"Kill the QBR?" one MSP said. "Why would I kill the most important interaction I have with my clients?"
The truth is, we don't want MSPs to entirely kill the QBR — we want you to overhaul the process with automation, and use that time more wisely, like for strategic conversations with your clients.
That just doesn't fit as well on a sign.
So yes, QBRs are a conventional way to show clients all the great work your team is doing, but let's talk about a more efficient and profitable strategy for maintaining and growing your client accounts.
Operationally speaking, logging in through multiple systems to gather information for a traditional QBR is time consuming. Throw in juggling schedules with a reluctant client and now you're even further behind.
These inefficiencies tied to QBRs make it nearly impossible to scale your client relationships. QBRs essentially make the most important part of your outreach efforts the most difficult, and severely undercut your ability to grow your business.
Automating the QBR puts you in a more profitable position.
Take this recent example from Dawn Sizer, CEO of 3rd Element Consulting.
In an article from CRN.com, she describes using a strategic approach to automation that allowed her to reduce overhead costs, free up her team’s time and drive more than $1 million in new revenue.
"The 150 hours saved [with automation] each year is time we can use for client projects, compliance work and other things that bring in more revenue," says Dawn. "After implementing a few of these automations, we were well on our way to reaching the million-dollar mark.”
In terms of the QBR, it takes so much time to bring together the right data from disparate pieces of your tech stack and assemble it in a readable format. All that effort on your MSP's part, and most customers don't even want to participate in the meeting because you're just reviewing a report that they could be reviewing on their own—maybe even followed by a pitch from the sales team.
What's worse is that MSPs rarely take good advantage of the opportunity provided by QBRs.
Most of the attention focuses on the large or noisy customers, translating to perhaps only 10% of accounts. Meanwhile, the majority of the client base receives only a perfunctory review or no outreach at all. That’s four times a year that potentially valuable opportunities pass by.
Ticket volumes, licensing, reporting—everything is readily available at the touch of a button.
Instead of a look back, you and the client can focus on exploring ways to help them move forward. Become their trusted advisor and a true partner. Clients that see you as a valuable resource instead of a cost center are the ones that buy more services and sign more contracts. Those are the conversations you want to have.
Elevating your approach in the post-QBR world requires putting a finer point on what your clients want. Reviewing the past isn’t on their agenda. They want to know where their business is going. Clients want outcomes.
Instead of spending this valuable time doing all the talking, MSPs that want to grow their businesses and their client accounts should listen.
Work to understand what your client needs and wants. Where are they headed? What are the outcomes do they really desire? Likely their most coveted outcomes have little to do with technology and everything to do with moving their business forward.
Your client may want more productivity out of their staff, or to be able to hold remote meetings from anywhere at any time. Perhaps they want to make sure they aren’t exposed to hacking through their email programs or via employees’ home-based device connections. You won’t discover any of these lucrative opportunities to help your clients be more successful and increase your own MRR if you’re the one doing all the talking.
If you've got CloudRadial CSA, you've got a portal that shows your clients what you’re doing all the time. That tool is building trust around the clock—you don’t need to duplicate that effort reviewing a printed report that isn’t designed for this purpose. And all that time you free up by pushing day-to-day actions through the portal can be used more effectively to truly understand how to deliver the outcomes your clients want.
The data held within a QBR will continue to be important and valuable to both you and your clients. But what you really need is a more efficient way to collect and assess that information so you can leverage it to greater effect.
CloudRadial automates the QBR process by gathering hardware and software data, Microsoft 365 metrics, and more. What's the secret sauce? Yes, it's an agent, but it's a lightweight one that is read-only, uninstalls itself, and your customer doesn't know it's there. It works in less than 2 minutes.
Here are the details:
Data from the agent runs against a policy report that you can easily customize to your standards. From there, the QBR automation picks up information from the vCIO planner, M365 reporting, and more to produce your QBR. No more logging to multiple solutions, and so much time and money saved.
This information can also be packaged into a PDF in less than a minute—providing a fast, on-demand QBR—or presented in big-picture form via the dashboard. The information is 24/7 and in real-time.
Using CloudRadial’s automation opens up more budget because it empowers you to turn the QBR conversation around and put it on a more productive path. When you can focus on clients’ outcomes, learn what they want to achieve, and show them how you can help them drive their organization forward, you gain access to new opportunities to become more valuable to them.
CloudRadial’s CSA provides the automation to kill the QBR and enables better efficiency for managing tech.
Want to learn more about how CloudRadial CSA and QBR automation positions your business for growth? Learn more here.