The Strategic QBR Process: How To Achieve Shared Accountability

By Andrew Brethauer, ScalePad

Way too often, the Quarterly Business Review (QBR) is treated as a sales activity - an opportunity to get in front of your clients and sell them new warranties and products. 

Unfortunately, also way too often, MSPs don’t have the proper action plan in place for their QBRs and end up putting in plenty of effort but end up getting low results in return. 

The desire is to change to a low effort, high return business review should be the goal of every MSP. To do that, MSPs need to change their focus around the QBR. That means thinking about it as a strategy meeting, not a sales meeting. 

“It’s changing the perspective in that your value isn’t in the products that you sell from a sales perspective, but it’s in your strategy,” said Luis Giraldo, CXO with ScalePad. “The sales QBR is what challenges MSPs to deliver them successfully because the client sees them coming. They become a pushback exercise. It becomes ‘every time you have a meeting with us, you’re trying to sell us more stuff’ because they are happening too regularly.”

During ScalePad’s Master Class webinar, Matthew Bookspan, CEO of Blacktip IT Services, said his company doesn’t even talk about products during their QBRs, which they have now called one-on-ones. Instead, they talk about their client’s business, industry trends, and concerns around their customer’s business that they are seeing.