Using the Quarterly Business Review to become a Trusted Advisor

By Gina Murphy 1

As a managed services provider (MSP) your goal is to build strong, long-term relationships with your clients. This relationship is generally defined by the quality of your work, the strength of your team and the value that you are delivering to the client.

Having a consistent and proactive communication plan with your clients is essential to becoming a trusted advisor. Informal day-to-day interaction sets the tone of the relationship while formal and “programmatic” communication provides a chance to discuss more strategic issues and demonstrate the value you bring to the organization. A great way to demonstrate this value is to conduct Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs).

QBR background

QBRs are quarterly meeting that looks at the existing state of your clients’ business and how you’re helping them reach their goals. It includes a look back at the past quarter and typically includes information on what happened in the last quarter, where were the successes and issues, what were the remedies, and how did your IT solutions perform. More specifically it could examine ticket trends, identification of any critical issues that need to be immediately addressed, and an action plan to address any of the identified issues, including scheduled follow-up and identifying members of the management team responsible for executing the mutually agreed upon plans.

Looking back over the past three months is only part of the QBR agenda. It’s also important to look forward to the next quarter and set goals. Identify areas of your clients’ business that are about to change and discuss how you and the client intend to work to achieve those goals in the future. Also bring a perspective of industry trends that you are seeing in your clients ‘market segment. If you see several customers experiencing similar challenges, share that knowledge with your customer to stimulate ongoing conversations about their challenges and help them avoid the same pitfalls. There are plenty of ways to bring value to your customer from sharing an article or a recent experience another customer had in the same industry to delivering some key points you picked up from a recent conference. 

How to use QBRs

QBRs help showcase the value you bring to the customer, and will also continue to solidify your role as a trusted advisor.  The more value you demonstrate, the more strategic you become to your client.

QBRs are also a good time to talk about new service offerings as well as services that may be tangential but relevant to what may be happening in the company. For example, your client may be using you for help desk services but is expanding its footprint into other North American cities. They may not know that you offer turn-key VoIP services which may help them ramp their new offices faster.

Planning a successful meeting

A successful meeting requires up-front planning and preparation; it’s paramount that the right people are present, understand what the agenda should look like, understand where the company is going, and are empowered to make decisions. It should be a strategic meeting and not delve into the day-to-day issues unless they are trending in a particular direction which needs further assessment.

Creating a successful partnership and gaining the status of a trusted adviser takes time – it isn’t going to happen overnight. But holding programmatic Quarterly Business Reviews will help to foster that relationship. QBRs provide the opportunity for you to showcase your value as well as provide an opportunity to bring more value to the table.