Welcome again to everyone who is joining us here today. We are in the Quarterly Business Review Pros, webinar. This is one out of three. We're gonna give people time to come in, start getting settled in. While we do that, I'm just gonna go ahead and just launch a quick poll. I promise this is related to, what we have in store for you guys today, and I'm gonna go ahead and launch this first one.

We want to know who we have in the audience today. So please, please, please let us know. What's your company size, your range of annual revenue, and company type? We're usually thinking about company type from an industry perspective, but it does matter when it comes to your data model and how you're building your QBR off from a, like, reporting perspective.

So please let us know where you're coming from today.

Love to hear a little bit about the audience and who we have with us.

We have quite a few more folks joining right now. So, again, welcome to everyone.

We're doing a little bit of a poll to understand who we have in the audience today and, be able to speak a little bit more to each one of your use cases.

It's gonna be fun. We've prepped a lot for this QBR as I was mentioning earlier.

We'll continue the poll, and then we'll do a little bit of introductions.

So at one zero five, we'll go ahead and get started as we give everybody a little bit of time to just join in.

Okay. I'm not gonna end the poll just yet, but we have about forty eight of the audience in the mid market section, what we call fifty one to a hundred. That's very interesting.

And the annual range is about forty five percent of the audience is under ten million.

And company type is very skewed towards SaaS, but we also have some professional services and others. Okay. That's great. I'm gonna go ahead and leave the poll open as folks, continue coming in, but, we'll go ahead and get started with a few of the introductions.

So I'll go ahead and go first. My name is Diana. As you guys can see in my tag underneath, I am actually located in Columbia.

I have experience in, marketing and management. That's where I created my career around. Then I started with RevPartners as a strategist, so I was in the trenches doing HubSpot builds and rev up strategies and actually creating TBRs for a lot of my partners. So I have that experience, very much top of mind.

But, also, I transitioned over to the sales team about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago. And, we were going through a transition of founder led sales to building an entire sales team. And so now we have a sales team, and one of the first things that I have to do as a sales director was to start doing QBRs because we really need we knew what revenue we were generating, but we didn't really know why or which aspects of the funnel needed to be tackled or improved or optimized. So I'm gonna be talking today about the overview and a little bit more of the general aspects of the QBR.

But the real, the real pro here is Brian. So Brian, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Thanks, Diane. Appreciate it. My name is Brian Kreutz. I'm the senior lead, of the center of excellence here at RevPartners, which is an internal team that has wears a lot of different hats.

And so we run our internal rev ops for RevPartners using HubSpot. We are also client facing, and we also, create all the internal playbooks that we use to deploy, different solutions for our customer base. And so this, this QBR, webinar kinda got me, prepared for our own QBR. So, you know, the queue the quarter will be two thirds done, on Saturday when July or June first hits, and so I've gotta start my own prep work.

So, this has really been a, kinda kick in the butt for me to get ready for what I present to Diana in early July.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Brian. Great, guys. So we are at one zero seven. I'm gonna go ahead and end the poll now.

Again, we just wanna understand who we have in the audience. So, again, we have most of the folks under the mid market section, and then we have between under ten million and then ten to fifty million. Makes a lot of sense. I'll talk about why in just a second.

And then SaaS folks, very skewed on this end, but also professional services coming in.

So I'll go ahead and share those results so that you guys can see them. Thank you so much for sharing.

We are ready to go ahead and get started. So I will pause this and get us into the overview of the series. So as I was mentioning, mentioning, we are doing a three part series of webinars for the QVR. It's such an extensive topic that we really thought it really needed to be more like a course where you have time between one and the other to digest the information, do a little bit of homework if you decide to do so, and, really get you up and running with your own QBR. So in the first one, we're gonna be doing all of the foundation, why, what, and then a little bit the preparation itself.

On the second webinar, we're gonna be talking about all of the takeaways and storytelling and how to get everybody engaged during the presentation.

And then on the third one, it's going to be all about driving those recommendations, making sure that you have alignment for the following order, and get your tools in place with accountability so that you can drive the action behind them.

So that's what we have in store for the entire summer. It's gonna be June, July, and then the first of August that we'll be having each one of the sessions. Today, like I said, we're going to be focusing on a little bit of an introduction, just understanding quarterly business reviews, why, what, how, and then jumping deep into setting the stage, with Brian. So I'm gonna go ahead and get us started here.

So this is very much overview of quarterly business reviews. These are revenue performance reviews that are done on a quarterly basis, and they're really the backbone of strategic alignment.

