Lesson 51 - Present your first QBR

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Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) are a common ritual on sales teams, giving you a chance to showcase progress to your team and plan for the future. This lesson will guide you through preparing and delivering an impactful QBR presentation. Your assignment will involve collecting all of the necessary information and organizing it to present during your next QBR.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, we're going to prepare for your first QBR presentation. Now, what is a QBR? This stands for quarterly business review, and this is a quarterly meeting that you're going to hold with your team and your manager to go over your sales results for the quarter and what you're planning to do to hit your targets next quarter. So the goal of a QBR is kind of threefold. One, it helps to keep you and your team members accountable to one another. Two, it helps you to highlight any successes and learnings to evangelize across the team. And three it helps you to make sure that you're kind of holding yourself accountable to your goals, what you're committing to for the next quarter and how you're going to get there. It's also just a really good way to get a second set of eyes on everything that you're doing. People can kind of poke holes in your strategy, or they can give you tips and help you to succeed. So ultimately, a QBR is a very valuable event. It's normally held over 123, days with your team, normally at the beginning of each quarter, and I would lean into these now, back when I was in sales, I used to either love QBRs if I had done really well, or dread them if I had done really badly. But hopefully, given the tips in this lesson, you will be more than prepared to present your results. So let's talk a little bit about how you should prepare for your QBR and what you should present. The first thing that they're going to ask you to present is your results for the last quarter. So you're going to present what was the amount of revenue that you closed, and how did that compare to your target. Now it can be very tempting to make excuses right off the bat if you didn't hit your target, so let me kind of caution you against doing that. You want to stick to the facts here. So the first thing you're going to say is, you know, my target was $122,000 in ARR and I hit $108,000 hitting, you know, 89% of target. That was probably bad math. But you don't want and then what I what you don't want to do is say, and really, you know, the reason for that is because this deal fell through, and this deal happened, and then, you know, I didn't really hit the ground running, and I should have done more emails. You don't. You don't want to get off script, right? The only time you need to get off script on a QBR is if your manager or your team is asking you questions. Otherwise, stick to the script. Here's the amount of revenue I closed, here's how it compared to my target. Then you want to review any one deals and any loss deals. So for your one deals, the deals that you succeeded, you want to go over anything that you learned or anything that helped you win the deal. The goal is to evangelize best practices for the rest of your team. For lost deals. You want to review any learnings. So this deal was lost because of a procurement blocker. It blocker, an objection that I didn't foresee. You want to let your team know not only why was the deal lost, but what did you learn from that that you can do better next time. Now, when you're talking about why a deal is lost, focus on what's within your control. So if it was an IT blocker or a procurement blocker, I would say something like in this deal towards the end, towards the late stage of the opportunity, we found out that procurement had been tasked with reducing their budget for the fiscal year, and I was unable to show a valuable enough ROI to overcome that objection. So notice what I've done is I've taken accountability for my own part of why this deal was lost, and your manager and your team are going to respect that. Now what's important is that you keep an eye on this from a lens of what am I going to do next time? So what I might say is, for my next opportunity, I plan to work with the value engineering team to build a stronger ROI statement that focuses on tool consolidation, right, whatever it is, right, whatever makes sense based on what you learned from that opportunity. So how much did you close? How did it hit your target? What are the deals that you the notable deals that you won? What are the notable deals that you lost? That's usually it for how you're going to go over the last quarter. Then what you want to do is focus on the next quarter. You want to focus on what is actually in my pipeline right now. What are my goals for next quarter? What is my commit for next quarter? What are what is my quota for next quarter, and how do I plan to get there? So you're going to talk about the health of your pipeline, the total pipeline value, how. It supports your future targets. You'll talk about your current outreach activities. What am I doing to build my pipeline? When am I planning to do this activity? You'll talk about your lead sources. Where is my pipeline coming from? That can help your team too, by the way, to understand like, oh, well, this person's seeing success from LinkedIn groups, or this person has seen success from cold calling, you know, etc, etc. Then you'll talk about your key opportunities. If there are any big deals in your pipeline, you need to walk through them. Share their stage, their expected close date, their deal size, explain your plan to win these deals. What am I going to do? What are my next steps? What? What am I still missing in med pick and what do I have? Do? I have a strong champion. How far along are they? Have I tested them? You want to give kind of the story of those opportunities, but keep it succinct, right? You don't want to go off on rabbit holes, and you should really have this information kind of memorized. You don't want to be pulling up your CRM to go through notes in the middle of your QBR, and we'll talk about that in a minute. Provide your forecast, include commit deals, best case deals, strong and weak pipeline we talked about forecasting in an earlier lesson. And then talk about your goals and focus areas. So on top of quota attainment. What are the additional goals that you have? Maybe your goal is to increase your amount of director plus activity. Maybe