How to Deliver a Flawless Executive Business Review

ladies and gentlemen please welcome to the stage gain sites chief strategist of both programs Reuben Ravi go all right this next panel is gonna be awesome I guarantee it I'd like to introduce the moderator of this panel Kelly Capote please come on stage she is her her official title is superstar CSM seriously come on Kelly [Music] all right who is fired up and ready to kick off the second half of our first day at pulse 2018 let's hear it alright well you should be very excited as I have not one but two very distinguished speakers here with me today to discuss a very hot topic how to deliver a flawless executive Business Review so let's go ahead and do some quick intros first up let's meet mr. Chris McNamara awesome all right so Chris is a former management consultant entrepreneur and now customer success executive and he's led a broad range of teams and organizations in thinking more deeply about how to better acquire engage and retain their target customers as the VP of customer success at Glassdoor quick quick Chris works with the teams responsible for enabling delivering and demonstrating values to glassdoor's customers Chris Chris has a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of New South Wales and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business let's give Chris a big warm pulse welcome awesome alright so in true gainsight fashion Chris this is your first tough question of the session let's do it share with us a fun fact about yourself yeah well one fun fact about me is that when I'm not helping our customers be successful I love coaching and I've been a Special Olympics volunteer coach for the last 10 years and this is a photo of me with my local Special Olympics basketball team that's awesome I love it alright you guys ready for our second awesome guest all right Laura Grendel come on up whoo [Music] all right a Minneapolis native Laura serves as a senior director of client development at sa P concur she's led client-facing roles for the past seven years at sa P concur and has worked in sales and account management for the past 17 years she's passionate about managing customer relationships to ultimately drive growth profitability and an organization for for the customers business so Laura let's give her a heartfelt welcome so Laura you're not getting out of this you have to share us your fun fact as well so I am the proud mom to a 17 year old daughter Catherine grace and she's pictured up there that's us in Vail last summer we love to travel and take advantage of the globe so I'm super happy to be here today thanks for having me Kelly awesome all right so let's take a seat what to expect during the next 45 minutes so I'll be your host as we know the executive Business Review is a CSM's highest profile activity or one of them for sure and it's a mann's a unique level of focus it could definitely be a make-it-or-break-it moment and each EBR is anything but one-size-fits-all so we're gonna try and cover some of the key criteria for today so we'll start with what are some common pitfalls of EB R's I think a lot of us may have been there in the room before we'll discuss what is the e VR process not really just an event but thinking about the three creep three key steps of really setting yourself up for success in the EBR and then Chris and Lara will share three lessons learned with some really concrete examples of things that we're hoping you can take away and operationalize you know within your own day-to-day activities and then we'll make sure to leave some time at the end to open it up for Q&A from the audience one quick housekeeping item we will be using slide o to facilitate conversation and Q&A at the end so make sure you have it open in your pulse app or go to www.weather.gov/gjt so we're gonna kick it off with some energy and engagement so let's sit back and watch a quick scene that we may have all it may hit a little bit too close to home for some of us so Lara and Chris let's take it away I am the bumbling CSM Chris it is so good to see you I'm so excited for our executive Business Review today great to see you too Laura thanks for taking the time good to be here it's so good to see you where's Kelly Oh Kelly we we we don't need Kelly we don't need Kelly I'm kind of her right-hand man so you know her calendars a disaster don't worry about Kelly she's not gonna come yeah not a big deal that's unfortunate oh yeah let's let's just let's just smash through this we can get through it you just you and I I've got a peloton class in about 30 minutes that I really need to make so if we can just jump right in I'm excited to hear what you've got to say okay I thought we had an hour on the calendar Chris Oh an hour really Wow I do not have an hour my there is no way I've got an hour yes sorry okay well let's start talking then let's just get to the document did you get the document I sent you oh there's a document yes there's a document I sent it yesterday afternoon to Chris oh my goodness I'm so sorry I have not reviewed the document let me just let me just you know what I don't I don't have my phone or my laptop with me either okay okay well let's just kind of get straight into it then with just this 30 minutes let's just get straight to page 175 okay and okay you'll see when you do get the document yes that our analytics that we've looked at we are making phenomenal progress on utilization on a feature alpha we're so proud we are so excited to share this with you okay okay okay feature alpha what about operation theta operation theta operation theta Laura theta we're all about operation theta this quarter theta theta theta it's it's the key it's the key to our entire business it's it's the center of our strategy I'm all about theta I'm really sorry Chris I didn't know that your whole focus had shifted to theta it's okay it's okay we're just about coming up on time now anyway so look I'm I'm really happy with the work that you've done like obviously very impressive I'm gonna relay this back to Kelly I'm sure she's going to take it from there in terms of the renewal so thank you so much for your work I'm gonna go jump on a bike all right well thank you Chris you all right let's give it up for them okay so what do you guys think went wrong we're actually going to open up to the audience if you can open up slide oh and go