QBR meaning: quarterly business review

The quarterly business review

A QBR is a quarterly business review: a scheduled meeting, once a quarter, where a team or a supplier goes through the last three months. It covers results against targets, what went wrong, and what happens in the next quarter. The quarter decides the timing, so at a company whose year starts in January, QBRs land early in January, April, July and October.

Two kinds exist, and the letters don’t say which. An internal QBR is a team reporting up to leadership: sales by region, a product team’s roadmap, a support desk’s ticket numbers. A client QBR is a supplier presenting to a customer, usually run by the account manager or customer success manager.

The client QBR

In software and services, the client QBR is part of keeping the account. The supplier shows what the product did for the customer that quarter, agrees goals for the next, and raises renewal or expansion while everyone is in one room. Some firms call the bigger version an executive business review, or EBR, held once or twice a year with senior people from both sides.

The customer’s goal is simpler. They want to hear what went wrong and whether it’s fixed.

What goes in the deck

A QBR runs on a slide deck: a summary page, a scorecard of targets in red, amber and green, wins, problems, and a plan. The scorecard decides the mood of the room. Three greens and one red means the whole meeting is about the red.

The last slide should list the next steps with names and dates. Those are the action items, and they’re what anyone remembers a week later. For a new account, the first QBR is often how the supplier tries to get the ball rolling on a bigger contract.

Slide 31 of 40

QBRs are long by design and longer in practice. A two-hour slot holds a 40-slide deck, and the slide everyone came for is number 31. 80% of knowledge workers reckon most meetings could lose half their length, and nobody believes it harder than at minute 95 of a QBR.

The fix is a pre-read sent two days ahead and a meeting that starts with questions. It works until someone presents the pre-read anyway.

The meeting before the meeting

A big QBR breeds smaller meetings. There’s the prep call to agree the story, the dry run to rehearse it, and the slide review where somebody changes a green to an amber. A level set at the start keeps the room from re-arguing the numbers. The deck gets its final edits ten minutes before the start, because that’s when everyone finally reads it.

The Q4 QBR

The review of the last quarter of the year meets the December calendar. Half the room is on leave, the numbers aren’t final, and EOY targets are still being chased while they’re being reviewed. So the Q4 QBR often slides into January, where it meets the planning for the next year and becomes a strategy offsite with worse snacks.

It’s the kind of meeting the meeting or email game is about. Most QBRs could start as an email, and the good ones do.

ESPN’s quarterback rating

Search for QBR and the first results are about American football. There, QBR is Total QBR, ESPN’s rating for quarterbacks. It values what a quarterback does on every type of play, on a 0 to 100 scale, adjusted for the strength of the defenses he faced. To appear in ESPN’s season table, a quarterback has to play at least 20 action plays per team game.

Two QBRs, one January

The football season’s playoffs and the business year’s Q4 reviews both run through January. A sales director can sit through one QBR at 10 am and talk about another at the bar at 6. Only one of them comes with a scale from 0 to 100, and it’s not the one with the deck.

Sport has lent corporate jargon plenty, from touch base to the ballpark figure. QBR is the rare case where both sides use the same three letters to grade a performance.

A QBR invite

Invite: Northwind account review, Thursday 2:00 to 4:00 pm

Agenda for the Q3 QBR quarterly review, two hours: results against targets, the renewal timeline, roadmap preview. Please send your slides by Tuesday noon so I can merge them into one deck. Pre-read attached, 31 pages.