And when we think about quarterly business reviews, there are things that it is and there are things that it is not. And I love to give this comparison because it really should be a moment for alignment. So it's an opportunity for you to create that strategic alignment usually with head of sales, head of marketing, and head of customer success or delivery or or services, whatever that that team is called. Those are your go to market teams. They really need to know what the quarter the following quarter's goals are and create that alignment around them, but also being able to retrospectively look at the previous quarter and understand the performance on a lot of different levels. What it is not, that it sometimes could become, but just as a warning, it's not time for to blame any individuals or teams or departments on anything is specific being shown. This requires an objectivity piece that is very important.

In fact, it's important that your QBRs are not done by the head of sales or the head of marketing, but somebody who can be a little bit more objective like our RobOps professional and is able to give you the hard data and the real recommendations.

It's also not the moment for you to throw new goals or new metrics, around to anybody in any team. You should really be aligned on what your KPIs were going to be and then being able to show the performance based on those, KPIs that you had already created alignment on.

So when we talk about quarterly business reviews, there's really a few key objectives objectives that you're you should be thinking through. And like I said, the main goal is to assess the performance over the past quarter and align on strategies for the upcoming quarter.

So you're you're gonna be looking at performance evaluation.

Did we hit our targets or not? Specifically talking about revenue targets.

Why did we or did we not hit our revenue targets?

Identify trends maybe from all of the data that you're able to see, and then create strategic alignment along those go to market teams and create accountability to assign and delegate different tasks and recommendations that need to happen as next steps.

Great. So when should you start doing QBRs?

I was talking about this with Brian as we were preparing for this course. And one of the main takeaways that he gave me, and I'm so in line with this was, I want people to know that the most important thing is to start doing QBRs.

One hundred percent aligned with that. It doesn't matter where you are, what you're doing, where your business maturity is. It really you should start measuring to understand where you are and where you can get to. However, we do see specifics on, like, business maturity, operational maturity, and rev ops maturity that can help you understand if you're in a good position to draw accurate data, to draw or to be able to create alignment between your teams. So we'll dig into that in just a second. But these are the three maturities that I believe that are, like, the foundation to to be able to pull the data and be able to do an an effective QBR.

So when we talk about business maturity levels, it really all has to do with where your company is. Right? If you're a maturity level one, you're probably a start up. Maybe you're still doing founder led sales.

Maybe you don't even have teams around you to be able to delegate to or create alignment for. So it's gonna be a lot harder, for you to be able to do a QBR at this stage. Maturity level two or three is where you really start getting into, okay. I have teams that are established.

I'm getting a little bit more into that ten million range, ten to fifty million, is where we start seeing folks actually starting to put the gas on the pedal on revenue operations where you're able to then pull data that you'll be able to use. So that's a little bit about business maturity levels. The second piece is the operational maturity levels, which talks about the alignment between your teams. Again, maturity level one here is you have maybe the teams already created, but they're very siloed and there's not a lot of of coordination.

So, really, when you're getting to maturity level of two and three, it's where you're starting to create alignment. Maybe some of your teams already have joint revenue goals. Maybe you already understand what those goals are, and you're starting to do ad hoc collaboration and different initiatives. But really maturity level four and five is where you'll start driving a lot of those data driven decisions and operationalizing them to create revenue, opportunities.

And then the final one, and I know I'm going through a lot of things here. We'll share this slide after, the event. But the rev ops maturity levels, I think, is the most important one. It's the one that we use internally at RevPartners to even measure where each one of our customers are.

And so when we're talking about level one, maybe you don't even have a unified CRM yet or or a single source source of truth. Maybe you still need to integrate a lot of your data. And so level two and three is where you start creating those processes. Processes.

You'll have everything integrated. You'll have efficiency being driven. You'll have your team actually have creating adoption within a system so that you can have the data to be able to report on. So, again, just in general, maturity level two and three is usually where you'd be able to, better understand or be able to pull the data that you need.

So I know that I just went through this really, really quickly, but curious to see if you guys have any idea on where you currently sit within any of these maturity levels. I'm gonna share a quick poll. And as I do that, I will go ahead and scroll back to the previous, maturity levels. So please, if you have this information, we would love to know.

The first question is about operational maturity. Do you think you're in level one, two, three, or, four or five, and understanding if you are maybe still very siloed?

Maybe you're already starting to create some, emerging alignment. You will start having some revenue generating teams collaborating, or if you already have revenue goals in place and all of the teams are tracking along that space.

So that's operational.

When it comes to business maturity, a start up, early growth, or mid market is where you'd be, yeah, perfect. Okay. Where you'd be, creating some alignment and then rev ops maturity levels. Do you have a CRM?

