ESSENTIAL GUIDE

Native Salesforce
Quarterly Business Reviews

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Why Settle for

Quarterly Insights?
QBRs at the Speed of Lightning.
You’re probably dreading your next Quarterly Business
Review (QBR). While they hold great promise for helping
predict success, traditional approaches are highly
disruptive to your selling machine and seldom yield
uniformly quantifiable outcomes. The picture becomes
even more clouded for complex selling teams that
include direct sales, customer success and multiple
channels across different time zones.
Successful selling machines harness technology to
quickly and consistently improve performance across
marketing, sales, customer success and channel teams,
which are converging in many ways.
This Essential Guide to Quarterly Business Reviews
shows you how to adopt a more agile approach that
leverages technology in exciting, new ways to discover
opportunities and drive more business on a continuous
basis. We often refer to these as Continuous Business
Reviews because they can be conducted in the normal
course of business using smarter approaches rather
than traditional methods.

Five Myths of Quarterly Business Reviews

Here are five myths that are being broken by revenue officers who understand the power of more progressive
approaches:

1. QBRs are highly disruptive, hence the need to conduct them after each
fiscal quarter.
2. QBRs are nearly impossible to conduct inside a CRM, leading to spreadsheet
and presentation hell, and rolling up the findings for executive forums is even
more difficult.
3. QBRs often favor reps who have charismatic personalities and masterful
presentation skills, and it can be difficult to determine who is likely to succeed.
4. QBRs don’t consistently and easily leverage CRM data as a system of record to
quickly understand historical performance and predictively power future success.
5. QBRs aren’t scalable learning opportunities for diverse sales, customer success
and channel teams alike.

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The Essentials of Quarterly Business Reviews

Successful sales leaders understand a QBR should
be an ideal forum for sales managers and enterprising
sales, customer success and channel reps to separate
themselves from the pack. After all, the best performers
are masters of their territory who think holistically about
their business and understand what makes their territory
unique. There are a few essential areas that should be
explored during a QBR and most of the information should
be readily available in your Salesforce system.

Your Salesforce system should include baseline reports and

dashboards that are used to reliably derive baseline insights for

Essential #1: standard time-based intervals, such as:

• QTD, Quarter-by-Quarter Comparison, Current vs. Previous

Review Your Results Quarter, and

• YTD, Year-by-Year Comparison, and Current vs. Previous YTD.

CRM Dashboard Win Reports

Every selling team has core reports that should be With the right content, win reports are important vehicles
included in their CRM dashboards, such as: for raising the IQ of a selling team, while encouraging reps
to try new approaches. Following are basic components of
• Sales vs. Quota a win report:

• Sales by Region, Territory, Team Customer demographic information such as name,

• Sales by Offering Type (Product, Service) location, annual revenue, industry conditions or
trends, financial performance and number
• Sales by Channel of employees.

• Average Deal Size Customer goals and challenges that were addressed
by your product or service.

Products or services that were chosen to address

13%
their goals.
Net New
Reasons why your products or services were chosen,
and competitive offerings that were also considered.
Upsell 30% 57%
How the customer found you, which is invaluable
Renewal information for the marketing and selling team.

Overall contract value and upside.

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The agile approach to creating sales playbooks that boost

Essential #2: performance at lightning-fast speeds is Account-Based Selling
Prepare Your Playbook (ABS) and it includes solutions such as Key Account Management
and Digital Content Management.

