The Essential Guide to
Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs)
Quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are one of the most precise tools you can have to enhance partnerships, engage executives, and see the value of your product recognized by customers.
Customer meetings can easily become repetitive, routine check-ins that gloss over strategic priorities and overlook opportunities for real growth. Status updates and renewal reminders may feel sufficient in the moment, but they rarely inspire true engagement.
QBRs break that cycle. Each quarterly business review is an opportunity to drive deeper alignment, establish a shared vision, and achieve measurable progress. Instead of relying on loyalty, you intentionally build it by delivering value and collaborating on the goals that matter most to your customers’ business, together.
This guide will help you make every QBR purposeful, transforming it from a transactional meeting into a strategic conversation that delivers results for both you and your customers. Let’s bridge the gap between routine check-ins and the impactful QBRs that lay the foundation for a long-term partnership.
Main Takeaways:
- QBRs turn routine meetings into strategic touchpoints, strengthening relationships and aligning on shared goals.
- A successful QBR highlights ROI, celebrates wins, tackles challenges, and defines clear next steps for growth.
- QBRs foster executive and cross-functional alignment, ensuring key stakeholders are engaged and invested in success.
- Best-in-class QBRs are personalized, data-driven, and focused on delivering value that advances both customer and company objectives.
- Leveraging QBR best practices and tools—like Gainsight CS—drives retention, expansion, and long-term customer success.
Chapter 1
What Is a Quarterly Business Review?
A quarterly business review (QBR), sometimes called an executive business review, is a strategic meeting held once every three months between you and your customer. Unlike standard check-ins, the QBR is designed to deliver value, highlight business impact, and deepen your partnership. The focus is on demonstrating ROI, aligning on shared goals, and advancing both your customers’ objectives and your company’s mission.
What Is the Purpose of a QBR?
QBRs are not just status updates or technical troubleshooting sessions. They are powerful opportunities for customer success managers (CSMs) to showcase progress, understand evolving customer needs, and co-create strategies for future growth. When executed well, QBRs position you as a trusted advisor—building trust, strengthening relationships, and setting the foundation for long-term success.
What Is the Difference Between EBR and QBR?
The main differences between an Executive Business Review (EBR) and a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) are:
- Audience and frequency: EBRs typically involve senior leadership and may occur annually or biannually, while QBRs are held quarterly and focus on operational performance and immediate value.
- Strategic vs. tactical focus: EBRs take a strategic, long-term view, aligning high-level business objectives, whereas QBRs prioritize shorter-term goals, tactical progress, and relationship-building with day-to-day stakeholders.
Together, these distinctions help determine which meeting format is most appropriate based on the customer’s role, goals, and engagement level.
Chapter 2
Why Are Quarterly Business Reviews Important?
Quarterly business reviews are important because they help you scale personalized customer engagement as your business grows. They ensure you stay aligned with your customers’ goals, maintain strong relationships, and uncover opportunities to deliver greater value.
Including senior stakeholders in your QBRs builds alignment and long-term partnership at the highest levels.
Keeping in touch with customers may seem easy in the early stages of your company’s growth. Because you likely have fewer customers than larger, more established companies, it’s easier to maintain individual relationships with each one.
However, as your company grows, those relationships become more difficult to sustain. And it can become impossible to scale that kind of one-to-one touch efficiently. Still, strong relationships are crucial to your continued success at every stage of growth.
QBRs provide a structured plan that ensures your relationship-building efforts don’t fall by the wayside. At the same time, they also reveal important information that you can use to carve out more positive experiences for customers—experiences that deliver more value and fit your broader growth plans.
Chapter 3
What Key Elements Should Be Included in a QBR?
A successful QBR is built on a foundation of transparency, collaboration, and forward momentum. To ensure every meeting delivers value, incorporate these essential elements:
- Strategic performance review: Begin by analyzing progress against agreed-upon goals, celebrating wins, and identifying any gaps or trends using relevant data and KPIs.
- Insightful challenge exploration: Invite open conversation around obstacles or changes in the customer’s business, surfacing risks and opportunities for improvement.
- Collaborative goal setting: Define and align on measurable objectives for the next quarter, ensuring both your team and the customer are working toward shared outcomes.
- Value demonstration: Quantify and communicate the business impact of your product or service by connecting results to the customer’s priorities and showcasing ROI.
- Actionable next steps: Close with a clear roadmap, assigning responsibilities, and establishing timelines so everyone leaves the meeting aligned and empowered.
When each of these elements is present, QBRs transform from routine check-ins into strategic touchpoints that deepen relationships, reinforce your value, and unlock new growth opportunities—driving success for both your business and your customers.
