“QBRs Are Dead.” Does It Hold Up?

Every quarter, like clockwork, somebody in my feed posts the obituary: “QBRs are dead. Your customers don't want them. Stop booking meetings to show people dashboards.” And every quarter it does numbers, because half the room has sat through a QBR that deserved to die.

Full disclosure before we start, because this show runs on it: I have skin in this one. I have run these reviews for years and I run a renewals organization right now. Which means this week I am reviewing a take that says my own meeting is dead. If the evidence says it is dead, I will stamp it dead.

The take

The strong version claims the quarterly business review as a motion is obsolete: customers do not value it, increasingly do not attend it, and customer success teams should kill it and replace it with continuous digital touchpoints. Not fix it. Kill it. This one does not trace to a book or a study; it is a recurring take in the customer success world that spikes every time budgets tighten, riding two real waves: the digital-first movement and the post-2022 efficiency era, when every meeting on every calendar had to re-justify its existence. It is not a lazy take. It comes from somewhere.

The steelman

The case for death is good, and it deserves to be made properly. Exhibit one: attendance, the metric that does not lie. When your customer's executives stop accepting the invite, delegate down two levels, or reschedule three times, that is the customer reviewing your QBR, and the verdict is in. Anyone who has run these at scale has watched attendance decay on accounts where the meeting stopped earning its slot.

Exhibit two: the median QBR is genuinely bad. Thirty slides of usage charts the customer could have read in an email. A recap of the just-ended quarter, presented to those who lived it. Our metrics, our template, our calendar cadence, whether or not anything in the account actually changed. That is not a business review. That is a status report wearing a suit.

Exhibit three: the economics. Preparing a proper review eats hours, and across a full book of business, running them everywhere on autopilot is one of the most expensive habits in customer success. The rise of pooled and digital CS proved something uncomfortable: whole segments of customers renewed just fine without ever taking the meeting. So the funeral is earned. Something really did die. The question is what.

The test

Here is what the obituary never covers: what a working business review actually produces, none of which shows up in a dashboard. It surfaces the risk telemetry cannot see: your champion is interviewing elsewhere, the budget owner changed, procurement got a new mandate. Usage data tells you what happened in the product; the room tells you what is about to happen to the account. It forces value into the customer's language before procurement asks: if your customer's executive cannot say in one sentence what your product did for their business, you find that out in this room in month four, or you find it out in the renewal negotiation. One of those is fixable. And it time-stamps commitments, on both sides, with executives present.

The operating truth I would put on a card: the renewal is not decided at the renewal. It is decided in rooms like this one, two quarters earlier. Kill the room and the renewal still gets decided. Just without you in it.

Now, honesty about where the critics are right: the tail of the book. Low ACV, single stakeholder, product-led accounts: the quarterly executive review was never alive there, because the economics never supported it and the customer never needed it. Digital-first motions serve that segment better, full stop. But at the top of the book, where the buying committee is wide and the renewal is a decision made by humans in rooms, this meeting is one of the highest-leverage motions that exists. Notice what the industry itself did: it did not kill the meeting. It renamed it. QBR became EBR, executive business review, value review. When a meeting survives by shedding its old format and keeping its function, that is not death. That is evolution telling you exactly which part deserved to die.

Two more breaks in the death claim. First, survivorship of bad examples: the people declaring QBRs dead are describing the median QBR, and the median QBR is bad, but the practitioners with the retention numbers mostly are not posting. They are in the rooms. Second, the incentive: “QBRs are dead” is excellent engagement bait, and for part of the ecosystem it is also a sales pitch, because the proposed replacement is usually software. On this show we always ask who benefits if you believe the take. When the answer is the person selling the alternative, the take does not lose automatically. But it starts its review with a disclosure problem.

The verdict

Static. True, but distorted. The funeral is real; they buried the wrong body. Conditions, out loud: it is signal when aimed at the ritual: the autopilot quarterly cadence across the whole book, the thirty-slide recap, no executives, no decisions. Customers reviewed that meeting with their attendance, and the verdict was death. It is also signal in the tail of your book, where the meeting never earned its economics. It is noise when aimed at the motion: the executive business review that is forward-looking, decision-forcing, exec to exec, and reserved for accounts where the renewal is decided in a room. Declaring that meeting dead because the bad version died is like declaring dinner dead because you have had bad restaurants.

The rewrite

“QBRs aren't dead. QBRs without decisions are. Kill the recap deck: your customer already did. Keep the room where the renewal is actually decided: exec to exec, forward-looking, built on their outcomes, and only where the account can pay for it. Bring a decision, not a dashboard.”

If your quarterly review cannot pass that test, do not defend it. Fix it or cancel it. The customer's calendar is the jury, and it is already voting.