The QBR Nobody Wants to Attend

Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a new episode of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

I share strategies and guides to help you become a proactive CSM, deliver more value for your customers, and turn it into revenue for your company every week.

Want to make it impossible to ignore your impact?

Not sure if it’s right for you? Get a Free Preview

There is a meeting that happens in almost every B2B SaaS company - quarter by quarter, customer by customer. It’s more than a meeting, it’s a ritual. A heavy burden that is dragging you down.

Ignoring it until the last possible moment. Then, quickly scrambling something together in a deck. And finally, joining it with the same enthusiasm as if getting a colonoscopy. Hoping that it will be over quickly.

Customers are not looking forward to it either. If they participate at all, they do so out of politeness and not because they expect to get value. It gets occasionally rescheduled - once, twice, three times - and then quietly dropped from the calendar altogether.

This is the QBR no one wants to attend. It’s not a coincidence. It’s a symptom. The QBR, as it is practised in most CS teams, is not failing because CSMs are bad at running meetings. It is failing because it is

In this episode, you’ll learn what goes wrong and what a QBR looks like when it is built on a system instead of a template.

The QBR started as a sensible idea. You meet with your customer once a quarter, review what happened, evaluate how things are going, and agree on what happens next.

A structured touchpoint that creates accountability and surfaces issues before they turn into crises. Demonstrating that you are genuinely interested in your customers’ success. It’s a powerful asset - still to this day - it’s just that it has been hijacked and has become something different.

It has become a reporting exercise. Where you spend hours building a deck full of

The customer sits through it. Visibly disengaged. Checking their phone every minute. The meeting ends with the time running out. An obligation fulfilled. If it had not taken place, none would have noticed a difference.

Here’s why the QBR turned into what nobody wants.

The content was built around what was easy to pull from the CRM and other tools. Not relevant to the customer’s business goals. The CSM walked into the QBR with answers to questions the customer never asked. And the customer walked out without understanding whether they were getting close to the outcome they really cared about.

In most CSM teams, it exists in a parallel universe. The customer success plan was agreed upon at the beginning, but no one is looking at it. The QBR happens every quarter and references nothing from the original agreement. There is no thread connecting what the customer said they wanted in month one to what is being discussed in month nine.

When all the content of the meeting is a review of what happened last quarter, you stay in the past. But the point of looking into the past is to define what needs to happen in the future. It’s supposed to create momentum and make the customer feel like the next quarter is becoming (even) better than the last one.

You arrive with a 57-slide deck. It’s looking exceptionally well. You’ve spent hours optimizing it from A to Z, but the customer did not come here for a presentation. Listening to an endless monologue. They came to have a conversation about whether things are on track and what to do if they are not.

Before diving into what a great QBR looks like, it’s worth recognizing the signals that the current approach is broken. Because many CSM teams are overlooking them.

If your QBRs are being pushed back consistently, it is not because your customers are too busy. Everyone is busy. The meetings that matter get attended. The ones that do not get rescheduled indefinitely. A QBR that keeps getting moved is one that the customer does not believe is worth their time.

If your QBR template looks roughly the same every quarter - product updates, usage stats, support summary, roadmap preview, next steps - you are running a glorified status update, not a business review. The agenda of a great QBR changes every quarter because the customer's situation changes every quarter.

If the only person in the room from the customer side is your day-to-day contact, you are not having a business review. You are having a check-in with a nicer name. A genuine QBR involves the people who care about business outcomes. A buyer who wants to find out whether the investment is justified.

A great QBR does not end with the time running out. It ends with an action plan based on what has been reviewed. A commitment to what needs to happen next with a specific owner and timeline. If every QBR ends with "thanks, speak soon," the meeting is not doing its job.

It’s not only the hours you spend on building a deck. Pulling data from different systems and scrambling it together. You postpone it until the very last moment. You feel resistance inside your mind. Because deep inside, you know it’s an utter waste of time. The only reason why you are running the QBR is that it’s what you are supposed to do.

A great QBR is not a meeting. It’s a strategic tool for engineering success. Customers walk in knowing roughly where they stand. They walk out with a clear picture of where they are going and what needs to be done to continue moving forward.

Here’s what a QBR should be like every single time:

The first part of a great QBR is not “Here’s what happened last quarter.” It’s “Here’s what you told us you were trying to achieve, and here is how far you have come.”

That requires a customer success plan. Not a use case documentation. An active, living record of what the customer agreed success looked like. With the milestones they committed to, and what progress looks like at each stage of the journey.

