Executive Business Reviews (EBR) - 101

What is an Executive Business Review (EBR)?

An Executive business review is a strategic, regularly-scheduled (usually recurring) meeting between key contacts at your company and key client stakeholders. It tends to be strategic in nature, focusing on the overall business relationship, measuring value delivered, and aligning on future goals. 

Often, business reviews are held quarterly, giving them the name Quarterly Business Review - QBR - but the cadence depends on the size and depth of the client relationship. (More on this below).

Goals of an EBR

When done well, an EBR can accomplish a few or all of the following objectives:

1. Deepen your company’s understanding of the client and industry – In an EBR, you should be listening as much as talking. What are the client’s strategic goals and metrics for the upcoming quarter/ year? What are they worried about? How are they seeing the industry shift? This information can influence not just this client engagement, but company and product strategy more broadly.

2. Assess and communicate value – Come prepared to prove the value you’re bringing to the client, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Get their feedback, as questions, make sure your business case resonates and aligns to how they think about value.

3. Identify risks – Again, listen carefully to what’s coming up. Where is their hesitation? Where in future plans for the team or company might there be risk? 

4. Identify opportunities – Does the client need things you’re not (yet) delivering that could be a good strategic direction? Are there additional lines of business / managers you can be asking for intros to? Brainstorm with the client how else to highlight the success they’re seeing (clients love talking about wins internally and externally)

5. Keep projects on track – Particularly during the implementation and adoption phases, EBRs are a great time to check in on progress. Does the sponsor need to unlock something, push harder in a particular area, or is all on track? Note – this is not a tactical meeting, but focused on high-level risks or requests.

6. Alignment on Future Plans – What’s up next? How can the customer be getting even more value out of your tool? Is there anything you’d like to ask them for - participation in a CAB, interview for a case study, intro to a new contact? What value can you drive for them after the meeting? 

7. Strengthen Customer Relationships – At the end of the day, and as cliche as it sounds, people do business with people. Take the client out for lunch or dinner or drinks, get to know their career goals and think about how you can support them. Trade vacation or family stories. In the US at least, clients tend to trust you more when they believe you care about them personally too. (And it’s just a more fun way to do business).

EBRs are NOT

1. Presentations or one-sided conversations – While coming prepared with a deck, key metrics, value highlights, etc is great, the focus should be on driving discussion and mutual understanding. Prepare to guide a conversation. 

2. One-off events or fixes – Establish a regular cadence that makes sense for everyone (see below), and keep the focus on the overall value and partnership. If you find you’re needing to go deep into one specific issue, consider scheduling a pre-meeting to get that out of the way.

3. Status updates, technical deep-dives, tactical reviews – Stay out of the weeds and out of the day-to-day. This meeting is more strategic, focused on the big picture of your partnership, and value attainment. 

4. Replacements for regular communication – The tactical work, day-to-day operations, technical reviews still have to happen, just not in this meeting. Map out communication plans with all stakeholders across a client, and make sure you have the right cadence for everyone. Consider separate in-person meetings, lunch or coffee breaks, etc with other stakeholders if you’re on-site for the EBR.

5. Sales Pitches – You can and should introduce new features and even upsell opportunities during an EBR, but ensure that client value stays the focus in the conversation. Tailor and personalize the conversation to what they specifically need.

Target clients for an EBR 

EBRs take time to prepare and present, so they’re not necessarily scalable for B2C or tiny SMB accounts. But it depends on your size and stage. Given that they’re opportunities to learn as well as deepen relationships, you might find that earlier in a company’s journey they’re worthwhile for smaller accounts too. Certainly the top 20-50% of your accounts at a minimum should be getting some sort of business review, and for an enterprise B2B, that might extend to 100%.

Cadence of an EBR

You’ll hear frequent  mention of QBRs - Quarterly business reviews. EBRs can be quarterly, but it really depends on the depth of the relationship, how quickly things are moving and changing, level of the folks involved. Every 6 months can be a great cadence for meetings with more senior executives and more stable partnerships, and annual is also possible though usually too infrequent. Discuss at the start of a partnership what makes sense, and schedule early.

Attendees 

From company’s side, usually include CSM, sales contact (to keep them close and prepared for upsell convos), and whichever executives make sense for the conversation. For more important clients, a VP of Product and even CEO might make sense. Often the VP of CS would attend. 

On the customer’s side, include the manager, decision-maker, and budget holder. Usually that will be Director + VP level, sometimes up to C-Suite for small and medium companies. 

Location

Meeting in-person can be a great way to deepen relationships and learn a bit more than what you might in a virtual setting. If in-person, consider pairing with a lunch, apero, or dinner to add some informal time. That unstructured time is a good way to connect on a personal level and build trust, and also leaves space for the ideas and observations that don’t quite into a formal meeting. 

Now… what if it’s a small client located far away? The time and cost of travel might not be worth it, but get creative. Can you combine a few customer visits into a sort of road show? Piggyback on an industry event that’s bringing a bunch of clients into one location to schedule a bunch of meetings? Worst case, a virtual EBR is fine, but if you can get creative you can often find ways to connect live.