Maybe you don't even have a CRM yet. Maybe you're working out of Excel. If you're working on a CRM, do you have all of your integrations? Are you creating processes?

If you're maybe level two, already have KPIs, and you're developing insights, would love to know what every single one of you are in this stage.

So I'm gonna go ahead and keep this open for a little bit. It does look like most of the folks here are in operational maturity two or three, which is great to see. It looks like you're right for getting started with QBRs.

And I don't see any replies for don't have a CRM, which is a fan fantastic news.

And most people are between level two and three. And then for maturity level for business maturity level, we are around level two. Great. Thank you so much for everybody that's answering. I'm gonna go ahead and continue here, and I'll leave the poll open for a second, while I go through this next stage. Let me go ahead and share the final results.

Great. So let's talk about the data model and goal setting. And this is probably my favorite part out of the whole thing. So when we talk about creating this data model, the first thing that you need to know is that you can't really know where you're going until you know where you have been, which means we need some historical data. So the fact that no one here has you know, that everybody here does have a CRM and you're all around maturity level two and three is a really great indication that you'll be able to pull a lot of the information that you need. So let's talk about the data model for a second.

We use the winning by design data model, and we have used this to create the alignment around our data architecture for different HubSpot instances.

We have used this for in general to guide the way in which we build revenue operation strategies within, the CRM. And what this speaks about is this is basically the funnel. So we used to see the funnel from, like, a marketing and sales perspective as just this part vertically. So leads would be coming in here, and then they would be trickling down. And at some point, they would become customers. And when they would become customers, we would pretty much not have anything after that funnel.

And the interesting piece about this this build time model is that it does care about after becoming a customer. Right? You need to activate them. You need to onboard them. You need to create an impact and build trust and then eventually, you know, have a recurring business. So this is where you could start measuring things like net revenue retention, churn, and all of those, recurring services, revenue models.

We have made changes to this, and I'll let Brian speak into that in just a moment. But this is the most simple, type of data model. And what I wanna highlight is that it helps us understand what are the volume metrics that we need. Right? So we need to understand the different life cycle stages. We need to understand the conversion rates between one stage and the other, and we also need to understand timing between one stage and the other. And those mostly the first two are going to be the foundation of how you draw information, for your QBR.

I'll go ahead and end the poll here. Thank you so much for everybody that has shared, their information.

Now sharing the info here with you all. Again, most of you under level two or three for operational maturity, which is just really, really great to see.

And, nobody everybody has a CRM, which is also great. Level two or three for, CRM or rev ops maturity, and level two for this maturity level. Awesome. Alright.

I'll stop sharing here for a moment, and I'm gonna go to my last piece, which is the revenue goal matrix. So, again, this is my my favorite part because it is the foundation of how you know what goals you're ever going to be tracking within this QBR. So, what this is, essentially, if you're doing, like, a yearly revenue, forecasting, that's essentially what this is. But we do have a goal matrix template that I'm gonna go into in just a second that is able to draw all of the different pieces of information that you're gonna need to report on.

And so if you don't have your yearly revenue forecasting done, this is a very good time for you to do it for the rest of the year, so h two. Now it does require that you pull some historical data, both revenue goals from last year and your goals for the current year, products and services, deal sources, conversion rates, life cycle stages, and average deal size. So let me show you what we have. We'll also be sharing this, particular template with you guys after the fact, but I just wanna run through this really, really quickly.

We've created three different, let's say, types of templates depending on your, rev ops maturity specifically. So most of you fell under this one. I'll start with level one.

So everything in yellow are all of the pieces that you'll need to fill in. And, again, this is like the forecasting or setting the goals for the next two quarters, basically. So everything in yellow is what you'll want to fill in. So what was your revenue last year versus this year? What was your distribution among all of your different products last year, and where are you making your bets this year? So say you have a star product that gives you sixty percent of your revenue, or eighty percent of your revenue, you're expecting that to be sixty this year. You're gonna make a few assumptions here.

The rest is going to be automatically calculated in regards to the percentage of, the revenue by the percentage that you have mentioned above. So, basically, like, your revenue distribution by product. And then you'll have your your sales motion. This level one goal matrix will only go into net new. But if you take a look at level four and five, you're gonna see that this also speaks into product upsell, product renewal, expansion, etcetera.

The other piece is going to be your percentage by lead source, your average deal size, and your conversion rates between SQL and closed one only. This first template, like I said, for level one is only measuring opportunities, the deal conversion percentage, closed deals, the deal size, that's average deal size, and the quarterly goals. So once you put the information on the left hand side, you'll have this, pretty little chart all filled out, and this is going to be the main output that we're going to be tracking during QBRs. Again, you may already have this information, and if you do, great. But if you don't, this template is a really great way for you to get all of your h two planning going and make sure that you can get all of the data that you need for your QBR.

