Sales QBR is a quarterly business review that helps you monitor the performance of your business, track key metrics, and identify opportunities for growth. It’s a great way to make sure your sales team is staying on top of the game and can also be used to manage communications throughout the team.
Let’s dive into Sales QBR in this article.
What Is QBR (quarterly business review)?
As said above, a quarterly business review (QBR) is a review of how your business is performing and what you need to do to keep moving forward. In the QBR, you’ll be able to see how your sales reps are doing compared to pre-defined goals and what actions they should take next.
Key elements of Sales QBR
A typical sales QBR should include the following elements:
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the measurements that indicate whether your business is headed in the right direction. They’re meant to help you understand how you’re doing and where you can make changes.
- Reflection questions help you focus on your performance, growth, and goals. They’re meant to help you reflect on what went well this quarter and what didn’t. How many KPIs do you have set up? Which ones are working well? Which ones need improvement? How will you measure them?
- Inspection of the current quarter looks at your business’ sales numbers over the last three months and compares them with prior quarters’ sales numbers. This helps identify trends in your business’s growth or decline over time. What were your sales this quarter? Did you achieve your targets? Are you meeting them on time, or do you need to adjust them for next quarter? Are there any issues holding back your sales growth? If so, what can be done about it in the future?
- Future planning looks at where you want your business to go by asking, “What do we want to achieve next?” and “How can we make that happen?” “What initiatives could help grow the company’s revenue over the next quarters?” What steps will need to be taken to accomplish those goals?
Why Sales QBR is important
Sales QBR plays a crucial role in growing your sales teams’ productivity and overall sales performance.
- It helps you to get an overview of the sales performance. You can see how everything is going, what needs improvement, and what is working well.
- It gives everyone in your sales team a chance to catch up on each other’s work and ensure they’re all on the same page.
- It allows you to set goals and expectations for the next quarter so everybody knows what’s expected from them.
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5 steps to run Sales QBR
Running a sales QBR is easy. You can follow these steps to do it:
- Step 1: Start with a short presentation of the review panel and your company’s current situation.
- Step 2: Present sales figures and explain changes in these figures over the past quarter.
- Step 3: Discuss the reasons for those changes. Let everyone in your team share their opinions.
- Step 4: Review objectives for the next quarter and identify potential problems that might arise in achieving them.
- Step 5: Make recommendations for improving sales performance and creating new opportunities for growth.
What metrics to include in your Sales QBR
When preparing for a sales quarterly business review, there are a few key metrics you should keep in mind.
For example, you should look at your revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC), the number of leads acquired, opportunities, won deals, lost deals, and average time to close deals.
Another critical metric is the customer lifetime value (CLV). This is how much money a customer spends over their lifetime with your business or how much profit they bring in over time. To calculate CLV, you have to estimate how long it’ll take for an average customer to make back what they spent and then divide that number by how many purchases they make before canceling their subscription or canceling their service with you altogether.
You might also want to review your customer base. What percentage of your customers have come back for more products or services? What percentage of them were new customers? How many times did they return? These numbers indicate how well you’re doing at retaining customers and attracting new ones.
Sales QBR Template and Example
Below are elements of a typical sales QBR. You can customize it based on your business’s requirements:
- Past performance: This section highlights your team’s key achievements over the past quarter (including notable wins and losses).
- Wins: A list of notable wins for the quarter.
- Losses: A list of notable losses for the quarter.
- Pushes deals: A list of deals that were pushed from last quarter (but not closed) and a brief explanation of why they were pushed back.
- Forecast: A forecast of what you expect to close and the deals that are currently in progress, along with an estimated timeline for completion.
- Next opportunities: A list of key next opportunities that have been identified by your team during this quarter.
- Potential risks: A list of potential risks that could impact your business in the future, along with mitigation strategies where possible.
- Large deals: The largest deals signed or closed this quarter, along with any challenges or issues encountered during their execution.
- Lead development: An assessment of how well your team has developed leads over this period, including any challenges encountered and steps taken to improve performance from now on.
Sales QBR tips
Conducting a sales quarterly business review allows you to evaluate your company’s progress and see how you’re doing against your goals.
Here are some tips to get started:
- Determine what metrics you can use to assess how well your goals are being met. These metrics should be clear, measurable, and objective. They should also be specific enough that they don’t require a lot of interpretation.
- Once you’ve identified your metrics, figure out how often you want to measure them. For example, if one of your main goals is growing customer retention rates, it might make sense for this metric to be measured every month instead of every quarter.
- Look at historical data for each metric and compare it with current data. This will give you an idea of whether or not unexpected changes in trends would warrant further investigation.
- Set goals for yourself and your team for the next quarter. Make sure these goals are specific and measurable, so everyone knows exactly what needs to be done (and when).
- Conduct a SWOT analysis of your company’s strengths and weaknesses as well as those of your competitors. This will help you identify areas where improvement is needed so you can set realistic goals moving forward.
How Revenue Grid can transform your sales QBRs
Every business should conduct a sales quarterly business review to dig deeper into sales pipeline and revenue projections, as well as determine successful strategies for the following quarters. If your business doesn’t have a sales QBR yet, now is the time to start one. That’s were Revenue Grid comes in.
Long done are days when sales team prepared PowerPoint decks or roll-ups to present at the QBRs meeting. Now when you use Revenue Grid for your sales QBRs you can accurately track all the critical sales metrics in one place:
- See the total pipeline value at the beginning and end of a selected period
- See real-time statistics on lost and won opportunities
- Analyze stage-over-stage conversion rates within the pipeline
- Examine conversion rate between stages in the pipeline for field sales teams
Ready to run your next sales QBR in Revenue Grid?
