Powering B2B Products with Customer QBRs
B2B product managers have a fundamentally different distribution model vs. B2C product managers.
In B2C, end users discover the product and sign up on their own.
But in B2B, the targeted end user cannot make the purchasing decision. To win a B2B customer, software companies need to convince a variety of customer executives, customer champions, and customer end users before sealing the deal.
A crucial part of keeping B2B customers from churning is the customer quarterly business review process.
While you shouldn’t expect to lead a customer quarterly business review as a B2B product manager, you’ll find them valuable for refining your product direction.
In this guide, we’ll discuss what a customer quarterly business review is, why it matters for your company, and why it matters for your customers. Then, we’ll discuss how you benefit from customer quarterly business reviews as a product manager. Finally, we’ll break down how to best prepare for the customer quarterly business review so that you maximize ROI.
So, let’s first break down what a customer quarterly business review is.
What is a customer quarterly business review?
A customer quarterly business review, abbreviated as QBR, is a meeting with key executive leaders within your customer accounts. This meeting is typically most relevant for enterprise B2B products, where it’s crucial to have executive buy-in so that you can demonstrate your ROI to them (increasing retention) and identify new areas of collaboration (increasing per-account revenue through upselling).
To clarify, these QBRs are not the same as your internal product management review meetings for your own company’s executive leaders. Rather, these QBRs are set up for the benefit of your customers.
The focus of customer QBRs is on strategic initiatives and customer priorities, rather than tackling tactics or execution. Tactics, execution, and minor feedback are typically covered by your CSMs (customer success managers) as part of their weekly touchpoints with customers.
Because customer QBRs are focused at the executive level, CSMs need to invest significant time to craft the agenda and the content for the meeting. Since CSMs are typically staffed with 5-20 customer accounts at a time, QBRs are typically reserved for the most strategic accounts.
CSMs typically only set up QBRs with customer executives only after your product has been implemented and rolled out by the customer organization, as that’s when customers start to realize the true value of your product.
If your customer is still in the implementation phase, they’re not going to benefit much from QBRs, since they’re still focused on just getting your product set up in the first place.
So, we now know that QBRs are regular meetings with customer executives that happen after your product has been rolled out. But, why does it matter for us to have these customer QBRs?
Why do customer QBRs matter to your organization?
Customer QBRs are valuable for your organization because they enable you to deeply understand what your customers need and why they need it.
One of the key parts of the QBR agenda is to learn more about your customer’s upcoming roadmap. Just like how you have a roadmap for your own product, your customers have their own roadmaps of strategic initiatives too. QBRs are a time for both you and your customer to discuss one another’s priorities, so that you can jointly look for synergies and find gaps to close.
Perhaps even more important than “what’s on the roadmap” is “why is it on the roadmap.” By hearing directly from a customer executive about why they’ve prioritized a given initiative and what pains they’re facing, you’ll have a deeper understanding of their decision making process.
That knowledge then enables you to determine what kinds of products and functionality will best resonate with them, and how long of a window you have before your customer selects a competitor or builds something themselves.
Of course, building empathy and learning isn’t just good for the product’s future. It’s also good for account health. By ensuring that the customer feeds heard, understood, and respected, you create goodwill, which helps with retention and renewals.
And, customer QBRs also build up key relationships with influencers within your company’s vertical. When your customers have a strong relationship with your company, they’re typically quite happy to provide testimonials, white papers, shoutouts during earnings calls, and praise during conferences. These proof points help to convince other prospects to evaluate your product, and QBRs are natural breeding grounds for genuine words of praise.
Finally, customer QBRs are valuable for your company because it’s an opportunity to upsell customers on existing products. To be clear, upsells aren’t the point of the customer QBR - that’s pushy and disingenuous.
But whenever your customer raises a strategic priority that they can’t currently cover with their existing solutions, and you happen to already have an offering for it that they’re not using yet, that’s a natural point to introduce them to your products. By doing so, you’ve solved their pain while capturing value for your company, and it’s a win-win for both parties.
