Stop the QBR Insanity!
Original Post: August 3, 2016
Ahhh, the Quarterly Business Review—an age-old tradition in the managed services provider (of any kind) community. We’ve all done them. We’ve all sat through them. And we’ve all wondered—after at least one of them—“am I really any better off now than I was before this meeting?”
Now, I don’t mean to disparage the process of getting together with clients to share the status of their accounts—that’s valuable. The QBR, when it stands for “Quickly Building Rapport” is excellent and engenders trust and confidence in the business relationship. However, the preparation time spent getting to the point of being ready to review the account is almost always inefficient and time consuming. Actually, it’s also a QBR—Quickly Blowing Resources. Copying and pasting data from several spreadsheets to put into yet another one, exporting reports from an ERP for a page of graphs, combining all of this with a branded coversheet and saving it as a PDF or (heaven forbid!) printing copies to put in a fancy report binder...man, where does it all end? Keep in mind that the data you're presenting as "up-to-date" becomes obsolete as soon as it's exported from it's native platform...setting you up for a "funny thing happened on the way to the client's office" type of scenario. Please, for the sake of your business and the morale of your account managers, stop doing that…now.
At Atlas, we want you to have meetings with your clients—regularly. We don’t think you should wait for a standing meeting each quarter to share good (or bad) news. We also don’t think you should spend any more time that what it takes you to click your mouse to prepare for it. We want you to show the value you provide when you bump into your client at the coffeeshop—just pull out your tablet and show them real-time statistics. We want you to give them a cost analysis that’s updated in real time before you tee off on the turn at 9—it’s right there on your smartphone. We want you to give them a data-supported recommendation for lifecycle refresh between ordering drinks and the arrival of your appetizer at dinner—the lifecycle leaderboard (and any number of other valuable insights) is one click away. Ultimately, we believe you should be armed to answer any question they have about the value you’re providing any time or any place they ask…so that’s precisely what we deliver.
If this sounds about right to you, let us show you how to end the inefficient cycle of Quarterly Business Reviews and the madness of Quickly Blowing Resources. We’ll put you on the path of delivering real value with real business results…when and where it really matters.