Status Quo:
Sitting on a plane en route to Dreamforce this year, you couldn’t help but overhear the chatter from dozens of sales execs, partners and others. Everyone was excited to tell their war stories about time in the field, customer hassles and internal roadblocks they had to face while trying to close a deal. Striking up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me was a good chance to ask about the pain points in her organization and at the previous companies she worked for. While there are many stories that will make an account executive cringe, few garner the reactions you’re bound to get when you ask about a company’s quarterly business review (QBR) process.
Necessary Evil:
While many AEs cringe at the thought of prepping and sitting through their QBRs quarter after quarter, the process provides value to the organization. Sales leaders get the opportunity to review performance, discuss goals and engage in sales territory planning. Quarterly Business Reviews give a great excuse for coaching on the ways and means to execute sales processes more efficiently in the coming quarter. Unfortunately, the process has become a time suck. Reps waste days out of the field and valuable selling time pulling reports, parsing data and producing presentations that are likely never looked at again after the hour long review. Look familiar?
The data becomes stale before you even start the review and it’s only valuable for the immediate discussion. You may come up with some great ideas for expanding your territory or get some great tips, but where’s the follow-through? Too often, QBRs lead to increased insight into what a rep could and should be doing to grow their business only to have the next quarter’s QBR seem like groundhog day as all of that insight gets buried in a file folder somewhere.
It gets worse if your QBR isn’t as simple as the example shown above, it’s not uncommon to see company’s with QBR decks that span 20-30 pages. As more data and more views are required, the time and pain to complete a QBR jumps exponentially for members of the sales team. You’ve already input all of the data into Salesforce – shouldn’t that count for something? It’s time for a change.
Make your QBR Useful:
Having been through the process ourselves, we think there is a better way to leverage data you ALREADY have to give managers the insight they need. Shouldn’t you focus more time on actually strategizing how you should grow your territory instead of spending frustrating time pulling reports and formatting PowerPoint?
Utilizing Shibumi for your sales execution cuts down on time preparing by automatically integrating with all of your Salesforce data and account information. Quarterly Business Reviews become less static and are able to be monitored and reviewed throughout the quarter to ensure you get the coaching you need to stay on track. Automation has been working throughout every aspect of the sales process to speed onboarding, document delivery, customer education and countless other tasks – don’t you think it’s time you took a step to automating your QBRs too so you can spend more time driving revenue growth for your territories?
See how Shibumi can save you time and money and turn your Quarterly Business Review into something that helps you and your team succeed throughout the quarter.