The QBR – A Better Way
The quarterly business review is a vital part of maintaining relationships with clients. But as the number of cloud clients grow, there may not be...
3 min read
Among the most commonly offered advice to MSPs and CSPs is to regularly meet with their clients for a quarterly business review (QBR). At its core it’s a great practice. A QBR is an opportunity to get credit for what you’ve done for the client and to grow the relationship by presenting other services you offer that are right for them. The problem with this advice is that it’s for the lowest common denominator of businesses. It’s not a best practice as much as something along the lines of “the least any CSP or MSP can do is report on what their doing to their client once every three months.”
Just because the QBR is suggested in virtually every MSP self-help book out there, doesn’t mean it’s the only or even remotely best way to communicate with your client. They’re not as concerned with the how the information is provided to them, all they care about is understanding what you’ve done, what you can do, and what you are going to do. CloudRadial lets you do that for them, not just quarterly, but every single day.
There’s a better, easier way
Instead of handing your clients a PDF or a stack of paper 4 times a year, CloudRadial gives you the ability to provide your clients with an always up-to-date, white-labeled portal that informs and enables them. It does everything your QBR does, but for all of your clients, every day of the year instead of just some clients, four days a year.
Show clients what you’ve done
Manually generating IT infrastructure reports for clients as an MSP or CSP is like a client who transcribes things instead of using cut and paste or launches the calculator app when using Excel. It’s not that you won’t get the job done, but unless you got into IT for a love of reporting, your time can be better spent doing what you are best at, or anything, really.
CloudRadial accepts data from practically anything that can spit it out, allowing you to provide always-on, up-to-date reports to your clients without the need for a coder. You can report on their IT infrastructure, project status, and much more without dreading a monthly or quarterly reporting schedule. Once you set it up, it’s there for your clients to see, any time they want to.
Show clients what you can do
Presenting your services to your clients quarterly is, again, the bare minimum you should be doing, not the best you can be doing. Much better is your service catalog right in their IT portal that they see every day. This way your breadth of offerings can be presented to them when they actually have a need, instead of arbitrary business review appointment times. It also reduces the friction between a client having a need and reporting that need to you. Anyone in the organization, not just your point of contact, can easily request a service or product with just a few clicks, instead of a call or email, to get the ball rolling.
Because putting everything you do down “on paper” can be a daunting task, we’ve simplified the process to help you offer value to your client instead of long lists of specs and pricing. It’s a catalog designed to help them communicate with you, as easily as possible, what their need is and not overload them with details that don’t mean anything to them.
Show clients what you are going to do
CloudRadial’s new Virtual CIO Account Planner tool gives you and your client a better view of what’s to come. It gives MSPs a way to organize their offerings so it makes sense to their client’s individual business. It also allows for you to pull in data from the reporting you’re already doing in CloudRadial so the plan is always up to date, ready to discuss with your client.
If you can manage it, meeting with your clients regularly is still a great practice. But when they’ve had access to everything you’d normally present in a QBR every day since your last meeting, you can get down to generating more business instead of spending your time presenting and explaining. Find out how CloudRadial can help you effortlessly deliver a QBR to your clients every day, not just quarterly, by signing up for a free trial or scheduling a demo today.
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