40 slides, zero insight: the QBR theater
Slide 23 of 40. The CSM reads out what’s on the slide, the customer checks the time for the third time, and both know: nothing is happening here. Yet the meeting is back on the calendar next quarter, because the playbook says customers from tier B up get a Quarterly Business Review.
Where do the 40 slides come from? From a template. The night before, the CSM spent two hours copying numbers together from three systems, updating logos, and inserting the product team’s roadmap slide the customer already knows from the newsletter. The result is a presentation about the customer that tells the customer nothing they don’t already know. Busywork with corporate design.
Yet the question behind a QBR is entirely legitimate: is this still worth it for both sides, and what’s standing in the way? You just don’t answer it with a slide deck, but with two things. First, real usage data: which teams work with the product, which have dropped off, which feature that was decisive at purchase is lying fallow. Second, an honest risk list: the open escalation in support, the champion who’s leaving the company, the integration that has been throwing errors for weeks. That fits on one page. You can talk about one page for 45 minutes. You can’t with 40 slides.
And then the thought that appears in no CS playbook: some customers don’t need a QBR at all. The mid-sized company where the product has been quietly doing its job for two years doesn’t want a quarterly meeting. They want it to keep running, and a human who picks up when it doesn’t. Forcing a review on them creates no loyalty, just the quiet question of whether that time ends up on their invoice. The mandatory cadence comes from a world where CS had to justify its existence with visibility. Meetings as proof of care.
Technically, the better version is no magic. When product data, tickets, and contract data come together on the account, that one page practically generates itself, and the CSM prepares conversations instead of slides. Two hours of copy-paste work per customer per quarter, at 60 accounts that’s 480 hours a year. For slides nobody wants to keep.
As a test, cancel all QBRs for one quarter and see which customers ask about them. The answer is your real coverage model.
