Quarterly Business Review Template

Score the quarter against what the customer bought your product to achieve, not how much they used it. Customer success consultant Lincoln Murphy defines a goal as an objective, plus conditions, plus a time frame¹. In his example, a customer wants $250,000 more in sales by the fourth quarter, but won't feel successful unless new customers average $12,000 a year. Without a time frame, he writes, a goal is just a wish.

Look for written goals first: the order form, the statement of work, the business case the buyer approved, and the definition of value from your customer onboarding plan. Then read the call notes and emails from the deal. Record where each goal came from. Scoring a customer against a goal they never agreed to turns the review into an argument.

Collect the evidence before you draft anything, and take four quarters of it: one quarter is a reading, four show a direction. Cut usage by the unit the customer manages against, such as regions, teams or stores. A healthy total can hide one region that has stopped using the product.

• Usage by the customer's own unit for the last four quarters
• Seats licensed, activated and active, so the gaps between them show
• Support tickets for the quarter, cut by the same unit
• Both sides' commitments from the last review, still under their original due dates
• The contract record, with the renewal date and notice period

Explain every big movement before the meeting. A jump often traces to something on the customer's side, such as a training session or a new manager. A fall is what they will ask about first, so find its cause before the call, not during it.

Write each figure you plan to show as the sentence you would say in the room. Then put it through four checks. The customer's finance team may test any number you show, and one that fails costs more trust than it ever earned.

Federal cost-benefit guidance has asked for the same incremental check for decades. The White House Office of Management and Budget tells analysts to count only incremental gains as benefits², or to record what a program displaces as a cost.

The Government Accountability Office's guide to designing evaluations notes that a program's observed outcomes typically reflect a combination of influences³, including other programs and economic conditions. So if a hiring wave or a price change landed in the same quarter, name it beside your number.

Survey scores need the same care. Bain & Company, which created the Net Promoter Score, calculates it as the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors⁴. With six responses, each person is a sixth of the total, so one move from passive to promoter shifts the score about 17 points. Show the response count beside the score, or leave the score out.

Gainsight, which makes customer success software, advises against preparing QBRs in isolation⁵ and suggests co-presenting with your champion. Numbers your champion presents to their own leaders are numbers they have already accepted.

Send a one-page value summary a few days ahead, so the meeting is spent on decisions, not reading. Then take the room through seven parts, in this order.

1. 1

   What you bought this for

   Each goal and its source, with any new goal raised as a question.

2. 2

   Where the quarter landed

   Target, actual and data source for each goal. Every miss gets a reason and an owner.

3. 3

   Value realized

   Only figures that passed the checks, each with its method, plus a line on what you left out.

4. 4

   Adoption

   Usage by their own unit over four quarters, with the cause of each big change.

5. 5

   What didn't go well

   Open issues, with your side's failures and late commitments first.

6. 6

   Next quarter

   Up to three commitments from each side, each with an owner and a date.

7. 7

   Decisions needed today

   Two or three yes-or-no questions, asked before anyone leaves.

Say what went wrong before they do. The customer already knows which goals slipped, and a review that skips them reads as a sales pitch. Naming your own misses is what makes the value section believable.

End with the next quarter's plan: two or three goals with measures, and commitments from both sides with named owners and dates. Add any measurement you still need, such as a missing baseline, so the next review can claim what this one couldn't. Set the next review's date before the call ends.

Then write a renewal read for your own team. Take the renewal date and notice period from the signed contract, not from memory; a contract summary dates each deadline from the clause itself. Call the account safe, at risk or unknown, and name the one change most likely to move it. This read never goes to the customer.

To start faster, use the template on this page. Open it with Edit with AI and River rebuilds the goals and runs the claim checks from your contract paperwork and usage data.