Buyers have become quite sophisticated and they • What account types should be ruled out?
expect even greater levels of support from the sales
• In which accounts do we already have an advantage?
teams that service them. At the same time, sales
professionals need account intelligence that helps them • In which accounts are we already engaged and
become reliable advisors to earn trust and compete have relationships?
more effectively. They also need great content that
embraces the customer’s journey and improves the • What accounts deliver the most strategic value?
buying experience for tech-savvy customers. It’s also fundamental to understand where you and
With this in mind, there are a few basic your company have been successful. Reviewing win
components of a playbook that will of course reports, analyzing customer lists by employee size,
vary by industry, company and role. revenue, industry and other dimensions that are vital
to your selection process, and understanding the
Select Top Accounts and Identify buyer persona of where you’ve been successful are
fundamental exercises for all reps and territories.
Key Stakeholders
Top account selection is a critically important activity.
An important tenet of ABS is to focus your efforts
on a relatively small number of high-value accounts
that have the greatest revenue potential. That’s why
account selection is a critical step in any successful
program. The right number of accounts in each tier of
your program will depend on many factors, including:

• The rigor of your ABS strategy

• Transaction deal size and volume

• Transaction velocity and length of the sales cycle

• Available sales resources

You may already have an idea about the kinds of

companies that are most likely to generate the
results that will justify the ABS approach. Here are
a few questions to guide your account selection:

• Where have we been effective in the past?

• Which account types have been profitable?

• What are the most predictive characteristics

of sales success?

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And there are other dimensions to consider about

target companies such as the annual revenue and
growth trajectory, and the number of
employees and locations. When filtering
from a long list of potential target accounts,
it makes sense to consider your current
level of engagement. This can weigh heavily
in favor of one company over another.

There’s an abundance of information available

to help. Company goals and challenges are
available via company websites, press releases,
8-K and 10-K reports, and other public sources
include LinkedIn, Owler, Crunchbase and Yahoo!
Finance. Some companies are also using third-
party buyer intent data to give them a competitive
edge. This information is often collected
about a person’s or company’s activity that’s
occurring on other sites, including articles read,
content downloaded and websites searched.

Not all prospects are created equal and it

takes an intelligent approach to sift through
vast amounts of information in order to tier
your accounts and invest your resources.

Develop Account Insights and Strategy

As mentioned, the most successful reps are
masters of their territory. They understand
what makes their patches unique, and how to
harness and scale limited resources to become
true customer advisors and win business.

Account-Based Selling works best when you

invest more of your limited resources in the largest
accounts that are most likely to buy. So, the best
opportunity to jumpstart your program is often to
simply grow the number of contacts per account.

Key Stakeholder Map Whitespace Report

When your account and contact records are in You’ll also want to better understand the opportunity
order, you’ll want to identify and map the key landscape within target accounts. A Whitespace Report
stakeholders within target accounts using a native can help you quickly identify hidden revenues to be
Salesforce application. The entire strategy depends hunted or farmed.
on doing your homework and learning about the key
buyers, influencers and potential blockers in these
accounts. A visual Stakeholder Map is an essential
requirement.

