How to run a QBR

To run a QBR, hold an hour with the customer every quarter that reports against the goals they set, names what is behind and why, agrees the next ninety days with an owner beside every commitment, and only then raises anything commercial. Prepare it with the customer before the meeting, not about them, and send the commitments in writing the same day. That order is what separates a review the customer values from a vendor update they sit through.

Gainsight’s guide to quarterly business reviews lists the elements a good one needs: a review of progress against agreed goals, collaborative goal setting for the next quarter, a demonstration of value tied to the customer’s priorities, and clear next steps with responsibilities and timelines. Everything below is how to turn those four into a meeting and a deck.

Before the meeting: agree the goals and the audience

A QBR fails most often before it starts. Gainsight’s article on running effective QBRs names the two usual causes: preparation done in isolation from the customer, and metrics chosen because they are easy for the vendor to report rather than because they matter to the customer’s business.

So start two weeks out with a short call to your main contact. Confirm the goals set at the last review or at onboarding, ask whether anything in their business has changed, and ask who from their side should attend. If a new executive has arrived, the whole emphasis of the meeting may need to change.

The customer QBR deck shows why the goals matter. Its fictional customer, Orrell Facilities, set three goals at onboarding in March: work orders closed within their service level window, a complete asset register across eight sites, and technician app adoption. Two quarters later, slide two reports against exactly those three, before anything else. The customer onboarding deck is the same account’s kickoff meeting, and it fixed the baselines in the customer’s own figures so nobody could argue about them later.

The agenda

The table under this article is a sixty minute agenda with ten items, the minutes each gets and the slide that carries it in the example deck.

Two things about its shape are deliberate. The scorecard gets the most time, ten minutes, because it is the part the customer came for. And the commercial option sits eighth of ten, after the issues, the roadmap and the recommendations. Put it any earlier and the customer spends the rest of the meeting wondering whether everything else was a setup.

Put the agenda on screen at the start, or say it in one sentence, and name the one decision the meeting needs from the customer. People listen differently when they know what they will be asked.

Let the customer talk for part of it. Ask your main contact to open the scorecard section with a minute on what changed in their business this quarter, and to respond to each recommendation before you move on. A QBR where the vendor speaks for fifty five of sixty minutes is a presentation, not a review, and it tells the executive in the room that nobody wanted their view. Leave three minutes at the end unallocated; they will be used.

Show the metrics they care about, including the misses

Report against the customer’s targets, beside the score, and include the lines that are still short.

The example’s scorecard does this plainly: service level closure at 89 percent against a 90 percent goal, the asset register at 100 percent, app adoption at 82 percent against 85. Two of three goals are still short, and they are on the slide in the same size as the one that was met. A scorecard that is all green gets skimmed; one with honest misses gets read.

Then show where the average hides something. Slide three breaks adoption down by site, from 96 percent at the best site to 54 percent at the worst, and names the two sites holding the average down. That is what makes the recommendations on slide eight specific: a wifi fix and retraining at exactly those two sites.

Keep charts to one finding each and write the finding in the title. The sales QBR deck puts attainment by rep before pipeline for the same reason: a team total of 94 percent reads differently once the spread is on the screen. The quarterly business review deck applies the same honesty to a company scorecard for a board. Choosing the right layout for each of these is easier once you know what a slide layout is and what it is not.

Put the ask after the value

If there is something to sell, give it one slide, late in the meeting, with a price, a start date and a decision date.

The example’s expansion option is a single card on slide nine: two more sites and a preventive maintenance module at 2,400 dollars a month from January, on a 24 month term. It follows two quarters of measured improvement and an honest issues slide, so it reads as a next step. The same card on slide three would have poisoned the meeting. The same logic of value before price runs through sales deck structure.

After a bad quarter, remove the card. A QBR with no ask is a message too.

Follow up within a day

The meeting’s output is the commitments slide, not the deck. The example ends on the next ninety days laid out as dated items with owners on both sides, from a wifi patch in week 42 to the next review date.

Send those commitments in writing within a day, with the owners and dates unchanged from the slide. Atlassian’s playbook makes the same recommendation for project meetings: distribute a summary and a list of action items to everyone who attended, to keep the momentum from the room. Then open the next QBR by reporting against that list first.

Between reviews, keep the list alive. Check the dated items at the halfway point of the quarter and tell the customer early if one will slip, with the new date. A commitment that quietly misses its week and surfaces at the next QBR undoes the trust the honest scorecard built.

Common mistakes

• A vendor roadmap tour. Show only the roadmap rows that affect this customer, as the example’s slide seven does.
• Usage metrics as value. Logins are your number. Closed work orders and resolved backlog are theirs.
• Hiding the weak sites. An average that hides two failing sites will be discovered by the customer, not by you.
• Commitments without owners. A line that says an issue is being looked into is not a commitment.
• The same deck for every account. A default template goes stale as soon as two customers have different goals.

Build it

Describe the account, its goals and the quarter’s numbers in the generator and it builds a deck with a role for each slide. The agenda role has eleven layouts, and there is a page on agenda slides that shows them. Pricing layouts have no “most popular” flag to highlight a tier, which suits a single expansion card. A table can grow to 20 rows and 8 columns, enough for a before and after ledger.

The guide to making a presentation with AI walks through the generator from the prompt to an editable deck. PDF export is available on every plan; the PowerPoint and editable PowerPoint exports are paid features, and both are rendered from the saved version of the deck.