Now we know why customer QBRs are so crucial for enterprise B2B product companies. But, what benefit does the customer get from it?
Why do customer QBRs matter to your customers?
When customers use B2B products, they’re changing the way that they work. Processes are crucial foundations for companies to grow and thrive, so it’s critical that the products they’ve decided to implement will drive processes that work for their needs. A good product creates good processes for customers, and a bad product creates bad processes for customers.
Because products are so important to B2B customers, your customers will want to know that the company who makes their products are also aligned with their needs. Processes are a matter of life or death for a large organization, and so they want to know that your company is paying close attention to them.
Customer QBRs are also forums for customer executives to share their plans with you, and to work together on planning for the future.
By understanding what’s coming up in your roadmap, they can decide whether they should opportunistically change their planned upcoming initiatives. And, customer executives also want to share what’s in their roadmap, to see whether your company might be convinced to alter its roadmap for mutual benefit.
On top of that, customer QBRs give customer executives direct access to leaders within your company, which gives them the chance to frankly discuss what's working well and what’s not working at all. Customer QBRs might involve your head of customer success, or your head of sales, or your head of product, because the customer is exposing their own C-suite to yours.
By giving executives on both sides a place to hear each other out, customer QBRs improve partnerships over the long run.
Finally, customer QBRs are an opportunity for customers to get insight into how they’re doing vs. other customers, whether those other customers are direct competitors or are leaders in adjacent industries.
These benchmarks are incredibly valuable for them to understand where they excel in your product usage, and where they’re falling behind. That then gives them opportunities to drive even more efficiency and to unlock even more opportunities through the use of your product.
So, customer QBRs are just as important for your customer accounts as they are for your company. But, what value do you get as a product manager by being a part of customer QBRs?
What value do you get as a PM from customer QBRs?
Customer QBRs can be incredibly valuable for product managers in the following ways:
Product feedback
Customer and market knowledge
Requests
Keep in mind that you won’t be able to get all of these benefits from every single QBR that you participate in, but you’ll definitely get at least one of these three.
First, customer QBRs are rich sources of product feedback. You’ll hear directly from your customer’s key decision makers on what kinds of non-ideal product behavior their users have, and this knowledge can provide you with inspiration on how to best improve your product.
You’ll also hear about what’s been working well for them, and why it’s been working well. That knowledge then helps you better position your products to other customers and prospects.
On top of that, you’ll also get to hear about pains that your product is not solving, and you’ll get to ask live questions about those pains. That in turn will help you decide what to ship next and how to maximize its impact.
Second, customer QBRs are also rich sources of customer and market knowledge. You’ll hear about how they perceive changes in the industry and which trends they’re focused on. By participating in the QBR, you’ll get to ask questions that will help you refine your product more thoughtfully.
And, if you attend enough QBRs, you’ll also get a more nuanced sense of the ways in which your customers are differentiated. From there, you can drive more precise customer targeting through your functionality, and you can make more reasoned tradeoffs about the kinds of abstractions and configurations you’ll need to build.
Third, one of the great things about customer QBRs is that it’s a partnership between your company and your customer, so you can use this forum to make requests of your customer.
For example, you can ask about implementing a customer feedback forum so that you have regular access to users. Or, you can ask for a committed pilot user group to test your functionality as you build it. Or, you can even ask your customer to dedicate development resources to cobuild a new product together.
Customer QBRs are valuable for product managers. But, to be clear, you shouldn’t participate in every customer QBR that your CSMs organize. After all, that’s not your core responsibility.
Since you won’t attend all of them, it’s also important to ask your customer success team to centralize their QBR recordings and notes. That way, you and the rest of your product team can gain critical customer context, even if you didn’t happen to participate in the QBR.
Let's say that you’ve been asked to participate in a QBR by one of your CSMs. What should you do next?