to the ideas tab quickly pop in a couple things that you that you saw that resonate as common pitfalls that can happen during executive business reviews we'll touch on them real quick and then we'll dive into the content all right and I don't know about you guys but I've definitely felt like that CSM in the room that's getting the blank stare playing on the phones so that's why we're here today to give you some tips and trip tricks to prevent that situation from happening all right are we bringing up the slide oh screen okay so the number one actually not knowing what should be included in an EB our agenda that's a good one what would you guys say about that one yeah absolutely spot on yeah and I know it's something I think it's really important is getting that agenda out in advance like a good few days so the executives know what to come in and think about it's good not knowing what your customer actually cares about yeah and not speaking their language that's a good one confirming proper audience and not getting the executive sponsor in the meeting those are all things that we're gonna talk about today that's great all right so Laura let's kick it off yeah I think for a lot of us when we think about the executive Business Review we think about the event itself the meeting when in fact really the executive Business Review is a process with three core components and each of those components is equally important it's the preparation it's the delivery the meeting itself and what comes out of that meeting with with the execution of all of the deliverables that you've discussed in your meeting it's it's easy to think of it it's just the meeting but those three core components that each deserve equal time arguably those bookends could even use more time than the meeting itself we'll get into more detail on that in a bit but really want to emphasize today that if you're thinking strategically about how you're gonna most closely partner with your clients you should really think about the executive business review as a process with three core components that's great all right so let's dive into three tips for a better ABR Chris you want to take us through number one yeah absolutely so one of the key lessons learned and one of the approaches that we like to take a glass door within our CSM team is to begin with the end in mind and we use an approach based on Franklin Covey I wonder how many folks in the room have actually used the Franklin Covey methodology show of hands real quick yeah a bunch of people so for those who are not familiar with that approach it's basically methodology for improving your personal productivity your effectiveness and one of the the quotes from Stephen Covey that really resonates with me and our team is that know where you're going so that you better understand where you are now so there every step you take along the ways in the right direction and for us at Glassdoor that really begins with a reflection on what are the concrete outcomes that you're seeking to achieve from the executive Business Review and unless you have clarity on those outcomes it's going to be very difficult to achieve success from that meeting at Glassdoor we orient that conversation very much around what we call client success criteria so you heard from Nick earlier this morning that the way that CSM's are being measured is shifting away from generic metrics of performance towards measures that's specifically aligned with the client gender and up on the the slide here you can see the way in which we approach setting the stage with our clients at Glassdoor the way that you should think about success criteria is that these should be a concrete statement of how you will deliver value to the client and in that regard these should be goals which are specific they should be measurable they should be attainable they should be relevant to your client and they should be timely that's great Laura how about you what do you think on this topic yeah when we're thinking about the preparation that it takes you can see here talking about the outcomes thinking about the outcomes in advance of the meeting it's it seems sort of funny to put this slide at this point right but really thinking about already thinking about that next meeting and there is no better time to start thinking about that that when you have the time and the attention of your key stakeholders and you're talking about those objectives and specifically how you're gonna measure those to have that accountability and buy-in that we're getting together again next month next quarter we're setting the date now we're anchoring that conversation so that it's already an expectation with your client that this is something we're doing this is an ongoing partnership we have your promise for engagement and you've established a true partnership for success that's great all right number two yeah lesson number two is that sometimes less is more and I've sat in a bunch of meetings with with CSM's where the client has specifically asked for data I need the data show me the data of data data data and the temptation I think is sometimes to give the client more data than they actually need because data is not the same as insight and when a client asks for data I think what they're actually asking for is inside so one of the key questions to reflect on here as a CSM is what is your client executive or the executives in the room really care about and what are the key messages or the key takeaways that you would want to communicate to this client in the limited number of minutes that you're going to have with them the more time that your CSM team invests in producing endless charts and analyses which are nice but don't necessarily tire to those core underlying messages and the insights that you want to deliver the more time your detracting from actually influencing the way the client thinks about your relationship with them one of the key aspects of being able to communicate those messages effectively is a concept that I first learned as a management consultant and these concepts are referred to horizontal logic and vertical logic and I'll touch on those in a moment but first to this question about what our executives really care about as an executive myself and Laura's an executive some of the things that come to mind for us are the following firstly how does the performance that