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SWOT Analysis
Creating an effective strategy for gaining trust,
expanding engagement, defeating competitors
and ultimately winning more business is to
utilize a visual SWOT Analysis tool.
Understanding these important account-specific insights will have a dramatic impact on every engagement because
contacts will be more inclined to read your emails, consume and share content, participate in important meetings and
ultimately consider you to be a trusted advisor.
Essential #3: Prepare Your
Plan for Next Quarter
$109 Direct
$328
Million $109 Channel
$109 Referral
Best-case, worst-case and most-likely forecasts should
be reviewed, and weighted pipelines may also be used
to smooth out the outliers and understand how likely
you are to succeed based on the opportunities in the
funnel. Ultimately, you’ll use experience, multiple data
points and other information to derive your forecast.
And a continuous approach that leverages your Salesforce
system and native apps will enable you to gain a much
better understanding of how to harness resources
across your marketing, sales, customer success and
channel teams to bolster the pipeline and strengthen
the top account opportunities you’ve identified apps.
Execute Account-Based Selling Plays
The rise of Account-Based Selling solutions such as Key
Account Management and Digital Content Management
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
Account Team Tasks
Finally, utilizing an integrated Account Team
Task Plan will enable you to orchestrate your
approach across sales and marketing team
members wherever they are located.
Compare Sales Quota vs. Forecasted Pipeline
It’s critical that you have accurate pipeline reports in order to
determine whether you are exposed without enough fuel to meet
your quota. This should be analyzed by key dimensions such as
territory, product line and route to market (e.g., direct, channel).
are bringing together marketing, sales and customer
success teams to improve transparency across sales
pipelines. This fosters a more vibrant understanding
of the unique needs that sales teams have today.
Now that you have identified your target accounts,
key stakeholders, influencers and potential blockers,
and created insights about each account and
person. It’s time to prepare the sales plays that will
get you in front of the people you need to meet.
This is where you’ll work closely with your cross-functional
teams to prepare programs that are specific to your top-
tier target accounts and more general for your lower-
value prospects. Targeted messages and campaigns will
be prepared and content playlists will be activated.
Calls 5000
Conversations 4000
MQLs 3000
SALs 1000
Opportunities 250
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Essential #4:
Keep It Native
Administrators can “snap in” a native app while sales reps
keep selling — no integration needed. Better yet, native
apps provide exclusive, real-time insights and ensure the
Salesforce platform remains the single source of truth.
Because they reside natively inside Salesforce, they are
trusted, secure, intelligent, multitenant and mobile apps
that completely leverage your investments in Salesforce
training, administration and data. They’re also maintenance
free and are consistently updated three times per year to
coincide with the Salesforce platform release schedule.
ESSENTIAL GUIDE
Completely native solutions are built inside Salesforce’s trusted
platform. Key Account Management and Digital Content
Management solutions allow sales professionals to execute their
ABS programs all within Salesforce.
Special Insights for Customer
Success Management
Customer Success Management (CSM) professionals
are gaining attention (and running on rocket fuel!)
as vast numbers of companies from Software as
a Service (SaaS) providers to big brands such as
Amazon, Netflix and Apple disrupt markets with annual
subscriptions for their goods and services. Among
the key metrics that keep these pros up at night are
annual renewals and customer satisfaction scores.
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From a Quarterly Business Review standpoint, virtually
all aforementioned Account-Based Selling principles
apply, which is the beauty of adopting native Salesforce
apps that snap into the platform for everyone to use.
That said, there are additional customer health
indicators for Customer Success teams to consider
when developing their customer-for-life programs
and forecasting your renewal business:
• Depth of product usage. How widespread is your
product adoption within the account? When did they
last use your product (e.g., log into your system)?
• Breadth of product usage. How many products
are used? Do they use them all? Should they?
• Feedback quality. Is the customer providing
valuable product feedback? Do they value the
partnership and see a bright future with you?
• Length of time. Have they been a loyal
customer and has your relationship with
them overcome the test of time?
Creating a reliable customer scorecard with
datapoints such as these takes commitment, but it
enables you to quickly identify areas of weakness
and exposure across your renewal business. It’s
well worth the investment you make now to keep
a good customer that you fought hard to win.

• Engagement. How often does the customer Additional Resources

interact with you, and in what ways? Does the
customer advocate for you? Have they provided
positive online reviews? Agreed to publish a case
Visit PROLIFIQ’s Resource Center
study? Conduct quarterly account reviews? at prolifiq.com/resources where
• Growth. What was the initial value of this you’ll find useful information such
customer and how much has it grown?
as the QBR Template, Essential
• Open A/R. Does the customer have
open invoices that are past due? Guide to Account-Based
• Survey scores. Has the customer Selling and the State of
responded to satisfaction surveys and
if so, what has been the result? Sales Enablement Report.
• Customer support usage. Has the customer
submitted a large number of support
tickets? Have they submitted any?

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About PROLIFIQ

PROLIFIQ® is the leading sales enablement company,

pioneering native Salesforce account-based selling
for key account management and digital content
management that empower sales teams to boost
performance and become trusted customer advisors.
The world’s leading brands choose PROLIFIQ to crush
competitors and ace the customer experience.

Visit prolifiq.com to learn more.

Copyright © PROLIFIQ Software, Inc. All rights reserved.