Chapter 4
What Are the Biggest Benefits of QBRs?
Forge Stronger Relationships
QBRs strengthen partnerships between your business and your customers by creating a regular, dedicated space for open dialogue and collaboration. These sessions allow you to proactively check in, celebrate shared wins, and demonstrate that you are invested in your customer’s ongoing success, not just their next renewal. This proactive engagement helps customers feel heard, valued, and supported, which deepens loyalty and turns your relationship from transactional to strategic.
Carve Deeper Executive Bonds
QBRs foster relationships between your executives and your customer’s executives by bringing senior stakeholders to the table. This alignment at the leadership level ensures that strategic goals are visible and prioritized, and it often uncovers new opportunities for collaboration that might be missed in day-to-day interactions. Executive engagement also signals to your customer that their business is a priority, laying the groundwork for long-term partnership and advocacy.
According to McKinsey, B2B customers who have strong executive engagement are 2.5 times more likely to renew, reinforcing the value of bringing senior stakeholders into QBR conversations.
Show Off ROI
QBRs give you a chance to highlight the ROI of your product and reinforce your value to your customer by connecting data, outcomes, and impact directly to their business objectives. Presenting tangible results and progress against key performance indicators makes it easy for customers to see the value they’re receiving. This not only justifies their investment but also creates a compelling case for continued partnership, expansion, and upsell opportunities.
Create a Clearer Direction
QBRs open up honest discussions about your customers’ overall health and what you can do to maintain and improve that status. By surfacing challenges, changes in business priorities, or new opportunities, you can collaboratively set actionable goals and adapt your approach to better align with evolving needs. This ongoing, transparent planning ensures everyone is working toward the same outcomes and that your customer’s path to success is always clear.
Reduce Contract Questions
QBRs help reassure you that your customer will renew their contract or subscription once it expires by consistently demonstrating value, addressing concerns before they escalate, and keeping the relationship top of mind. Regular, strategic check-ins minimize surprises at renewal time and provide opportunities to proactively address any blockers or hesitations, making the renewal process smoother and more predictable for both sides.
Build More Trust
QBRs demonstrate to your customer that you’re serious about providing ROI and that you expect to do so within 90 days. This regular cadence of accountability shows you are committed to transparency and continuous improvement. By setting clear expectations, following through on action items, and sharing honest updates—even when challenges arise—you establish yourself as a trusted advisor invested in mutual success, not just a vendor.
Ultimately, QBRs help you move your customer in the direction most beneficial to them, which naturally will be the direction most beneficial to you as well. After all, if the customer doesn’t experience success with your product, there’s a good chance that customer eventually will churn—and that’s not good for either party.
See How Singular Doubled Its QBR Cadence With Gainsight AI
Discover how Singular used Staircase AI by Gainsight to increase monthly QBRs by 2x, boost customer engagement, and surface insights across thousands of accounts—without adding headcount.
Chapter 5
What Are the Best Practices for Effective QBRs?
Too often, leaders will treat QBRs as just another box to check off the list, heading into meetings with little strategic vision. That’s a costly mistake. QBRs are a valuable chance to understand the value your product currently delivers to your customers, what they are looking for in the future, and boost your company’s value to key stakeholders throughout the organization. Simply put, the best QBRs follow a clear structure and strategy.
Prepare a QBR Plan
A QBR without a strategy is a waste of everyone’s time. It also puts you at risk of churn. Create an agenda and make sure all attending parties receive it well ahead of the meeting time. A focused agenda will set expectations and make it easier for customers to craft their most important questions or points of discussion ahead of time.
A unified QBR strategy benefits from both the CS and Account teams working together. Research from Salesforce shows that 87% of business buyers want their reps to be trusted advisors, so it’s important to bring those relationships and value-driven conversations into a single, strategic discussion.
Emphasize Business ROI
QBRs are a chance to put ROI on display and help your customers realize value. That’s why ROI should be a centerpiece of these meetings. To determine what ROI to focus on, ask yourself, “Why did our customer purchase our product in the first place, and over the last quarter, how well have we fulfilled that need?” Present numbers and data points that demonstrate the value you have delivered in that time period.
This is especially important for executive audiences. Research from Oracle shows that 72% of senior decision-makers report that information overload—or mistrust in the data—often delays decisions.
You need to make your data not just visible, but trustworthy, relevant, and aligned with their strategic goals.
This is the perfect opportunity to revisit the mutual success plans that you crafted with your customers at the beginning of the engagement. Track your progress, adjust timelines based on new goals or learnings your customers provide, and consider what else is possible based on the goals you’ve already reached.
