How do you keep QBRs relevant throughout your contract?

Quarterly Business Reviews are an essential part of a buyer-supplier relationship. However, to keep them relevant and engaging you need to ensure every Business Review adds value to your relationship. It's important to keep things fresh and, above all, relevant as the partnership evolves and grows. 

In May 2024, Clientshare hosted a Virtual Panel with QBR experts from OCS Group UK and CEVA Logistics. Here is their advice on how to keep your QBRs relevant throughout a contract.

Transcript:

James: And it's something that I think organisations often forget is when you win a contract - so if you think about OCS, CEVA or other huge organisations in your marketplaces and others - you've often sort of parked everyone on the lawn. You've got everyone there from the project team to the account management team, you roll out the red carpet for the C-suite... Every senior person's there and what we hear a lot is that often those people only come back in when you've either got a problem or there's a renewal.

So, how do you try and make sure - let's take for example a five-year contract, you're halfway through it, you've got a QBR in the middle of it - how do you try and make sure that that's got as much importance for you internally as an organisation, as the very first one or the very last one during that period? How do you make sure that during a contract life cycle that is still at the top of your priority list? Is there anything that you do as an organisation that means that it doesn't slip down?

Claire: I think for us it's having an effective risk register against those contracts, and a lot of that is focused on the relationship. So we'll take into consideration structural changes within an organisation both internally and externally, how we then have to [review] the relationship map as a result of that, flag it, again looking at activity on a contract...

CRM and data from those account plans comes heavily into play and in respect of the initiatives that we work on, keeping things fresh and I think that's the thing; we can't just be reliant on the status quo when we operate these contracts anymore, there's a huge emphasis now from customers on us driving value, relationship, innovation... It's actually monitoring and managing that.

James: You've got to work at it haven't you?

Jon: Yeah you really have. And I think Claire's earlier point about being really prescriptive about diarising things well in advance is crucial in that element, because the more senior the people you need to get to talk to each other, the more fractus their diaries often are. I think the other element for us is about balance.

My MD's got a phrase that I'm sure he wouldn't mind me sharing where he says: If I pick up your account plan, Jon, look down it and I need to know - insert name of big company here - director when I need to ring him to go out for a coffee. I need to be able to tell that from your account plan.' And I think having that level of structure to your account plan as to know, for your senior stakeholders in your own business to know, when important waypoints are on the horizon for our customers is the key.