we are talking about actually compared to what we set out to do like is is the level of attainment aligned with the success criteria that we have laid out for our partnership in working with this organization secondly how does this compare to what we did last time so executives are often interested in the trend in performance over time linked to that I think executives are very interested to understand how they compare to other organizations and to the extent that you can provide insight around competitor benchmarking that is always going to be an interesting and compelling conversation for an executive and then lastly any executive is going to not only want to understand current performance but the reasons for that under that performance particularly where there's an issue of under performance so if we are performed or underperformed what are the key drivers of that result and what are the implications what should I know about that so that I can take away and take action thanks Chris Laura let's hear your peers your viewpoint on this item absolutely so it's it's critically important that when we do and we're starting the plan our executive business review that we've thought for ourselves what is what is my point of view when I go into this meeting what am I going to do to move things forward with my client what's gonna be most beneficial to them but also what's frankly you know what's gonna be important to my company too how do we create some mutually beneficial goals and objectives that we can become a line to I might even need to challenge the client when I'm thinking about that but we're gonna have to be able to get the client's attention to understand what is meaningful and impactful to them and when you do propose your strategy why should they care about it and encourage you to ask yourselves and your teams these questions as you go into preparation and maybe even do some mock EB RS with one another so that you can hash out like have I really answered the question this is really going to be meaningful to them or am I just chucking out the data and hoping that they grab onto it and so understanding you know what is the benefit and as we've talked a time and again about do we have the smart objectives around it to ensure that we have a clear crisp understanding before we even get to the doorstep about how we're gonna get there and deliver upon those goals so when you are building that strategy it's critical that you're engaging the client and building it so you're coming in with your point of view well you've already established this with key core components that you're bringing forward and then in collaboration with your client you're building that strategy to help get their buy-in to what it is that you're working on together that you have their full buy-in and their partnership and mutual accountability to making sure it comes true so we're doing this by looking at the data looking at the benchmarking calculating the potential ROI understanding any risks associated with what you are proposing sometimes you might have phenomenal alignment with your client in terms of what the point of view and the strategy is that you're proposing alternatively it might be some moments that you're going to challenge the client's perspective and helps them reframe the way in which they think about their very own business but remembering that as a loyalist servant to them that you have visibility to Lowe's the way ways in which other organizations are doing this and so you have the visibility that they really long for and you have you can be that trusted adviser to them when you come on site and partner with them with your point of view to develop that strategy yell are I really like the piece of tell me how we might do that not just tell me I need to do something but give me some concrete net next steps to actually take action awesome all right so I think we're all really excited to hear more about horizontal and vertical logic Chris so explain to us a little bit more about what it is and we'll share an example horizontal and vertical logic is obviously incredibly exciting so I can see well delay I mean this slide waiting with anticipation for this particular slide and one of the things that Nick asked Laura and I to do in today's presentation was try to come up with some really practical suggestions for you around how to increase the effectiveness of your ABR's and I think this is one really practical thing that that everyone can can reflect on so horizontal logic is basically the concept that the flow of content in your document should follow a logical progression and basically form a coherent narrative and this is a concept that is very prominent for any professional services company for any management consulting company vertical logic is the idea that within a specific page in your document the material that you're presenting should align to basically the message that you want to deliver and if you worked for McKinsey & Company or Boston Consulting Group or Bain you would always be told that you should only seek to deliver one message per page and I think that that is a really simple and powerful reminder that as human beings we can only process a certain amount of data so if you show me a chart or a table and you're trying to draw out four or five different kind of messages the chances are and that that's not really going to to connect and I'm not going to retain that information so sometimes again less is more so let's work through a quick example of what horizontal logic could look like Glassdoor is a recruiting company and so I wanted to share with you and example of a document that we might share with one of our clients and so this slide begins over the last year the number of applicants for your jobs on Glassdoor has been increasing the average cost per application is well below other benchmarks but we're only sponsoring 30% of your jobs today so we believe that there's an opportunity to expand the coverage of your roles with Glassdoor and reduce your hiring costs so this is an example of a narrative where we're communicating a specific story to the client we're supporting expansion with this particular account and the the progression of the content in the flow it's logical it's intuitive we're trying to only deliver a single message per page and this is the the core of what I was referring to in