Alright.

That pretty much covers my part. I'll go ahead and stop sharing here, maybe address any questions that have come in.

Looks like see any questions, Diana.

I got two answered, so I think we're good to go.

And, guys, that that goal matrix chart is awesome. A lot of people we talk to say, we're not really sure where our goals are. It's kinda hard to come up with them. You fill that, chart out all those yellow cells in fifteen, twenty minutes, and it spits out really good benchmarks to use before here.

And, Donna, I have to say we have good news and bad news by that poll. The good news is that, everyone almost everyone's maturity level two or above. The bad news is if they haven't started preparing for their QBR yet, in early July, they are already behind the eight ball. So for all you watching here, I'm gonna show you exactly how I'm gonna prepare for our QBR at RevPartners.

This is what we use for all of our clients and what we do internally. And so we're about thirty days out. Saturday is June first. Gonna walk you through exactly what I'm gonna do for the next thirty days to, to run an awesome QBR in early July.

So the way that I think about the prep is really three phases, and they happen in different, timelines before the QBR. Phase one is all about prep and logistics, getting the calendar, getting the meeting on the calendar, highlighting key stakeholders, and doing a little retrospective of what you worked on over the last ninety days. Phase two, definitely the most important phase. This is the data deep dive.

We're diving into the CRM. We're diving into the metrics. We're diving into the charts. We're highlighting areas of emphasis.

We're doing our secondary KPI deep dive, and we're gathering those data insights that are gonna inform how we, go about our next ninety days. The third phase, you have to finalize everything and you gotta present it. You gotta go live with it and you gotta run your QBR, present that to the team, gotta confirm those next quarter goals. That goal matrix is an awesome resource for that, and you gotta align on your priorities, over the next ninety days.

Right? If those insights are not driving what your priorities are, then there's no reason to do that data deep dive. So I'm gonna go through each one of these phases and show you the exact resources that I will use over the next month, six weeks to get ready to rock and roll.

So preparation phase one, this starts thirty days prior to the end of quarter, which means this will be starting next week for me. We gotta get the meeting on the calendar with all of the key stakeholders.

I always say invite more people than you think because the more visibility and alignment you have across the org, the better. Our QBR is the second week of July towards the end. I think it's on Thursday. Fourth of July is that first week. And so you already have to think ahead and realize if you don't plan it that first week because you're probably gonna be on vacation.

Start thinking about what you did the last ninety days. Whether your team or the greater company in general, what were some of those major initiatives for q two? Are some complete? Are some still in progress or some deprioritized?

Just begin to kind of take notes and think about what you accomplish over the next ninety days. Start brainstorming the next ninety days. You should already think about initiatives you wanna tackle in q three. You don't have to make them super formalized and detailed project plans yet.

Just start brainstorming things. And then lastly, track team metrics. So, obviously, the data won't settle until the quarter is over, but a lot of, metrics tend to stabilize, you know, two thirds to the quarter, like conversion rates and things like that. So look at your look at your dashboard, start tracking key metric trends and just taking notes.

Again, we're we're letting things similar for the next thirty days, but we're getting ahead of ourselves by doing some brainstorming ahead of time. So what does this look like? First, if you're not running the QBR and you would like to, you've got to align the key stakeholders. You gotta tell them what is the purpose.

Why are we doing this? Well, as Diana said earlier, we're reviewing the business's performance to plan over the last quarter. That's why the goals are so important. And we're also highlighting the key factors that influence that performance and which can be improved upon.

Right? As business leaders are all trying to increase revenue or decrease costs. We gotta look at that metric and see how we can improve on them. What is the agenda?

There's a lot of details that go into this, but, generally, it's a three part series. Last ninety days retrospective, metrics deep dive, next ninety day road map. But think about three these three objectives, it makes the agenda super simple. What is the end state?

Why do I care? Why do I wanna attend? Well, we need to align and prioritize the initiatives for the next ninety days. We also need to agree on the metrics you could influence the most.

We need to work as a team going into q three. So we need to prioritize the things that we think we can impact the business the most and agree on the metrics and data that we think have the biggest outsized impact. So show the purpose, the agenda, the end state, and get that meeting scheduled.

So what is that retrospective look like? So this is kind of the template we look at. RevPartners, I'm a big fan of dark mode. So any kind of dark mode slides I can do, I tend to do. And so at the top, we've got three months. So this is month month one, two, and three just as a template, but this could be April, May, and June.

