You had a productive quarterly business review (QBR) with a top-tier client. Congratulations!
That’s great news, but it’s not entirely a success until you complete some critical follow-up steps. Then you can celebrate. Otherwise, all you’ve accomplished is strategic QBR preparation and meaningful conversations with key contacts and leadership of a VIP account that may soon be forgotten.
But, if you fail to follow through and act on all the valuable information and insights you gleaned from such a productive QBR meeting, you’ve wasted the time of everyone involved.
QBR follow-up activities
The steps you take after a QBR are at least as important, if not more so than those you take when preparing for these essential meetings. Once you’ve had a successful session with your top-tier account, it’s time to sort through and act on what you learned from the exchange.
Answer these questions
Consider these questions as you review your QBR notes:
- What did we learn about the customer?
- What new information was revealed about things like the client’s environment, business, market, satisfaction, goals, challenges, and team?
- What commitments did we make to the customer? Make sure you create a plan to act on these commitments and communicate them to everyone on your team who is impacted by these promises or will need to take action to achieve them.
- What risks and opportunities did we uncover that we weren’t previously aware of? Risks and opportunities are things that you’re going to be constantly hunting for when you’re at QBRs.
Then you must address risks, pursue opportunities with your client, and incorporate these into your revised account plan.
Document your findings
Now that you have thought through these questions, it’s time to document what you learned, committed to, and what changes are to be made to the account plan. You can document your business review details in your QBR software for easy reference when you’re preparing for your next review with this key account.
Send follow-up emails
Although you provided a verbal recap of the discussion at the conclusion of the QBR meeting, it’s best to send a recap email to all attendees. Be sure to include new goals, agreed-upon actions, and other highlights in this communication. And remember to thank your client for their attendance, collaboration, and participation to make it such a meaningful and valuable QBR.
Then ask participants to confirm agreement or respond with any clarifications or additions to ensure everyone is on the same page. This prevents miscommunications and misunderstandings as well as wasted activity on inaccurate information. This also serves to build the client’s confidence and enthusiasm about the future.
Rate the performance of the QBR
Enable all internal stakeholders who attended the QBR to rate the success of the meeting from various perspectives like:
- Client happiness with the prior period
- Client engagement during presentation
- Client excitement about upcoming period
- Potential for account growth
These ratings provide a more well-rounded, quantifiable assessment of how the meeting went and identify areas for potential improvement.
You can automate this process with our new QBR software where these ratings are then aggregated to generate an overall rating of the QBR from the perspective of the internal contacts. This score is then included in the same section where you documented the QBR review details so it’s easily accessible when preparing for your next review meeting with this client.
This is an important step because we want to encourage discussion and questions to ensure all internal stakeholders agree on what reality looks like for this customer. This allows us to work more effectively with the customer as a team.
Do a team postmortem
As you prepared for the QBR, you had an internal account review. Now that you’ve completed a successful QBR with the client, it is time for the entire team to reconvene to review all information and insights learned during the meeting. Exchange details you each picked up on that other attendees may have missed, so you are all on the same page. Then document these accordingly.
Ask the team all the same questions you worked through to make sure everyone is thinking about their observations in the same manner. Then leverage all this information to refine your account strategy. This allows you to demonstrate to your Key Account contacts that you clearly understand their goals and needs.
Complete your post-QBR follow-up steps
Don’t allow all the time and effort you invested in preparing for a successful QBR to go to waste by failing to follow through. Taking these steps ensures that you, your team, and your client are all on the same page, and taking action on what you learned. This boosts your effectiveness and your customer’s confidence as well while further cementing the relationship with the client.
Want to simplify your post-QBR follow-up steps? Learn how Kapta’s QBR software makes the follow-up process effortless and productive.