Keep the conversation personalized to that specific customer, the goals they’ve outlined, and what is possible for them based on what you know about their product adoption and usage. Spend the most time during this part of the QBR so that you know exactly how to deliver value and guarantee renewals, adoption, and expansion.
Present Benchmarking Data
Companies love to see how well they’re doing in comparison to their competitors. If you can correlate that success to your product using hard metrics, they’ll be eager to continue doing business with you. Ensure that you’re noting what sticks out to your customers, what questions they ask, and what metrics they discuss so that your sales and marketing organizations can use that information to drive expansions and upsells. While this may not be the time to make those upsells, it is important to share the knowledge learned in each one and provide any identified actionable insights.
Set Up Your Next QBR
Lay out important goals for the next quarter. In some cases, this might be a good time to bring up expansion opportunities or new products and add-ons that will help the company achieve its goals. Be sure to confirm the goals with your customers, outline who will be responsible for the various tasks associated with those goals, and any other important details.
Remember, these meetings must be strategic value-adds for your customers. Simultaneously, they must outline to your CSMs where the customer wants to go, how to get there, and any opportunities in the future that they should communicate to the broader team.
Lean On Your Customer Health Index
After the QBR, update the customer’s health score with new insights and ensure key takeaways are documented and shared across your team. A Customer Health Index (CHI) helps you track and communicate customer engagement, satisfaction, and risk in a single score.
By incorporating CHI into your QBR, you can anchor the conversation in objective data. This makes it easier to highlight positive trends, surface potential risks, and align on where to focus next. Use the CHI as a starting point to shape recommendations, prioritize support, and personalize your strategy.
Involve the Right Stakeholders
The impact of a QBR depends heavily on who attends. Make sure to include both day-to-day users who know the product and strategic stakeholders who can influence future direction.
Executive participation helps elevate the conversation from tactical updates to long-term planning. It also increases the likelihood of buy-in, follow-through, and alignment on shared goals. When the right people are in the room, QBRs become a platform for strategic growth, not just operational reviews.
Explore How Gainsight’s AI Agents Help Teams Scale Strategic QBRs
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Chapter 6
How To Avoid Common QBR Mistakes
Now that you know what you should cover during your QBRs, let’s talk about some general no-nos.
Don’t Dwell on the Negative
If possible, steer clear of in-depth discussions about anything negative. Highlight successes rather than dwelling on any shortcomings. That said, you should allow the customer to provide honest feedback. That way, you’ll have the opportunity to assure the customer that you can solve any issues or problems they have experienced.
Don’t Get Defensive About Criticism
Resist going on the defensive if the customer brings up any issues or challenges. Again, focus on the positives, and turn conversations about problems into conversations about solutions. Remember that this is an opportunity to find new, valuable features to add to your product map to expand your customer base and increase upsells if you start to see themes in these conversations.
Don’t Let the Meeting Drag On
By setting a time limit on your QBRs, it motivates you to keep the meeting tight and focused. As a general rule of thumb, try not to let the meeting go longer than an hour.
Don’t Rely on Generic or Outdated Content
Bringing a templated deck that doesn’t reflect the customer’s current goals, usage data, or recent wins sends the message that you’re not fully engaged. QBRs must feel tailored. Always refresh your content with the latest insights, recent milestones, and customer-specific context.
Don’t End Without Clear Next Steps
Don’t leave the meeting without scheduling the next QBR. This shows the customer you intend to follow through on everything discussed and that you will deliver results by the time you meet again.
Chapter 7
What Should Be Included in a QBR Presentation?
An effective QBR presentation balances structure with customer-centric personalization. While each QBR should be tailored to the customer’s priorities, industry, and stage in their journey, a consistent framework keeps the conversation goal-oriented and actionable—never just a status update.
Use the following QBR template as a starting point and adapt as needed for each customer:
Executive Summary
Start with a high-level overview of key insights since the last QBR. Highlight major outcomes, progress, and what matters most for this meeting, setting a clear agenda and expectation for your customer.
Key Performance Metrics
Present the metrics that matter most to your customer’s business—think adoption rates, feature utilization, time-to-value, or realized efficiencies. Each KPI should reinforce the business impact of your product or service.
ROI Analysis
Demonstrate the tangible value delivered. Use concrete numbers—such as hours saved, increased revenue, or improved operational efficiency—linked directly to your customer’s use cases.
Progress Against Previous Goals
Review commitments and success plans from the prior QBR. Celebrate progress, address any blockers, and be transparent about areas that need adjustment or extra support.
Benchmarking Data
Share relevant benchmarks so your customer can see how they compare to similar organizations or industry standards. This could include adoption rates, time-to-value, or satisfaction scores.