And on the left hand side here, we have these rows are our rev ops pillars. At RevPartners, we believe that rev ops has three main pillars, team efficiency, visibility and adoption, and performance. We want all of our objectives and projects to live with under these pillars because those because we know those affect business performance the best. We also use the OKR methodology at RevPartners, and so each of these will have an objective in between one and four key results that go under the objective.

As we know, a lot of these things can take several months. And so in the top left corner, we have, in month one, we've got one objective with one key result, and it's under the team efficiency pillar, and we think this is gonna take just one month. So that's where we have, that that, rectangle there. If you look into visibility and adoption, we've got a larger objective that we think may take two months, and that's because we've got three key results underneath. You see that third key result takes about six weeks to kinda deliver, and that's why it's halfway through month one and halfway through month two. We don't need to get through the week by week plan about how you, like, achieve this. This is just high level of wanting these key stakeholders on what were the business objectives we are trying to achieve, what were the key results that rolled into those, and, generally, when did those get delivered.

If you look over to objective four here, maybe this is just beginning in month three, which is June. If it has to carry over to July, if it's in progress by the end of the quarter, that's fine. We'll just go ahead and roll this over to our next ninety day project plan.

So by looking at your last ninety days and really forcing yourself to look back and say, what did we achieve? What were the key results of these objectives? And generally, what rev ops tool do they align to? This really, really helps you kind of give a very, high level understanding of kind of what you did, over the last ninety days.

If you have a project management system, we use ClickUp here. You can do, like, a Gantt chart or any kind of visual representation. I would always recommend that. Right?

We're not diving into the specifics about what you achieved here. That's not the purpose of this meeting. But giving a timeline really helps people. If you think about what you did in March, which was only three months ago, you might not remember off the top of your head.

And so this is really good alignment to the entire team on what you've worked on and what you have planned.

So once you do the last ninety days retrospective, we we gotta start looking at key report trends. And so I'm starting to look at my dashboards right around now and looking at things like conversion rates, like MQL to SQL conversion rate, deal conversion rate, sales stage movement, things like that just to start taking notes about key trends that I'm seeing. I'm always looking quarter over quarter or month over month so that I can just begin to take notes. It's really hard to, like, open, you know, all the data on July first and just start because there's so much possibilities there. But if you're not kind of, you know, aiming on a couple key points to look at, you're kinda doing yourself a disservice.

If you got plenty of time over the last thirty next thirty days, open up your CRM and see what it says.

So that's prep, that's preparation phase one. Now prep phase two is gonna be the first week of the new quarter. So as soon as July first hits, all that data in your CRM from the last quarter should be kinda set in stone. And so what we're gonna do is use those things that Dana showed us with our goal matrix and our, data model to really start, adding some of this data in. So we're gonna complete our primary KPI data model table, and I'll show you what that looks like. We're gonna highlight areas of emphasis.

We're gonna use those areas of emphasis to do a secondary KPI deep dive, and then we're gonna use that to gather data insights.

Everyone always wants to go to, like, the third or fourth layer immediately, and it they don't connect it back to the layers above. So we start at the bot at the top and just go one layer each time to really connect the dots and show how this little, cog in the wheel impacted the overall goal here. So let's take a look at what some of the stuff looks like. So here's our recurring, model Bowtie. Recurring, recurring revenue Bowtie data model we use at RevPartners.

At the bottom, you see we've got the volume metrics and the conversion rates. And then we have a recurring revenue business, so we're tracking net new revenue, cross sell, upgrades, downgrades, churn. All that good stuff we're tracking as well because we've got our net new goal, but we also have goals on the other side of the business. And so, it looks complex once you do this a couple times. It actually becomes very easy.

You're then looking at KPI visibility. And so, this is something new that we've done, and we're seeing how can we slice the data to tell a better story. And so for each object in your CRM, you know, contacts, deals, tickets, whatever you have, you've got custom properties that you can report on. So if you look here kind of in the middle, you'll see that we've got our deal object.

So in the deal object, you've got the the sales rep or the deal owner. You might have MEDDPIC scores. You might have a closed lost reason, a product, a deal source. All of these things are gonna tell you why or why not you get your revenue goal.

So highlighting areas that you've got full adoption in really helps you where you're at. But you see some in red. You've got things in red that are not fully adopted or not available yet. You're telling your team, I don't have visibility into this data yet, so I cannot use this as part of my deep dive analysis.

When you're working on these next projects, you're looking at turn and turn these reds into oranges and oranges into greens. The more greens you have, the better data you have at your disposal to do better data insights.

