For business advisors, consultants, and account managers, a Quarterly Business Review is one of the most effective tools for strengthening client relationships. Let’s take a quick look at what these reviews are and their importance.
What is a Quarterly Business Review?
A Quarterly Business Review (QBR), sometimes called an end-of-quarter business review or executive QBR presentation, is more than a financial report. It’s a structured client meeting supported by an end-of-quarter slide deck that highlights KPIs, business outcomes, and future opportunities.
It’s important to distinguish between two main types of QBRs:
- Client-Facing QBRs: These are external meetings between a company and its customers or partners. The purpose is to strengthen the business relationship, demonstrate value, and identify opportunities for growth. For example, a Customer Success Manager might prepare an end-of-quarter slide deck that includes adoption metrics, return on investment, and recommendations for next quarter.
- Internal QBRs: These are held within an organization, often between leadership and functional teams (sales, marketing, product, finance). Here, the goal is to assess performance against quarterly objectives, review KPIs, and align strategy across departments. An internal QBR presentation often includes sales performance dashboards, pipeline analysis, and quarterly targets.
The sole aim of a QBR is to understand the business’s potential, the opportunities and markets it can tap into, and the long-term goals that can be achieved. It is not a progress check; QBR presentations are a strategic tool for aligning vision, measuring outcomes, and uncovering opportunities. By documenting the process and using a clear quarterly results presentation, you not only track progress but also position yourself or your team as a trusted advisor in decision-making.
According to Gartner, executive QBRs are among the top 3 practices used by B2B vendors to retain enterprise accounts.
With a quarterly business review, you get a chance to understand the client’s vision and a window to craft your plan to help them out.
Documenting the QBR and showing interest in your client’s business plans helps you become a trusted business advisor. And that’s why they are so crucial.
A quarterly business review is also an option to unveil hidden business opportunities. For example, suppose a customer expresses interest in hiring two new employees in the upcoming quarter. In that case, you can include an IT budget and discuss the software, computers, and training resources required for their onboarding.
In the long run, this report will help to understand the usage trends, budget and IT demands.
During the initial stages of a company’s growth, your client will need to interact with his customers more often. In the early stages, there will be lesser customers so building one-to-one relationships will be easier and more effective.
Bottom line here is that QBR‘s are hugely beneficial for everyone – you, your clients, and your clients’ customers. They help strengthen the partnership between a business and its customers.
Setting an Agenda for a QBR
It is important to set an agenda for a QBR meeting, whether internal or client-facing, as it will help you in many ways, especially when you come to the point of documenting it in a report format.
Here’s a sample outline you can adapt:
- Review of KPIs and performance metrics
- Strategic goals and milestones achieved
- Customer feedback or pain points raised in the quarter
- Opportunities for growth or new initiatives
- Next steps and responsibilities
If you go into a QBR without a concrete set of goals and a pathway to achieve them, you’ll only end up wasting more time. It will not add value to your client’s business, nor will it help you showcase your services in a better light.
Craft an agenda and make sure all parties anticipated to attend, receive it well ahead in time. This will minimize any chances of the meeting being derailed.
Also, create a QBR outline that includes the main subjects, which needs to be discussed. You should have all pointers laid out before the meeting commences.
Sharing the agenda in advance, along with an end-of-quarter slide deck, ensures that all participants come prepared and that the meeting is aligned with business objectives.
How to run a QBR successfully
Running a QBR successfully requires preparation and discipline. Here are best practices to follow:
- Timebox each topic: Allocate specific time slots to prevent discussions from running over.
- Use visuals, not text-heavy slides: An executive QBR presentation should focus on charts, KPI dashboards, and progress visuals.
- Share pre-read materials: Send your agenda and supporting reports in advance so participants arrive informed.
- Define roles and responsibilities: Clarify who presents what, and ensure all stakeholders know their part.
- Reuse a premade template if available: Using a professional QBR template or end-of-quarter presentation deck helps maintain consistency across reviews. You can choose the PowerPoint templates that best fit your needs.
Tips to Writing a Professional Business Review
While showcasing the QBR, it is important to present the KPIs that make the most sense, while making sure you add your own unique punch to it. Following are some important tips that you must keep in mind while writing a professional quarterly business review:
1. Be a Storyteller:
Create a storyline and engage the audience leveraging the art of storytelling in your presentation. Present a problem to be resolved. Make a structure where every part of the story does its work and has an interactive flow to it. The beginning should be introductory while the middle part should push the vision and demonstrate your plan to help the client achieve its goals. The conclusion should have the final solution mentioned clearly.
2. Review the KPIs:
The client strategy meetings and review reports should always be started with KPIs. Knowing the current state of achievement of all the important indicators of your customer, plus those indicators your are involved, is essential to describe real status and plan for the future. Generally, indicators are built to control plans and force actions (for example, budget KPI help to force organizations to spend accordingly to their plans). Make sure you have a detailed action plan that backs up the indicators status.
3. The Nine-Minute Rule:
Divide your presentation into two parts: an initial summary that covers all of the important details and is done in nine minutes or fewer, followed by a detailed session. Humans tend to lose interest in a presentation after the first ten minutes, which is why it is important you have the crux mapped out in the initial summary of the QBR.
4. Highlight Real Results:
Use stats and facts to showcase the results that have been achieved. Don’t use indefinite terms and metrics. These will only reduce the value of the quarterly business review and make it sound vague.
5. Make it Crisp and Consistent:
There is no point in going on and on with the presentation if it does not lay the right impact and hits the chords. The PowerPoint slides should be consistent and the theme should please the audience.
These 5 important pointers can help to prepare an effective QBR.
Quarterly Business Review Mistakes to Avoid
Many business advisers repeat some mistakes that are main reasons behind the sinking of a QBR. Following are the ones that you should avoid:
- Steer clear of thorough discussions about anything that is negative. You should lay emphasis on the successes more than the failures.
- Choosing a defensive approach if the customer brings up any issues or challenges is another mistake that you should avoid. Address the queries in an amicable and accepting way.
- Not paying enough attention to the 9-minute rule and lingering on with the meeting for longer than an hour is a big NO!
Now that we have discussed the important aspects of a QBR, let’s walk you across the importance of PowerPoint presentation.
Using PowerPoint Presentation for a Quarterly Business Review
Having the right QBR presentation template can help to boost the effectiveness of a Quarterly Business Review. A part from that, following a pre designed theme with a professional layout will make it easier to structure and order the content in a way that is easy to present to an executive audience.
1. Quarterly Business Review PowerPoint Templates
With a business review PowerPoint template you can create professional-looking quarterly reports and annual Business Reviews. These provide a structured theme to present every corporate area with data-driven charts and infographics. Such templates provide top of the line, 100% editable PowerPoint Charts and vector to create impressive infographics & visual content. These representations are ideal for summarizing strong numeric information. You can impress your audience and create professional QBRs quite effectively and seamlessly.
2. Light Business Quarterly Business Review Templates
If you need a more generic PowerPoint Template, you can use the Light Business PowerPoint template and adapt ts content to your QBR topics. You have a business theme that matched professional environments ready to be edited with your own content.