How should you prepare for customer QBRs as a PM?
The most important step is to align with the CSM to understand the agenda, their role, and your role for the QBR.
I’ve found from painful firsthand experience that sometimes, the correct answer is to politely decline the meeting. Too often, customer success managers will ask product managers to attend as a “security blanket,” but that tactic frequently backfires.
As an example, when product people are attending customer QBRs, customers tend to focus on “what’s on the product roadmap?” rather than on “how do we partner together?” That line of questioning creates a “we vs. you” mentality instead of a true partnership mentality.
Another downside of having product managers attend is that customers sometimes spend too much time rehashing tactical feedback, such as text, colors, or animations. That then reduces the time available to discuss the most strategic levers for accelerating your customer’s business while simultaneously growing your own bottom line.
Therefore, it’s crucial to work with your CSM to determine whether your presence is a hindrance or a benefit. And, it’s critical that they tightly control the agenda and set clear expectations with attendees, so that everyone focuses on the highest-ROI topics rather than on small nitpicks.
The second most important step is to clarify what you want to get out of the customer QBR as a PM. Most of the time, if you’re not going to get anything out of the customer QBR, you should elect not to attend.
Of course, sometimes that’s not possible. As an example, if your customer executives have escalated that they need to speak to the product manager directly, then you shouldn’t decline.
Still, make sure to let the CSM know what you’re looking to get from the customer so that they can kick off the process, either within this QBR meeting or with a different upcoming touchpoint.
Your time is limited and expensive, so ensure that you’re only making yourself available for the highest-impact customers where your presence will make-or-break the product. Otherwise, your time is better spent on crafting products that help the entire customer base overall, rather than talking to a single customer.
If you and the CSM both determine that your presence is valuable, it’s time to prepare for how you’ll contribute to the meeting.
Here’s my QBR prep playbook:
Pull up this customer’s product usage stats
Pull up overall product usage stats for benchmarking purposes
Read the CSM’s notes on account health, ongoing initiatives, and customer attendees
Prepare your publicly-facing roadmap and practice your talking points
For any asks that you’re going to make, practice your pitches to the customer
Practice how to say “we’ve heard your feedback” without committing on the spot
Keep an open mind to inbound feedback
Of course, the exact items that you should prepare will vary from CSM to CSM and from customer to customer. So, make sure you align with the CSM to clarify what prep work you’re in charge of vs. what prep work they’re in charge of.
Once you jump into the customer QBR, stay laser-focused on your key objectives.
Get the answers that you need, build relationships that matter, and don’t commit on the spot without going through the standard prioritization process.
As you attend more and more QBRs over time, you’ll naturally come to value them as high-impact touchpoints, and you’ll become more and more adept at navigating them successfully.
Eager to learn more about how to collaborate effectively with other cross-functional stakeholders? Our Product Teacher PM Masterclass provides students with actionable, scalable frameworks for managing and influencing stakeholders.
Closing thoughts
Customer QBRs are ongoing processes led by your customer success team for your B2B products. They’re crucial for empowering customers to grow alongside your company. And, they shift your customers’ perspective, so that they treat you as a valued partner instead of a replaceable vendor.
As a B2B product manager, you stand to benefit from customer QBRs in a variety of ways. You’ll learn more about the gaps in your product, and you’ll have a much better understanding of your customer and the market that you’re building for.
You’ll also get to make requests of your customer for mutual benefit, such as exposing their users to you for user interviews, asking their development teams to cobuild with you, or providing a user group to you to run a product pilot.
By thoughtfully leveraging customer QBRs, you’ll have a much better understanding of your own product and its product/market fit, and that in turn empowers you to build winning products.
Thank you to Pauli Bielewicz, Siamak Khorrami, Goutham Budati, Markus Seebauer, Margaret Wang, Alina Ha, Juliet Chuang, Shanthan Gangupantula, and Kushal Sheshadri for making this guide possible.
