It’s quarterly business review time!
Aside from our three essential quarterly business review templates, in this article, we’ll cover all the basics. We’ll add some neat tips and tricks to help maintain and value-add to this critical documentation component. We’ll make sure that by the end of this article, you’ll be ecstatic and stress-free to conduct a quarterly business review to help you strategize for the future.
In this QBR article
The basics
Before you jump into opening up our quarterly business review templates, you might be wondering “what QBR is in business leadership?” This acronym stands for Quarterly Business Review. QBR aims to openly discuss your business performance, get comprehensive data on how you can add more value to the products or services that you offer, and establish attainable goals for the coming quarter. But it’s much more than a simple check-in, though: it requires extensive thought and preparation!
You’d need to set out agendas and goals all throughout your QBR in order to get the desired outcome from your meeting. Here are some of the most important bullet points to double-check to prevent some blind spots during this important discussion:
- Review of your company’s performance based on your previous QBRs, and an honest assessment of your progress and achievements
- Challenges moving forward
- Problems that your customers have experienced, short-term fixes, and notes to bring more lasting solutions
- Potential additional products and/or services that your customers expect from you
- Setting up goals for the following quarter
Documentation is crucial in every meeting, especially if it is for QBR. Research shows that within an hour, your team will have forgotten about 50 percent of the information; and within 24 hours, about 70 percent of that information is washed away. And within a week, it’s safe to assume that 90 percent of the information will be gone!
The first step is secure written documentation which can help facilitate a smooth live QBR. We’ve got this covered in this article.
Secondly, it is recommended to record your quarterly business review, with free tools such as tl;dv.
After this you might want to rinse and repeat with other meetings!
We’ve got you covered with our range of meeting templates. No matter what note taking app you’re using — whether it be Notion, Jira, Evernote, Google Docs, or Confluence — we’ve got templates for these document types!
Quarterly Business Review templates
Quarterly business review templates are readily available online. However, you should double-check the template you plan to use because it will be determined by the field your QBR is focused on. Is it going to be business-oriented, for sales, or for customer success? While QBRs may have the same essential goals, the approach will be slightly different for the field you are using it to, so make sure to tweak it to fit your agendas as much as possible.
Here, we’ve put up the three most essential QBR templates to assist you in manually recording and documenting everything that happens during a live meeting.
Multi-discipline Quarterly Business Review template
A QBR meeting template will assist you in swiftly reaching important checkpoints that will help you evaluate the business-customer relationship based on its outcomes. You can download this template from Asana here. Better yet, you can also try this awesome template from tl;dv’s meeting templates, or you can just click here to direct you to the closest QBR business template in tl;dv’s list of templates!
Sales QBR template
Sales professionals in your business need an effective QBR business planning process not only to execute quarterly sales goals, but also to serve as a means to measure the results of your sales team’s efforts.
You can check out this sample general sales quarterly business review template from Hubspot here. Or you can also try out this really cool tl;dv sample sales template to help you manage your sales meeting. This outline will help you to establish accountability among your salespeople and elevate your team’s performance. Craft and tweak your QBR as you wish, just follow the general guide so you won’t feel lost!
Customer Success QBR template
Your customer success team mostly focuses on proactively finding ways to find solutions to problems that your customers may face. This ensures that the quality of your products or service and the satisfaction of your customers always comes first. Having a routine QBR gives your business an insight to check on blind spots from the outside looking in or from the perspective of your customers.
You can check out this general sample of a customer success quarterly business review template from Skilljar here, or you can visit this sharp tl;dv template to help you in handling this important meeting.
Quarterly Business Review FAQs
Q: Do I really need to conduct a quarterly business review?
A: It all depends on how far ahead your company is already. Startups are recommended to maintain lasting relationships with customers. But when you’re already scaling, it can be harder to keep in touch with your customers by scheduling meetings in longer intervals. This is the time that scheduling QBRs are really important.
Q: Should I really do it quarterly? How about monthly, or any other interval?
A: If you keep adding value on a routine basis, then you can increase the frequency to monthly or reduce it to quarterly depending on your performance, business goals and objectives. In this case, you can just stick to a meeting with a definite agenda in a shorter time interval in between check-ins. Remember that the good thing about QBRs and constant monitoring is that it lets you detect blind spots.
However, B2C environments are mostly focused on short-term goals. This means that this area is more susceptible to customer churn since people are more likely to leave if you can’t meet their expectations. In this case, QBR should be done on a regular weekly monitoring.
Q: What should my goals be for every QBR meeting that I hold?
A: Specificity and detail are the keys to having good outcomes for every QBR meeting! Keep in mind that you should have SMART goals (and yes, you can have sound goals by following this quick acronym):
Specific: You should be specifically aiming for something achievable for your customers, like retention rate or higher LTV.
Measurable: Specify a target number within a period of time, and make sure that you have ways of extracting measurable data to compare numbers before and after changing something up.
Achievable: Set plausible achievable goals within the measurable and specific parameters that you’ve set for your business or sales team.
Results-Based: Focus on data and apply iterations to your campaigns or marketing strategies based on the information you’ve gathered.
Time-Bound: When setting and planning for your next steps, make sure to set and follow through on deadlines.
Q: How do I take meeting minutes or record my QBR?
A: By installing the free tl;dv Google Chrome extension, you can autoamtically record all of your quarterly business reviews. What’s even better? There’s an automatic transcript provided and you can add timestamped highlights!
Supreme QBR documentation
Aside from templates that you’d need to stick with in order to go over your main agenda, like any other meeting, you still need to take minutes to fully document important notes all throughout the meeting.
Detail is an essential key in ensuring that you’ll hit all marks whether that’s quarterly or at any other interval. However, the challenge with note-taking is that 51% of employees take their own meeting notes so how can you make sure that what they’ve written down is all clear, concise, accurate, and in alignment with what has been discussed?
You can make use of a QBR meeting template to ensure that everyone has the big picture and is on the same page. QBR templates can also help you note important details about your quarterly objectives, as well as quarterly updates, forecasts, and other important details.
If you want to get into the loop of effectively taking minutes during a QBR (or any other important meeting!), head over to this tl;dv article and we’ll provide you with the best tips and templates to help you out.
Instantly record your QBRs
let’s cut to the chase! Wouldn’t it be so much easier if you could get an instant recording of your next QBR?
But not just any old recording, one with timestamped highlights – that instantly transport you to the most relevant point in your meeting.
Final thoughts on Quarterly Biz Reviews
Growth and success highly rely on documenting all important aspects of your business and meeting quarterly to review your key performance indicators. QBRs open up a lot of important conversations that will not only further improve quarterly goals but also give you informative data about your customers. Take these neat tips and tricks in mind, download these QBR templates, and use tl;dv’s extension to ensure that you’re never caught off guard during quarterly meetings!
Is there any other quarterly business review template type you’d like us to include? Email [email protected].