How best to track product adoption through quarterly business reviews (QBR)? Periodic business review meetings are a great way to continually remind your customers of the value your products provide to your customers and or to check the overall status of the deployment.
Frequency
Most commonly business reviews with customers are referred to as QBRs since quarterly frequency seems like a good target touchpoint period. With that said, choose the frequency of business review (BR) meetings based on the nature of the business, customer-specific situation, and your availability. Assess your customer lists and group them by in-implementation and post-deployment lists. Give time for adoption after implementations before you schedule adoption meetings for in-implementation accounts. For the latter, plan to touch base every quarter, although the frequency could be higher or lower depending on the situation. Too frequent calls with just deployed customers may make these calls ineffective. Availability of resources in the customer success group, full- vs. part-time resource status in the customer success function, and customer availability will also play a role in allotting time for these meetings.
Requesting Client Data
Request clients to collect adoption metrics, captured in other third-party systems such as customer relationship management, enterprise risk management, HR, or risk management solutions, ahead of these meetings. This data is a goldmine for your sales and marketing teams who are always eager to get their hands on it. Play your cards well. Do not persist annoyingly if there is no response.
Be polite. If you push too much, you may not get much. Typically, the customers that are most successful in deploying this solution, are more forthcoming in giving you this information. Use surveys to send out adoption assessment questionnaires and usage metric templates. When you incur time in collecting data when none exists, you may get “nothing to say” from customer contacts. On receiving such push backs, do not press further or they will stop taking your calls, damaging the relationships.
Meeting Preparation
Then use this combination of real or extrapolated quantitative and qualitative data to create a perspective, a hypothesized value talk track, on the adoption prior to the quarterly business review meeting. Go with what you have and then validate it with the customer. The key is to make the customer’s time worthwhile. Add insights, industry perspectives, data, and analysis from other customers’ usage. Share product roadmap, which is often of interest to customers to see the type of investments the vendor is making in research, development, and resource augmentation. Make them feel that they learned something from the interaction. Keep augmenting your bag of information with new industry perspectives, new tools, and product extensions. Ask your fellow customer success, sales, implementation, and support teams to do the same.
Post Meeting
After the meeting, follow through on action items. Failure to show progress from previous calls will render upcoming ones ineffective and worst-case loathed.
Key Takeaways
- Show generated value from your solutions
- Gather data from your system and ask for data from customers’ third-party solutions
- You may get “nothing to say or share” from customer contacts. On receiving such push backs, do not press further or they will stop taking your calls, damaging the relationships
- Make do with you have, and or add other perspectives from comparable implementations