Can’t Get an Exec to Attend Your QBRs? Use Executive Business Reviews Instead
When working with large enterprises, one of the biggest challenges is getting engagement from our customer’s executives. Execs often think of us as just another vendor, and they often don't find it worth their time to engage with us strategically. CSMs are usually left scrambling 6 weeks before a renewal to get these executives engaged, and it's usually too late by then. These executives don’t have visibility into our impact. They don’t actually know how we’re enabling their individual teams. So by the time the renewal is coming up, the executive isn’t bought into the partnership.
So how do you create mindshare with a customer’s executive team? Frequent Executive Engagement.
To learn about how to better engage with execs, we interviewed Tara Sharma, an Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Twilio Segment. Tara graduated from London Business School in 2020 with an MBA. Prior to her stint in London, Tara worked at Qualtrics as a Senior CSM and also worked at KPMG as a management consultant. What makes Tara an exceptional wizard at her craft is her consulting and MBA experience, specifically in strategy and operations.
People with backgrounds similar to Tara’s typically traditionally sought roles in areas like product marketing, strategy & operations, or business development. But recently, there’s been a noticeable push to bring people like Tara into customer success. When working with large enterprises, their needs are complex and unique. So hiring post-MBA candidates with more traditional corporate backgrounds like consulting brings much-needed structure and frameworks to customer success.
Aisha: Tara, thanks so much for making time to teach us about how you conduct Executive Business Reviews. Let's start with the basics - why do you use Executive Business Reviews? Why do they matter?
Tara: An executive business review takes place between executives on both the customer and the vendor side. The purpose of these meetings is to maintain executive alignment on both sides, educate and keep customer executives informed on the value of the partnership. This ensures continuity of the relationship and allows us, as CSMs and as an organization, to reset expectations when needed. Think of an EBR as a tool to facilitate effective communication, to highlight things that allow for the customer to become a strategic partner. When it comes to enterprise accounts where a CSM is working with 15-20 different products across multiple teams, EBRs are leveraged as a tool to facilitate communication across the different teams and bring them together to review the larger, more macro goals of the business. Especially, in SAAS, where customers are working with multiple vendors, we use EBRs as a tool to be seen as a strategic partner, not just another vendor.
So again, the objective is to maintain executive connection, to ensure alignment on high level business initiatives, raise and address risk on both sides for effective mitigation.
Aisha: When is a good time to conduct an EBR? What are some “triggers” that should point into the direction of an EBR being due?
Tara: One of the main reasons to have an EBR is to have tough conversations and elevate the conversation to the right people in the organization who care enough to solve the issue, on both the customer side and our side. Outside of EBRs, we meet with customers on a regular basis, where we focus on achieving daily goals. During EBRs, you have the opportunity to step back from the day to day, look at the partnership holistically and call out what's working, and what's not working. As an individual contributor on a project, an EBR is an opportunity to highlight blockers and ask the executives for buy-in, or help in solving for these blockers. This goes both ways, where us as CSMs can ask the customer executive for their assistance and understanding in solving for the blocker and aligning resources internally to solve for the blocker.
Another way to use an EBR is when you achieve a key success in the partnership that you want to brief the executives on. This is not just an opportunity for us as CSMs to highlight our achievements, it’s also an opportunity for individuals on the client side to showcase their successes. Especially for larger, enterprise customers, where you are working multiple workstreams at a time, I don't think that we take enough time to stop and look at our work holistically, and take the time to quantify the value of the day to day work.
You want to present these key successes to people a few levels above your program manager; i.e. the VPs and C-level executives. When you present the key successes to the right executives and once they become aware of the use cases or revenue being unlocked, they are able to provide further guidance on what to work on next. EBRs can be inspirational and get executives talking about the drivers of the partnership.
An EBR is also a great opportunity to land and expand into an enterprise account. When you are showcasing a big win at an EBR, this can be an opportunity for your AE to create an expansion model by asking if other teams are interested in replicating this success. Work with your AE to uncover expansion opportunities and look for teams where the same model can be replicated.
Aisha: Now let's shift to the anatomy of an EBR. How should CSMs be thinking about the content of the EBR itself? Where do I start?
Tara: The key ingredient to an EBR is cross functional collaboration. Typically, with strategic customers, you have representation from different groups as well as representation from product, engineering, support, and sales on your side. The key to an EBR is to collect highlights from all the different groups on the customer side, as well as teams on your side, and synthesize these into a story. You want to expose executives on both sides to your achievements and tell a story about what all the activities mean and where we are headed in the partnership.
As a csm, be the quarterback of creating the narrative, put the pieces together, and try not to create the narrative yourself. Ask each team for their version of the story. Ask them questions like “what were the activities this quarter and why do you think they’re valuable”. Don't try to boil the ocean. Instead, gather pieces and stitch together a story. CSMs are not technical experts, we won’t always have in-depth knowledge of what each team is doing and can't always speak to these technical workstreams. It's each team’s responsibility to represent their successes, but it’s the CSMs job to look at each activity through the lens of enterprise value.
Aisha: What are 4 things to include in an EBR?
Tara: The 4 things to cross check in your EBRs are:
Identifying and Preparing the narrative: Gather the pieces and craft a story. Get everyone on board. Prepare the teams to present, iterate on the slides until everyone is aligned on the narrative. Customer execs want to hear from our execs, so prepare a talk track for them.
Prepare your execs for the tough conversations: If there's something you want to highlight in the EBR that is a blocker and your team needs help, get your executives on board.
Hold the customer accountable and have a move-forward plan. You had the EBR, now what? You have to continue having EBRs, facilitate communication between execs and report on progress or resolution frequently.
Aligning at the right level by seniority: If there are VPs from the customer side, make sure that there is at least someone VP level or above coming from your side.
Aisha: Are there any tips you can share on how to prepare for an EBR?
Tara: Yes! Here are some things to think about as you prepare for an EBR
Hope you enjoyed learning about how you can add EBRs to your toolkit. Try one out on your own and let me know how it goes!