can be difficult without cloud-native multi-tenant solutions for mobile device management.
JumpCloud can help you manage, secure, and analyze endpoint activity throughout your clients’ networks. It allows you to leverage deep visibility into your clients’ IT environment that can improve your partnerships and unlock greater value through your managed service offering. Sign up to become a JumpCloud partner today.