Orange is the tough part. It means adoption is needed. Closed lost reason, I see this a ton. People have it as, like, a text field.

It gets filled up half the time. You can't use it. It's not standardized. It needs adoption so that you can use it.

Go through your KPI visibility, look at your own CRM, and build this chart out.

Then we start at the very top.

We ask ourselves, did we hit our revenue goal? Right? You start at the top. You give your goal, your actual your percent to goal, and then everything else in the QBR says why or why not and rolls up to this.

So you start at the top, and then you look at your data model. This is a blank model that we're giving you guys as a template just to kinda fill some things in. But this is what it looks like when it's filled out. There's a lot going on here, but we're all we're only filling out one row at a time.

So at the far left side, in the green, we've got our life cycle stages. We've got leads. We've got MQLs. We've got deals created.

We've got closed won deals, and then we have the count of each of those that happened the last quarter. So right here, I'm saying I created four hundred twenty one deals in q one, and I closed a hundred and nine of them. That's a twenty six percent close rate. We're just kinda using a rolling average for conversion rates.

The gray columns in the middle are taking the column to the right, dividing it to the column of the left, and that is our conversion rate. So if you have data here, go back as far as you can, at least two or three quarters so you can start seeing trends and impact. This table has the last four quarters. It also has a sum per year to date.

It's got our twenty twenty three goals and our delta to goals.

And so all we're doing in that prep phase two for the QBR, the first week of the quarter, is filling out the most recent row here. So you're filling out eight, like, eight or ten metrics and data points. But when you combine this all together, you can see how valuable it is. And so now what I'm looking at is I'm putting rectangles of color around areas of emphasis.

Red is obviously something where we mistarget or a big trend that went down. Green as we hit target, we're right online. Yellow, we're kind of in a holding pattern or neutral. So you wanna highlight different areas, and you wanna dive into each of these areas.

So I'm gonna look at average deal size. This is red. You can see it. It fell from fifty four hundred the previous quarter to three thousand.

That's a big drop, and it's way below our goal. So it's five hundred dollars below our goal. So this is an area of emphasis. I'm gonna show you how to take this cell and connect it back to the overall picture.

So we're gonna take each of those cells, green, yellow, red, whatever it is, and we're gonna add it to a metric with supporting details. So this is a template again, but you can see here that I've got average deal size, and I've got twenty eight percent drop year over year. So that's the block that I'm showing right now.

So I'm keying in on that one square right here and then showing the bluff right here. Now I'm gonna dive into what happened here. So we wanna look at charts in our CRM and look at trends over time.

Average deal size has dropped twenty eight percent year over year. Why is that?

Right? So average deal size fluctuation, you kinda give, like, a reason why, and you have a couple bullet points here. Right? You're gonna have a lot of these data insights, so you don't need to, like, go over everything here.

But you wanna clearly say that the data and the reporting and the CRM backs this up. So if we so if we go back, we got this square right here goes to this key bluff point. It goes to this supporting detail, and this is the takeaway. Right?

Why did average deal size fall?

Adding new lower price product lines have brought down our average deal size. That's a fact. That's a statement. So while our net new customer account has remained stable, that's kind of a stable yellow metric, We are still missing plan. Why did we not hit our goal? Because the lower deal size has not been offset by an increase in deals created.

So I'm currently connecting different parts of the data model. Our average deal size has decreased because while our converge rate has remained the same, we haven't filled up the top of funnel enough to come up with that increase to hit our end of a revenue goal. Right? A lot of these things are a math equation, and just by stating it in a key takeaway, now the entire team is aligned to exactly what that metric was.

Right? So that's what you're doing in the prep phase two.

You're adding your data model. You're highlighting areas of emphasis. You're diving into those areas with reports and graphs that you have in your CRM. You're giving a bluff of what happened with the metric, and you're giving a key takeaway.

Now comes the fun part. Right? You've got your slides done. You've done all your data work.

Now you're ready to finalize and present. I recommend you do this the second week of the new quarter, maybe the third week, but always in the first month of the quarter because, otherwise, the data gets stale. You're gonna finalize your next ninety day recommendations. Right?

Whatever role you're in, whether it's rev ops or sales or whatever, you wanna come to the table with recommendations. I've seen the data. I've thought about this. This is how I think I can impact the business.

You're gonna, of course, deliver the QBR to the team and have a wonderful Zoom call. Maybe it's in person, and, it's in a go gray. You're then gonna confirm next quarter goals. What are our benchmarks for the next quarter?