terms of horizontal and vertical logic yeah I love that I know we actually did a training session at gain site on like storytelling it was a very similar concept so it definitely resonates all right number three no substitute for preparation yeah one of my favorite quotes from Muhammad Ali is that the fight is won or lost far away from witnesses behind the lines in the gym and out there on the road long before I danced under those lights and basically what I think Ali is getting at is that there's there's no substitute for hard work or preparation and this is something that's directly within your control so you should never walk into an EBR and be unprepared for that conversation and if you do you really only have yourself to blame and I think to a degree the success of the EBR is the product of what has happened over the prior six months and the prior 12 months you shouldn't as a CSM expect to arrive and achieve success in that moment unless you've invested the hard work in that relationship and creating value for the client over that prior period of time so part of what we we look to do at Glassdoor is ensure that we're preparing for those conversation in the right way that we've got very clear alignment on goals within our team and with the client that we are allocating responsibilities within our team very effectively that we're reaching out to the right business sponsors in those client organizations to ensure that you know you don't end up in the situation that Laura and I role played earlier whether decision maker is not in the room and putting yourself in the shoes of the client to consider what kind of the Franklin Covey methodology would describe as yellow lights like what are the potential concerns what are the likely questions that they're going to have related to the content that you're presenting to them the more that you can anticipate those the better prepared you will be for the conversation lastly one other thing that we like to do at Glassdoor is try to understand the sentiment of the customer before you get into the room so the customer is feeling good that's great because you know that you can orient your narrative more around the opportunities if your customer is not feeling good then it should be a different conversation like don't walk into the EBR expecting that this is going to be a conversation about growth opportunity if they're not feeling good and so one way that we try to assess that before walking into the room is by implementing NPS surveys with our clients every quarter so once a quarter on the client calendar our clients will receive a simple NPS survey that basically asked them to assess the the nature of their experience with glass door and we timed that survey in a way that helps us to have a read on sentiment before the CSM steps into the room that's great all right think you have some good tactical items to share with us as well yeah absolutely as we've shared Nick it asked us to give all of you some takeaways and so hopefully this is helpful to you I'm particularly around gainsight and looking at your CE 360 and understanding someone so many of the dynamics of the client it could be easy to have a super-busy week and not do the proper preparation for your meeting and fully understanding your clients profile so we encourage you to look at their current what does their current contract look like you know our organization concur came into existence in the early 90s we do have clients who have some sweetheart pricing and so when that conversation comes up it's important to know that it's important to know the discount levels it's important to know what were the terms of the agreement are there is there a parent company coming into the picture for your account understand the utilization and adoption metrics have there been any changes in the organization's that would suggest some key players have changed and there's a need for new training to increase utilization understanding when the contracts coming up for renewal and what shifts and may be taking place in their organization that would affect the status of your contract what sort of CTA s are open and this one can be a bit tricky for my experience in our organization our customer engagement executives are really the relationship advisors with the account they're not technical support and some of you might relate to this and so much as your client might ask things of you that truly are not to their benefit north's clearly to yours but you find yourselves in a reactive situation so critically important that as you do this engage in this manner that you keep it a business conversation but I gave to give them the opportunity to get with the right resources to address any concerns they might have but help them understand that you are their partner in business and that will help you have carve out more time for yourself to be proud better prepared for these meetings and conduct the kind of executive business reviews that your leadership really wants you to conduct close not one opportunities where has your organization historically engaged with this client and opportunities to help them with their what they have from you with their services potentially services that would really help them improve their business today well how did they get missed how did the evaluate evaluation go are the same and individuals would be key stakeholders are they still in place is this a good time to reopen that conversation or as Chris said is it not is it probably best to leave that acknowledge it and make it as a personal goal for yourself I would like to shore up what our gaps in our relationship are right now so that I know in three or six months I can come back and re-engage in this conversation around my clothes not one opportunities and certainly understanding that leveraging everything from LinkedIn to the industry news PR to fully understand what's going on in your clients industry what kind of trends are important to them for example for my team we have a solid chunk of oil and gas clients in Texas they've certainly seen a downturn in recent years but to them operational efficiency is top of mind we also have clients out here in Silicon Valley a totally different conversation there are a lot of them are in a fast growth trajectory and are their willingness to spend and invest bill they're more they do it in a different way because