your goal is to learn the product in a more robust way. Maybe your goal is to present your first demo. Maybe your goal is to build your own business case. You need to be setting your own goals, and these can be career goals as well. Maybe your goal is to take on some additional projects that will benefit the team. So work with your manager and understand what your goals are going to be. Then you want to identify, oh, and when it comes to your goals, keep them smart, which means Specific, measurable. I think action actionable. I don't remember them all results oriented and time bound, right? They need to be practical, basically. So make sure that your goals are something that next quarter you can come in and talk about, did I achieve it or not? Um, then you want to talk about the obstacles that you're facing. What are the things that that stalled you last quarter, and how are you planning to get through those obstacles over the next quarter? Or do you foresee any obstacles to your growth over the next quarter, to hitting your goals that you need to get out in front of your manager right away? And then finally, what support do you need? What support or assistance from leadership or other teams. Do you need to overcome these obstacles? And I would go so far as to say that a QBR is one of the best places where you can raise your hand and say, I need help, because a lot of times enablement teams, product marketing teams, product teams, leadership team members, they are all going to attend these QBRs. And things that you say in your QBR will also get funneled up when your leaders do their own QBRs with their leaders all the way up the chain. So it's a really great place to raise your hand and say, I need help in these areas. So write down two or three areas where you need help, and bring those to your QBR. Um, all right? And then also any like customer feedback that you've been getting, um, any competitive insights that you've been gleaning if you're seeing more of a certain competitor than you're used to raise that maybe your team members are seeing the same thing, and that's a market trend that your company needs to address any customer feedback that you're getting over and over again, you need to raise that as well. So those are the different things that you're going to present in your QBR. And your study guide will walk you through kind of writing all of these down. But all in all, I want you to remember one thing a QBR is your chance to show your professionalism. It is a chance for you to get in front of your team and your manager, show that you are taking this role seriously, that you are that you are committed to driving results. And a lot of people show up and they half ass it. And it is not the place to half ass something. A QBR should be one of the more robust preparations you do throughout the year, and I really want you to make sure that your numbers, your calculations, your forecasts, your storytelling, all of it is succinct. It's crisp. I would go back and I would re take the lesson on preparing for a perfect presentation, which is in this course, that's going to help you prepare, but you need to make sure that you are getting rest, that you're hydrated, that you're not. Hung over. Normally, these QBRs are being held at off sites where the whole team is going out for drinks the night before. Resist the temptation to over indulge, because you really need to look crisp for your QBR. You want to be careful not to brag if you knocked your numbers out of the park, you know, be thankful. Be humble. Make sure that you share the learnings that got you there. And make sure that you're not sitting on your hands for the next quarter, right? Make sure that you're telling them, Hey, I'm not complacent. I realize that that quarter is now over, and it's time for me to continue to contribute, and then, likewise, if you had a bad quarter, it's okay. Every single person has big deals that they've lost. They have quarters where they've totally missed. I've had quarters before where I closed nothing, not even 1% of my quota, and I survived. Right? It's we. Sales managers know that even the best sales people are going to have good and bad quarters. You're going to have ups and downs, so if you had a bad quarter, it's okay. Don't fall on your sword, right? Just show up and present your results and present what happened. Make sure to focus on the effort that you're going to continue to put in, make sure to focus on the learnings that you've gathered, because that's going to show coach ability, iteration, improvement, and that's what's going to be so important. I think that's it for now. Now it's your turn. You are going to for today's assignment, prepare for your upcoming QBR by filling in each of the areas that we've covered. For your forecast number, you can use the forecast that you built in our previous lesson. Make sure you take notes on feedback from your manager and peers during the QBR. And actually, it's good to show that you're taking notes on what they're telling you, make a show of it, right? You've got a notebook. I'm making notes of what you're saying, right? They want to know that they're being heard. And then create specific next steps to implement any of the changes that are discussed during that QBR. Something that will take you very far is take notes during the QBR, and then during the next QBR, mention what you heard during the last one, what you did to fix it, and what the results were. That is such a pro move. And then the last thing that I would say is it's okay to actually meet with your manager before the QBR to give them a preview of what you're planning to present. It might seem a little funny because, like, the QBR is kind of the place where you're supposed to be doing that for the first time, but it will help you realize that you're on track, and you don't want your manager to be completely sidelined or surprised during a QBR. So make sure that you are, make sure that you're thinking about that, right? Cool. Your study guide is going to walk you through all of this, and that is it for today's lesson on the daily quota and good luck on your first QBR. QBRs can be incredibly fun. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to bond with your team over the good, the bad and the ugly. But you should be approaching this with an open mind and a sense of learning, and yeah, you'll you'll end up having a good time. That's it for today's lesson on the daily quarter. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time bye.