The QBR Nobody Wants to Attend

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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.