When the QBR opens with the customer's own goals and their progress toward them, everything changes. The customer is not sitting through a vendor status update. They are in a conversation about their own business. The CSM is not reporting on what happened. They are facilitating a genuine assessment of whether the investment is delivering.

Great QBRs are not comfortable meetings. They are honest ones. If the customer is on track, the QBR demonstrates that specifically. With concrete evidence that connects the product’s performance to the business outcome customers care about.

If the customer is behind, the QBR addresses it directly. Not defensively or apologetically, but clearly.

Many CSMs shy away from giving customers unpleasant news. Because they were made to believe that it would hurt the relationship. But customers do not retain because their QBRs feel good. They retain because QBRs help them to get better results, even when it means changing course.

The last 5-10 minutes of a great QBR are the most important part. They are not reserved for a summary of what was discussed. It’s where decisions about what happens next are made.

Specific actions with a specific owner and a specific deadline. This is what distinguishes a QBR that drives retention from one that merely accompanies it.

A genuine QBR does not only involve the people you are directly working with. It features someone from the customer’s business who cares about business outcomes. A VP, a Director, and an economic buyer.

Someone who connects the product’s performance with business goals and allocated budgets. Getting that person in the room is not easy. But it is the single most important factor in whether the QBR creates value or consumes time.

The way to get them there is to make the meeting worth their time. Which means leading with outcomes, not product updates. Speaking their language - revenue, cost, risk, growth, and not the language of features and usage metrics. Give them something they don’t get in any other QBR with all their vendors.

A great QBR is not the product of great preparation days or weeks before the meeting. It’s the product of a great system that it is part of. A system designed to deliver, measure, and demonstrate customer outcomes.

Here is what that system looks like:

The purpose of your QBR is to evaluate whether your customers have moved forward toward their desired outcomes as expected. You can only measure it if you have a clear definition of that outcome. This is where your success - and failure - starts.

The outcome of the QBR is to verify whether the course is right or needs to be corrected. If you have no actionable customer success plan in place, there’s nothing to compare the actual customer journey to. You may see performance gaps, but you don’t know where they have been caused and why they exist.

You need to have actual insights into customer progress and outcomes. Not login frequency, session length, or support ticket volume. Metrics that make it clear whether customers are on track, ahead of, or behind relative to their own success criteria. Everything else is guessing.

Define a specific sequence of steps you are performing in advance of the QBR. That you are following repeatedly. It’s not "pull together usage data and build a deck." It’s like this:

Follow a consistent structure that every QBR follows, regardless of who the customer is. Open with the top-level outcomes and break down their performance - good or bad - into layers or parts to review them in greater detail.

Assess the progress honestly. Surface what worked, what did not, and why. Get specific feedback. Recommend a specific course of action. Close the QBR with a decision and a commitment on the next steps.

This framework ensures that every customer gets a QBR of consistent quality. It dramatically reduces preparation time because you are no longer assembling it from scratch.

When QBRs are built on a system rather than a template, the results are not marginal. They are transformational.

The QBR does not close renewals itself, but it changes the trajectory of the account. Performance gaps don’t remain hidden. Issues are resolved before escalating into crises. Growth opportunities are detected and pursued. Customers who experience QBRs that are all about their success do not churn.

If you run an impactful QBR, you become more than a random vendor employee. You become the person who

That is the definition of a trusted advisor. Most CSMs aspire to become one, but never do what is necessary to achieve this status.

A QBR that is genuinely focused on the customer's outcomes surfaces gaps between where they are and where they want to be. And that works both ways. If a customer has accomplished their 12-month goal in 6 months already, they have massive proof of value. The next natural step? Exploring opportunities to further grow their outcomes.

When QBRs consistently involve senior stakeholders, you build relationships at the level that controls renewal decisions. The economic buyer who attends four great QBRs per year is not going to cancel but defend your product in a budget meeting.

That is the multi-threading that protects accounts when champions leave, when budgets tighten, and when competitors come knocking.

That may sound soft, but it is not. If you run QBRs that you know are genuinely valuable, you no longer dread them. You prepare differently, show up differently, and carry a different kind of confidence. The quality of your conversations improves, and so do your results.

The QBR is not the problem. It’s not outdated, and customers don’t hate them. It’s the absence of a system that turns QBRs into burdens.

Most CSMs are trying to fix the symptom. Creating better slides, more refined agendas, or more engagement tactics. They are not addressing the elephant in the room.

The QBR is failing because its foundation is missing.

If you build the foundation, the QBR fixes itself.