Why Your QBR Presentations Are Failing?

12 Reasons of Unsuccessful QBR Presentations

According to a study, among B2B customers, 71% are at risk of defecting to competition, and only 29% are genuinely engaged. You can keep the customers engaged by devising ways that have a positive impact on their bottom line.

QBRs (Quarterly Business Review) presentations are an excellent way to showcase those metrics and depict the evaluation of whether the company has stayed on track regarding meeting the goals and requirements of clients.

However, despite the importance, the QBR presentations can be dreaded by the leadership sometimes. There could be a lot of reasons like the presentations are long, unfocussed among other things.

This article will help you figure out why your QBR presentations are failing and what you should avoid to convey your reflections clearly.

12 Reasons for Failing QBR Presentations

Your QBR presentation helps you present the previous quarter’s performance and the roadmap for the upcoming quarter. These presentations provide you an opportunity to brainstorm what went well, what activities should be stopped, and what tasks should be continued. All of this makes the QBR presentation important.

However, there are a few slip-ups that must be taken care of to ensure a successful presentation–

1. Lacking focus, structure, purpose, or plan

Your review presentation should be concise and on point. It should ideally focus on the key performance goals and expand upon the developments over the quarter. The review presentation often frustrates customers because they lack structure and aren’t organized.

There isn’t a clearly defined agenda, and worse, sometimes the presentation deviates entirely from the agenda in its quest to cover a lot of content.

Instead – Have a clearly defined agenda with fitting timelines (for everything) that ensures the proper flow and coverage of everything essential.

2. You are not really upfront

You might be tempted to present facts a little less harshly by sugar coating them. But this won’t serve the required purpose. The presentation is not for detailing the success story. Instead, it is for showing the analysis of the progress made so far and discussing action plans for the upcoming quarter.

Honesty will help you build trust and involve everyone to brainstorm ideas for the future.

Instead – Be upfront and explain the context of the failures.

3. Too boring to handle

The format followed is too lecturing style, which results in participants getting bored with the presentation.

The traditional presentation format doesn’t inspire participation and engagement from the audience, stifling the chances of any active discussions for better winning ideas for the future.

Instead – Use multimedia content like catchy graphics and visuals and pre-designed templates to pique curiosity and engagement.

4. There aren’t definite conclusions

It is good to be reflective and explain tactics, but it is not good to be inconclusive with critical benchmarks. You must be conclusive for future campaigns, clearly elaborating on the opportunities and challenges.

For instance, let’s say the target is to increase sales for the buyer.

The campaign led to that (Strength), but the website crashed due to poor loading capacity (Weakness).

The influx of new buyers (new business) means a chance to upgrade the website (Opportunity) but also the risk of overwhelming support calls if not taken care of by the customer success department (Threat).

Instead – Do a SWOT Analysis to provide insights into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

5. Working with too many KPIs

Analytics and data are essential to give a clear picture of the scenario. However, be wise not to get carried away with too many KPIs.

Focusing on too many parameters will result in customers getting lost in the data. Use KPIs that show the success of your strategies, like customer churn rate and retention costs, Net Revenue Retention (NRR), upsells/cross-sells, customer health, etc.

In these, churn rate and NRR are key KPIs to highlight the bottom line of the business and the parameters to focus on.

Instead – Pick KPIs the clients understand clearly and are essential for their bottom line.

6. Not using real data

It is not a good strategy to simply point to the campaigns that were successful and those that were not. Real data gives credibility to the material and findings.

Statistics will provide concrete evidence of your strategies (whether working or not) and illustrate which factors have been affecting your success (time and method).

Having said that, don’t focus too much on the numbers and end up making the presentation boring and robotic.

Instead – Use hard numbers to explain your results concretely and concisely. Take the help of data visualizations and infographics to make the information more engaging and easy to grasp.

7. On-ground support missing

One of the reasons QBR presentations fail is that they don’t get the key stakeholders on board. The right people, even if they are not a part of the presentation, need to have access to the data and the overall process and follow up when needed.

You don’t have all the answers, and missing out on the right people will result in missing out on the key factors that might affect your success plan.

For example, for accounts matter, you will need to have people involved in purchase decisions on board. Similarly, if you are working on sales strategies, you will need to speak to the required sales personnel.

Instead – Involve relevant people for valuable insights into the process.

8. No roadmap

The QBR presentations must not be restricted solely to the discussion of the performance of the past 90 days. It is wise to look upon the reflections and devise strategies for the future.

By brainstorming what strategies worked and what didn’t, you get the building blocks to create goal-oriented and actionable steps for the next quarter. By assessing the current scenario, you learn everything that will impact your planned trajectory.

Instead – Try to devote at least 1/4th of the presentation time to discussing future plans.

9. Not caring enough about the attendees

The QBR presentations fall flat if they are too much about resting on one’s laurels.

As your attendees are devoting their precious time to listening to what you have to say, they want the presentation to be truly valuable for them.

Instead – Make your presentation audience-centric and encourage their active participation. Listen carefully to their responses/feedback and take appropriate notes.

10. Too long

QBR presentations last for long hours generally. If you add in the preparation time or the travel as well, the time invested in the process becomes a lot. Since the presentation is quarterly, the process amounts to 4 times a year. It translates to a lot of time invested by the parties involved, which could have been spent in actualizing the goals.

Instead – Limit the presentation duration to a fixed time, with presenters getting a stipulated time to present the material and not more than that.

11. An expensive exercise

Travel expenses, presentation material, refreshments, printing costs, lodging expenses, off-site meeting costs, etc., add to it the long list of people who are supposed to attend this every 3-month presentation.

All this can make the presentation exercise a little heavy on the pocket.

Instead – You can conduct a couple of your presentations online to cut down on time and other expenses.

12. Being too technical and complex

You lose the essence of the presentation by making it technical. Technical jargon, acronyms, and overuse of data and metrics might make the presentation too complex for people to understand.

Also, you should refrain from sharing obscure data or making your presentation like a dissertation.

Instead – Include a succinct summary with simple graphs, bullet points, figures, infographics, etc., that makes the key point digestible. Keep your presentation shareable, concise, and as simple as possible.

Summing It Up

A Quarterly Business Review presentation depicts a periodic review of last quarter’s progress and showcases actionable insights for the next quarter. However, this presentation fails to make the required impact due to the factors mentioned above.

Be mindful of keeping the presentation concise, organized, customer-centric, and goal-oriented. Use graphs, charts, illustrations, etc., to enhance the visualization and meaning of the content.

Let us know your thoughts in the ‘comment’ section below!