Tips For More Insightful QBRs
Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) are critical tools for sales leaders--and sometimes painful exercises for those in charge of pulling them together.
These reports, by design, are internally-focused and heavily data-driven, with plenty of figures and graphs around pipeline, close ratios, quotas and forecasts. If you are creating account-specific reports, you might include some insight into the business strategy of the customer, and information on how the customer's current initiatives align with your company's offerings.
Here's an idea sure to get the attention of your sales leadership: include a snapshot of your customer's CXO priorities in your QBR. It can be as simple as the grid below, which shows the alignment of specific customer initiatives with key executive decision makers (this is a generic example):
This simple grid was a huge hit with one of our customer's sales leadership. Why? Because it provides insight into the customer story behind the QBR data. This snapshot proved to be a valuable tool for driving business-focused conversations and accelerating the close of bigger deals.
Here is a remarkably wise and well-crafted argument from sales leadership guru and author Lisa Earle McLeod on why sales organizations should be putting more focus on customer insight across all sales planning and operations. She makes the argument that keeping tabs on customer priorities and initiatives is far more important than focusing on the competition.
Boardroom Insiders can be a useful tool for pulling together this up-to-date customer insight quickly. And if you use Salesforce.com, you can instantly access this insight within your account or contact records with no hassle or extra log ins.
Happy selling!
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