How running QBRs doubled my revenue and transitioned me to Strategic Sales

The first year my sales leader asked me to start running client QBRs was the year I transitioned from selling to "strategic sales." That next year, my revenue doubled in two of my largest accounts.

Before then, I'd never thought about them that much. QBRs (quarterly business reviews) had earned a reputation, often referred to as "data dumps" because the volume of data vendors presented was mostly about themselves. These meetings were not well attended by key people on either side and did little to move the partnership forward. They were transactional in nature and vendor centric. They were information meetings about information everyone already knew. So, in my mind, and the clients', they were pointless.

I wasn't keen on trying to force this type of meeting on my customers. That is, until my boss challenged my way of thinking and turned what I thought was a data dump into a growth strategy meeting with top executives.

She got me to see that this meeting could add value to the client in ways they had never considered. We could uncover new opportunities for both parties to diversify and expand the partnership.

The strategy is simple:

1 - Ensure a formal structured business review is scheduled at least 2X a year and attended by every key stakeholder.

2 - Business reviews should be tied directly to the customer's business objectives and focused on driving value for both parties.

3 - Reviews must remain dynamic and forward-looking, never slipping back into status updates.

Simple, right? Three objectives I could knock out in an afternoon. Hardly!

It would take a solid year to give birth to this type of business review, and it was worth every second.

The first objective was nearly impossible. I did not get a single key leader to attend the first one, from either side. So #1b was going to be a large mountain to climb (will come back to that later). Then, I got busy on getting #1a completed and moved on to working on #2: structure the business review so it's tied directly to the customer's business objectives and focused on driving value for both parties.

#2 required a lot of conversation with client end users. To succeed, I had to find out if our services were actually impacting the customers' business objectives and learn it entirely from their point of view. This took about 6 months and connected a lot of dots for me. I was able to move these tactical relationships (what have you done for me lately types) to strategic alliances. Through these fact finding meetings, we understood why we needed each other and how we could take advantage of the business review to tell that story.

For #3, I built the QBR meeting to be conversational. For instance, instead of 10 slides filled with our performance data, I created one slide with just three questions. The next slide may have one phrase from a client user describing something they valued or something they wanted to see changed that we could impact together. No data, no dumping, not about me. It was about the partnership. Think of you and your life partner or friend checking in to see what you need, why and how to move forward. Selling stops and turns into finding agreement and alignment. Persuasion is not necessary because the work ahead was laid out through collaboration.

Now back to #1b. After my first two QBRs, the third was well attended by leaders. My champions were proud to invite their bosses to a meeting that was about growing their company. In doing so, we also grew our company by 2X in 12 months and this meeting was the catalyst.

I now see why my boss was so eager to get me to do this type of business review. She knew it would turn me into a strategic seller for my clients. As she put it, "you will become a competitive advantage for your customer, become a vital partner to their success." My sales leader knew this would change the relationship with my customers forever. It would cost me time and a lot of work, but the payoff was worth it. Not just for me, but my account team and our client team.

The business review is one of 21 growth drivers in strategic sales that our system, the Vitality Index, addresses. It diagnoses and scores the account, builds the exact growth strategy the team needs now to increase sales, and guides execution until they achieve all of their objectives.

For the growth driver, quarterly business reviews, we handcrafted over 80 plays around just this one area to get salespeople from where I was to what I became, a vital partner to my accounts, an indispensable resource vital to their success.

Strategic sales is complex, so we distilled this type of work into a system everyone can use no matter what level of experience you bring to the table. It was built from the same approach we used to create some of the largest partnerships in our industry that have lasted decades and are still running.

Winning, growing, and protecting large accounts has been our life's work for the past 30 years. The system will help most sellers willing to master strategic sales in less than a year. If becoming a top-producing account team is important to you, then the Vitality Index can help.

We made a sample for you to try. This is not the actual system, but it will show you a practical plan for growing a live customer in your portfolio. This snapshot will give you a diagnostic, analysis, and an actual growth plan for where you currently sit across two of the seven Domains: Relationships and Competitiveness.