Look at our goal matrix. Is this aligned? Do we wanna update it? Confirm those next quarter goals.

And then you're gonna confirm your project plan and how to prioritize over the next ninety days.

The stakeholders love this because you're leaving here with the plan that they were able to align to and help you prioritize before the end of the meeting.

So what does this look like? Second week of the quarter, you're finalizing these key insights. You're giving them all supporting details. You're using those insights to make your next ninety day recommendations.

Of course, you're going to the main event, and you're delivering that QBR.

Then you're going to confirm and align on the priorities and project plan for the next ninety days. Diana never needs to know what I'm working on on July tenth because I just told her. And she told me that she's aligned with it, and I need to prioritize this. Right? She can free up to start filling that pipeline again, and I can go work on helping improving metrics. Right? We've already aligned on this, and I've tied all of these things back to the metrics from the glass corner.

So what are these recommendations look like? Again, these need to be high level enough because you're including a lot of stakeholders, and you wanna just give them kind of the key area of emphasis. So at the top, we've got our three rev ops pillars, performance, efficient efficiency, or visibility, and we want each recommendation to fit into one of these. So deal segmentation, segmenting higher fit deals to, to higher speed or whatever is gonna be in the performance. Sales automation increases efficiency.

Adding deal sources and, choosing HubSpot's north star metric is gonna add visibility. That KPI visibility chart, you want that all those res to turn to greens.

So we're aligning those metrics that are insights with our recommendations, with our rev ops pillars, and here's what our next ninety days looks like. And so this one's no longer a template. This is, like, an idea of what these, objectives could be. So I've got July, August, and September.

I've got each pillar filled up, efficiency, visibility, and performance. And I've got these key things in here that I'm gonna start working on. So deal segmentation on the previous slide. I just said deal segmentation is big.

I want to focus on this as my next quarter recommendation. Well, guess what? That's the first thing I'm gonna work on in July.

And once I do deal segmentation, I can do sales automation for lower priority deals.

Right? And then you've got lost deal segmentation and nurture program. We're stacking things on top of each other because at the end of the ninety days, we know that we can influence that performance of that metrics. All of these should tie in and make a lot of sense.

Once we have our lead acquisition filled out and visibility adoption, we're gonna do HubSpot optimizations with workflows and risk. We're connecting the dots here. We're giving the team and the key stakeholders a ton of confidence to know that. I looked at the data.

I made my recommendations, and I have an action plan to actually support that.

So this is it, guys. We got thirty days to go before the end of q two if this is your fiscal year. We got the prep and logistics that you should be starting as soon as next week. We're doing our data deep dive that first week of the quarter. And finally, we're finalizing and presenting this thing that second week of July, and you're gonna look like a champion internally.

Go ahead, Diane.

Back to you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Brian. Well, like I said at the beginning, we do wanna make this a little bit interactive, and we're about to go into the q and a.

But before that, we are going to be sending out a review recap email with all the different resources that we went through today. We encourage you to complete the goal matrix template if you don't already have some sort of revenue forecasting document and also to complete the preparation phases one and two. In the recap email, you're going to see that I'm going to be offering five meetings for five different folks Should you want to go through the goal matrix and help help go through and building it out, I'll take the first five folks that, book a meeting with me. So we only have a few minutes left.

I want to go through we actually have quite a few, questions. I'm gonna read them out, Brian. And if you wanna answer them or you can pass them back to me. Okay?

Yeah. It looks like Peter and Ryan have a similar question about conversion rates. And, this is a hot topic, so I'll just go ahead and take it. Let's do it.

The reality is, I mean, you guys you guys are right. What they're saying is, like, this is not a true conversion rate because if you're making the assumption that all leads become customers in the in that calendar quarter. And if your sales cycle is over ninety days, how does that work? Okay.

So what we are doing here is we're not it's not actually a true funnel where only these fifty six hundred leads are our sample size. We're looking at any lead that was tagged in that calendar corner and any MQL tagged in that calendar quarter. So if this MQL became an MQL in twenty twenty three, we're still getting or sorry. If this MQL become a lead in twenty twenty three, but did it become an MQL till now, we're still gonna include them in the sample size.

There are so many ways to do conversion rates. You can do a cohort based. You can do a rolling ninety days. You can do a simplified way like this.

We've chosen a simplified way because, again, we're not trying to, like you know, it's not trying to be rocket science. We're trying to align key stakeholders on trends we see in the business. There are a lot of ways to do converge rates, and these will be close enough for you to actually make recommendations and dive into the data. So for us, it's very easy and very linear to just track when that contact or deal hit that phase of the customer journey in that, quarter and just do it a very simple division here.

