The end of Q2 is upon us, which means a ton of scrambling to close deals, adjusting and adding to your pipeline for the second half of the year, and dealing with the necessary evil of quarter-end meetings. I spoke with a few of Seismic’s sales leaders and old colleagues to discuss why QBRs and plans are so inefficient, and what could be done to make them more meaningful, more effective, and actually matter going into the following quarter.
Data isn’t actionable. Many times data either isn’t updated or isn’t provided in QBRs, and individuals will “circle back” after the meeting to provide data or information that they didn’t compile or update in their presentations. This is a waste of time for everyone, because there isn’t usable data to base action items off of, so it’s impossible to plan for future quarters. Ensuring that the data in quarter-end sales presentations is as up-to-date as possible (we’re talking down to the second the presentation is opened in the QBR meeting) can help you figure out exactly what needs to be done the next quarter. Having access to the most updated data in presentations means that “I’ll get back to you on that,” or “I’ll send you the most updated report after the meeting” are eliminated as excuses, and actionable plans can be created during the meeting itself.
Non-sales departments aren’t in the loop. QBRs are a great way for sales leaders and teams to reflect, analyze and plan for the quarters to follow. But if the plans hashed out in the QBR don’t align with the goals of the rest of the organization, companies find their departments misaligned and working against each other. Making sure that other departments, especially marketing and product teams, are in the loop when it comes to sales’ plans is important for a productive and effective QBR and overall company success.
QBRs take too long to plan. Typically QBRs require every sales manager (and sometimes every rep) to manually create a report, pulling and inputting data from Salesforce and other sources about deal progression and team performance that quarter. This usually means everyone creates their own PowerPoint slide with the (questionably) updated and valid information from that quarter, and someone is stuck compiling all of those into a single presentation for the QBR.
This is time that an entire sales team could have otherwise spent selling and making those QBR presentations more successful. Being able to automatically sync the data included in QBR slides (pipeline stats, number of deals and their values, rep performance, etc.) leaves sales teams more time to actually improve those numbers, rather than just talking about how they can be improved each quarter.
QBRs, while helpful and necessary, are typically renowned as a burden for sales organizations. Including stakeholders from other departments, presenting actionable data in real-time, and automating the creation and data input of QBR presentation slides can make QBRs much more effective and much less of a headache each quarter.
