It's Time To Kill The QBR

The quarterly business review (QBR), once a mainstay for MSPs, has got to go. QBRs used to offer a way to show clients all the great work your team was doing, and providers leaned on them more as cloud and remote work moved in and they saw their customers less. But QBRs are no longer useful, needed, or even advantageous. And so it’s high time MSPs gave the QBR the heave-ho in favor of a better, more efficient, and more profitable strategy for maintaining and growing client accounts.

Your clients don’t like QBRs and you shouldn’t, either

QBRs were an okay solution years ago. They brought together datasets from a not-yet-overwhelming tech stack and presented it in a readable format. But for as much as MSPs appreciate QBRs as a connection point and a conversation starter with clients, that’s how much clients dislike them. Most customers see the quarterly review as a waste of time—20 minutes of reading through a report they could review on their own followed by 10 minutes of being upsold whatever the sales team was pushing that quarter.

With the on-demand access many clients now have to their account data, it’s much easier for them to see what’s going on. Ticket volumes, licensing, reporting—everything is readily available at the touch of a button. Clients don’t want an MSP to spoon-feed them information that’s already on tap.