Two out of three clients feel that their service providers’ Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) process is inadequate. As a senior leader in a B2B enterprise you need to make sure you keep up with your industry and focus on both delivering and proving your additional value to your clients. The humble business review is one of the best opportunities for this.
Where to start
The first questions you should be asking yourself when you inspect your Quarterly Business Reviews process is:
- What is the attitude being fed down from the senior leadership to your account teams towards QBRs in general? Is it seen as an essential part of their roles?
- Are they putting their QBR decks together with the mindset that this is a chore they must simply do, or can it be one of their greatest tools for evidencing value and gathering feedback?
- How are you fostering an encouraging attitude internally towards gathering feedback?
- What is the senior leadership's perceived attitude towards negative client feedback and do you have a process in place to make sure the account teams feel secure in sharing and dealing with this effectively?
Having a growth mindset and creating a Quarterly Business Reviews process that your team and clients look forward to could be the difference between a renewal or an up-sell. Having an open and productive attitude towards client feedback in general, and more so towards negative feedback, makes a huge difference. Being able to respond to an issue quickly and thoroughly can create even greater loyalty and growth.
How to implement change
It’s senior leaders like you who must lead the charge on demonstrating the right attitude. When you discuss feedback, what kind of language are you using? What language are you motivating your teams to use?
Equally, as a senior leader it is important to consider if you could sit in on a few reviews with key accounts to demonstrate the value of QBRs and lead by example.
Customisation
- Personalise client communication as much as possible.
- Make sure to include value adding content and insights in your QBR packs.
- Clearly communicate the importance and impact of clients feedback to your team and clients.
Using personalised content can be very impactful when sharing your Quarterly Business Review packs. You can add a quick video message, a personal note from the CEO or relevant senior leader, and make sure you share some relevant industry insights. Our customers have seen great results from using our embedded video tool and leadership message feature as part of our easy-to-use workflow process.
One of our customers, Martin Hess, the UK CEO of Telefónica Tech, says:
“I love being able to share a message with our clients each quarter as part of the QBR pack. It becomes a very natural part of the process. We have had great feedback from our clients to the short personal video messages from the accounts team too. The whole workflow is just really easy to use and delivers consistent high quality business reviews every time.”
Actions and reporting
It’s important to ensure that the attitude towards QBRs are backed up by actions. Making sure the feedback received is tracked, handled and reported is another step in showing that it is a business priority. A couple of things to implement might be:
- Ensure that your team track and follow-up on any action needed and taken based on client feedback.
- Support the sharing and reporting of both positive and negative client feedback.
- Acquire or build the tools you need to make the data accessible to all stakeholders.
Consider using digital tools to track feedback and actions. It will support the team in keeping track of tasks and making it easy to prove to your clients that you listen and take them seriously. For example, the Clientshare business reviews platform enables you to set up actions, tasks and alerts to make it simple to evidence progress, and functions as an early warning system against risk of churn. Making the data accessible means everyone is on the same page, and it is also a natural starting point to prove direct value at the start of your next QBR meeting.
We work with SEKO logistics, who use our platform to manage their business reviews process. Dan Eckett the Client Solutions Group Director UK&I, says:
“The regular reviews and consistent workflow of Pulse ensures we keep our clients as up to date as possible on our progress. It shows that we offer our clients the opportunity to give us regular feedback, that we care about what our clients think about us and that we will take immediate action. That's pretty powerful.”
Next steps
Building a new process from scratch can be very time consuming. There are tools out there that help you with different parts of the Quarterly Business Reviews process, NPS and CSAT as well as reporting and analytics. You can use Excel or survey tools and collate information and data from the different sources manually, or even outsource it to third party agencies.
At Clientshare we have created our Pulse platform specifically built to help B2B enterprises across Logistics, Facilities Management, BPO and IT services to digitise and manage the entire Quarterly Business Reviews process, combined with gathering CSAT and NPS. Our automated reporting and unique risk analysis dashboards will make your client health data accessible to all relevant stakeholders. We work with some of the largest B2B enterprises across several industries, and over a third of the top FTSE 100 are using Pulse to either send or respond to reviews.
Want to learn more about how Quarterly Business Reviews can help you unlock growth? Have a look at our blog 'Can Net Promoter Score Really Help You Upsell Your B2B Clients?' or the ISP webinar with our MD, James Ward, talking about '3 Ways to Unlock Growth' and follow our updates and news on LinkedIn.
To learn more about how to stop losing clients and start growing accounts with Clientshare Pulse. Here’s a quick introduction to how it works.
If you want to learn more, book a demo with our wonderful sales team.
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