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How the best do it

What separates a best-in-class QBR from a status update?

Benchmarking and a point of view. The best QBRs tell a customer where they sit relative to comparable customers, then say plainly what the top performers do differently and what this customer should change. That requires you to have aggregate data and be willing to use it. The second marker is that the executive sponsor on the customer side keeps showing up, which only happens when the meeting reliably produces a decision rather than a recap. The third is that risks get named in the room by you first. A QBR where the customer raises the problem is one you already lost control of.

Go deeper

5 resources, 5 link-checked.

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

Nine chapters covering the QBR structure, the common mistakes (generic content, dwelling on the negative) and how to keep quality when you have too many customers for one per account.

The Essential Guide to Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs)

From Gainsight 9 chapters

  • McKinsey found B2B customers with strong executive engagement are 2.5 times more likely to renew.
  • 87 percent of business buyers want their rep to act as a trusted advisor, not a vendor.
  • Keep a QBR under an hour, and lead with outcomes rather than a data dump (72 percent of senior decision-makers say information overload delays decisions).
Open gainsight.com
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

The most complete breakdown of what goes into a health score: which four to six categories to weight, how to segment scores by journey stage, and the failure modes (too many metrics, too much subjective input).

Customer Health Score Explained: Metrics, Models and Tools

From Gainsight 12 min read

  • Sample health score weighting: usage 40 percent, support trends 25 percent, sentiment 20 percent, executive engagement 15 percent.
  • Score bands used to triage accounts: 71 to 100 healthy, 31 to 70 at risk, 0 to 30 critical.
  • 78 percent of customers say personalisation makes them more likely to buy again (McKinsey, 2021).
Open gainsight.com
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

The Gainsight CEO on why CS should own an NDR number rather than just a churn number, including the idea of giving every CSM their own book of MRR to grow from 100 to 115.

8 Things I Learned from Dave Kellogg About Net Dollar Retention

From Gainsight by Nick Mehta 8 min read

  • Gross retention is ambiguous (which ARR is the denominator, is a product swap churn), while NDR folds churn and expansion into one number.
  • One cloud company cut NDR by acquisition channel (self-service, enterprise, channel) and found some sales motions were losing money.
  • Some accounts churn whatever a CSM does, so that time is better spent expanding healthy customers.
  • Break upsell into its parts: more of the same product, new products to the same buyer, new products to new buyers.
Open gainsight.com
📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Intermediate

A seven-step method for building relationships beyond one contact. It is written for new deals but the mechanics are identical for protecting and expanding a renewal.

Multithreading in Sales: The B2B Selling Framework

From Highspot by Jessica Hitchcock 11 min read

  • In the older enterprise sale, a single contact could carry you 80 to 90 percent of the way to close; now there are a dozen people involved.
  • Map five stakeholder roles on every deal: economic buyer, technical evaluator, end user, procurement, and executive.
  • Multithreading is not one extra call, it is multiple conversations with multiple contacts across weeks or months.
Open highspot.com

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