Customer Health Update
Provide a snapshot of the customer’s current Health Score and what’s driving it. Discuss how recent engagement, support activity, and feedback have influenced trends.
Action Items and Next Steps
Close with a clear, shared action plan. Assign owners, set deadlines, and outline dependencies to ensure follow-through. This builds trust and drives accountability after the meeting ends.
When you follow this QBR presentation structure, every meeting is focused, personalized, and designed to deliver measurable value.
Chapter 8
How to Scale QBRs Without Losing Impact
As your customer base grows, delivering personalized, high-quality QBRs to every account can quickly become unmanageable. However, scaling your QBR program doesn’t have to mean sacrificing value or the customer experience.
By leveraging smart segmentation, process automation, and a standardized yet flexible framework, you can ensure every customer receives the level of strategic partnership they need.
Here’s how to evolve your QBR approach as you grow:
Segment and Prioritize Your QBRs
Not every customer requires the same cadence or depth of engagement. Segment your accounts and align QBR delivery accordingly:
- Strategic accounts: Offer high-touch, in-person or live virtual QBRs with executive stakeholders to drive alignment, surface expansion opportunities, and reinforce value at the highest level.
- Growth accounts: Deliver digital-first QBRs through video meetings or detailed email recaps, balancing relationship-building with efficiency and actionable insights.
- Emerging or at-risk accounts: Use automated dashboards and in-app messaging to share key insights, highlight risks, and maintain engagement, reserving live touchpoints for moments that matter most.
Table: How to Scale QBRs by Customer Segment
| Customer Segment | QBR Format | Delivery Approach | Why It Works |
| Strategic Accounts | High-touch, executive-focused | Live meetings (virtual or in-person) with customized data and roadmap tie-ins | Aligns your solution with long-term strategic initiatives and reinforces executive relationships |
| Growth Accounts | Digital-first, lightly personalized | Video QBRs, email recaps with dashboards, or async slide walkthroughs | Scales your effort while still demonstrating ROI and reinforcing success plan milestones |
| Emerging or SMB Accounts | Light-touch, mostly automated | In-app messaging, success snapshots, self-serve dashboards and AI agents | Maintains engagement and visibility at scale without overextending your team |
| At-Risk Accounts | Targeted intervention | Brief live session or focused check-in with risk mitigation plan | Allows your team to proactively address early warning signs and realign on goals |
Automate Preparation and Data Collection
Manual QBR prep is time-consuming and doesn’t scale. Automate the collection of health scores, usage trends, and goal progress so every QBR—regardless of segment—is fueled by up-to-date, actionable data.
Standardize the QBR Structure, Personalize the Insights
Adopt a core QBR template as your foundation, but tailor each meeting to reflect the customer’s specific goals, recent wins, and areas of opportunity. Reference real feedback, highlight meaningful results, and call out individual stakeholders to create a sense of partnership at scale.
Leverage Technology for Proactive Engagement
Use AI agents and real-time analytics to surface shifts in sentiment, engagement, and stakeholder health across your portfolio. This empowers your team to prioritize QBRs for the accounts that need attention most, and to focus every conversation on the insights that drive action and value.
Deliver QBRs That Drive Retention, Expansion, and Executive Alignment
Gainsight CS gives your team the tools to automate preparation, personalize insights, and scale strategic QBRs—without sacrificing impact.
Chapter 9
How Gainsight CS Powers Impactful QBRs at Scale
Scaling your QBR process doesn’t just require the right strategy—it demands the right technology. Gainsight CS is purpose-built to help customer-facing teams deliver consistent, insightful, and value-driven QBRs, no matter how large or complex your customer base becomes.
With Gainsight CS, you can streamline every stage of the QBR journey, from data collection and meeting prep to follow-through and ROI measurement:
- Before the QBR: Automatically generate dynamic dashboards and presentation-ready slide decks that surface the latest performance metrics, usage trends, and goal progress for each customer, saving hours of prep time and ensuring every meeting is built on real, relevant data.
- During the QBR: Guide the conversation with integrated health scores, real-time sentiment insights from Staircase AI, and collaborative goal-tracking tools. This keeps QBRs focused on business impact while uncovering risks, gaps, or new opportunities as they arise.
- After the QBR: Turn insights into action with automated CTAs, standardized playbooks, and accountability tracking. Gainsight CS ensures clear ownership and follow-through so nothing falls through the cracks, and customers see consistent value, quarter after quarter.
See how Gainsight can help you plan your next QBR meeting. Schedule a demo with our team to see exactly how we can help you reach your unique objectives.