There's a lot of ways to do it, and however you wanna do it, that's totally fine. But what we're trying to hear do here is not decide if this twenty seven point four should be twenty eight point five percent. We're trying to say, generally, if this conversion rate is in the air the error margin, is it enough of an insight where we can actually, use that to impact business? So this is something I think about a lot, and there's not an easy answer.

But I hope that makes sense where, there's a lot of ways to do conversion rates, and this is the way that we've chosen to do that. So hopefully, that answers the question for Peter and Ryan.

Yeah. And there's a follow-up question from Peter too. How do we align the QBR with preparation for the quarterly board meeting?

That's interesting because it's basically talking about the OKRs.

OKRs are usually done, like, two weeks or consolidated two weeks before the quarter ends for the following quarter, but we're saying that we're going to be for something where the QBR at the, like, middle of the month, the next month.

I mean, quarterly board meetings, you know, the they're scheduling it just kinda depends on your cadence. But what I would say is that if those board meetings aren't aren't influencing what you have in the QBR, then you're doing it improperly. If we're not tracking the metrics in your CRM the board wants to see, then what's the point of it? I think you should use the q internal QBR as kind of a litmus test so that you can get your your team aligned to what you're gonna present up to the board. So the board likes a lot of, super complicated metrics, and maybe you have to use Excel formulas to get there. But the underlying data should be in the CRM. And if you need a little higher level approach to using the QBR that's a little bit more applicable to all the stakeholders, I would start there and then use that as a basis to inform your board meetings.

Yep.

Yeah. I definitely agree with that. We have another question that's really interesting.

How do you navigate providing those recommendations directly after performance updates and hearing, like, feedback from leaders and having them feel like you put them on the spot even though you know that the QBR is objective? How do you handle that with the different stakeholders?

Eager to hear your thoughts, Brian, because I'm one of your stakeholders.

Look. We're on the same team here. All I care about is helping the business out. And the reality is if you don't have trust with these stakeholders and they don't trust that you're coming with an unbiased opinion that's for the good of the company, then you need to work on that first.

At these QBRs, I tell Diane and the sales team exactly what the data is telling me, and I'm not gonna share her code things because I need to get to the underlying things to improve the business performance. We've got a ton of trust between each other. She knows I'm looking out for the best interest of the team. And so she doesn't have to necessarily, like, immediately agree with every recommendation I have, but we're gonna use that time in the back half of it to align with what she wants to prioritize, with what I wanna prioritize, and then we have a continued conversation on how we do about that.

So this is why it's called recommendations because we're trying to be proactive and recommend things that we think are gonna impact the business. If you disagree as the leader of your department or you think something else needs to be priority prioritized, that's why we have open and honest conversations afterwards. It's not like, hopefully, after this meeting, you never talk to your leaders again. Hopefully, you have another meeting in the next week to say, hey.

We had a little bit of disagreement on some of these recommendations. Let's do a deeper dive to figure out the best path forward and come to an alignment.

Yeah. I mean and, I definitely agree with the fact that we're all on the same team, and creating that, level of trust with the different stakeholders is probably the most important thing for the QBR altogether.

So it goes into, like, some of the first recommendations that we were talking about. Right? Like, make sure that people know what the QBR is for, what you're going to be providing within the QBR. And maybe if you need a few eyes on it before you present, then all the better to create a little bit of alignment prior to.

Okay.

I think that's all we have time for today. Thank you so much everyone for joining. Any last comments or remarks, Brian?

Yeah. There was just one more question from Peter around, shouldn't you have your OKRs done before the beginning of the quarter? But shouldn't your OKRs also be influenced by the, the QBR? And the reality is, like, you know, we work over an entire year.

It's not like my job totally changes from June thirtieth to July first. Things are always moving. It's not like every OKR needs to be done by June thirtieth or the the role ends. Right?

So this is kind of like a rolling scenario where we want to have ideas of what we wanna work on. But if they're not finalized, finalized to the second week of the quarter, that's totally fine. Right? We want to plan things, have the data validate things, and then confirm things.

But if that happens a couple weeks into the quarter, it's gonna be just fine. So be as proactive as you can. But if you're not agile and flexible with how you're operating as a business, you're putting too much rigidity into a the reality of, hey. Things can go quarter to quarter, and it's not that big of a deal.

Alright. Thank you so much everyone for joining us today. We're gonna be sharing all of this, reporting assets, everything you need on a recap email, and see you again in, June for the next section of presenting your QBR.

Thank you all.

Thanks, everyone. Appreciate it. Bye bye.