it has a different impact to them so understanding what's going to be meaningful to your client and what's going to help them become successful is key and as you're going through your 360 checklist you want to be sure that you've identified those things and ultimately as we witnessed today under sneaking sure that you have the right attendees and them in the room and do not hesitate to reschedule if you can't get those attendees I recently had a nice through the heart when I had a conversation with a CFO who said if I was engaged sooner we'd be keeping this service I I came to this you know to the scene that a little too late when it fallen out and there was really a huge bummer so when you can keep the services top of mind and we'll get to that in a moment to how do we keep in line with our c-suite to ensure that those connections are once they're established that they're maintained but that you have the right people in the room that are going to be able to influence and impact your relationship and who do you're not single-threaded that you do have the appropriate context to ensure that the relationship is healthy and continues to move forward that's great hopefully these are some good examples that you can all walk away with and start thinking about as you begin to prepare for your own EB RS all right so I think this is the big one and we wanted to make sure we definitely touched on this one today how do you actually make sure that you get the e to the e BR what do you think Laura so you know it's a funny thing so often you know when a contract goes through the key stakeholders and executives are very often involved right how if I show of hands how easy is it for you to engage a sales executive in that crossover conversation to ensure you get the download of all the sales information who has a great easy time with that all right I understand so it is critical especially if you live in an organization where sales has suffered from the client a sales organization critically important to make those relationships with the sales executives in your organization to understand and looking who is a contract signer if you if you're you and your teams don't do it today I encourage you to go through every contract get that signature and mark is a key contact and gain site that's critically important that you know who signed that contract are they still with the organization if not who is their successor and who are the influencers in their organizational chart be it just political or actual who's gonna help make those decisions and influence whether or not you get a renewal and as it relates to the sales individual once you have a new client come over the door you have to be besties with that sales executive and help them understand that now I understand that you kind of love them and leave them kind of person but the thing is is that I'm gonna treat this client really well and once we do you're gonna have a referral and you're gonna get more deals because I'm gonna help you maintain these great contacts at the account and so the having maintaining those relationships at the executive level is critical and the first step to that is at the point of sale ensuring that you grab on and get a hold of the regional sales executive so that you ensure that relationship has continuity beyond that we encourage you what we do at concur is we have newbie nurture campaigns so our marketing team works with us and it's automatically loaded so that executives get like ongoing support from us and I understand what it is what's the ROI and working with us you can do that if depending upon the size of your organization you can do it at a more grassroots level additionally it might make sense for you to sort of make a match for an executive within your organization if I'm one of Chris's team members I might have Chris be assigned to a certain executive at another organization or even other folks a CMO or whomever at Glassdoor to make sure that there's alignment there and make it in such a way that it's personal to that person right so from from my perspective I might link mark Nelson our CTO to a CTO at another organization to make sure that their their personas that they're on the same page and things that are top of mind for them will come through and collaboration and that we are continually articulating the value of our solution to that client that it's that they understand on a regular basis that they're getting the industry back benchmarks and not just data but insights that'll help them improve their business and help them reach their specific and unique goals and that will be different for a CMO and a CTO and a CEO and a CEO oh and a CCO it's gonna be different to each and every one of them and doing that preparation and homework is critical yeah I particularly like the executive outreach program and having that program governance I've personally found that if we have executives linked up with their executives and there's a regular cadence call happening it's much more likely that we're gonna have those executives present present at the EBR so yeah that's a good anything you'd add Chris I think the only thing I would add is that I would encourage you to think about building relationships with these executives over time like if you treat this as a transactional situation then that is only going to minimize the likelihood that the executive attends in order to to have that executive take time out of their day prioritize that event over many other events there needs to be a compelling agenda there needs to be an existing relationship like if I'm asked to attend a meeting chances are that the first questions I'm going to ask is okay what's the agenda and who's attending like can someone else attend on my behalf and if those things don't align to what my priorities are then chances are I'm not going to attend that meeting yeah that makes a lot of sense okay so Laura and Chris we've aligned on objectives we brought some powerful insights and we've done a whole lot of planning and we've had a really good successful EBR so then what happens so then it's time to execute right taking our greed upon action items from the the meeting the second step in the process of an EVR and understanding that we've discussed and set our goals we've documented those goals we already have our calendar date with the attendees for our next visit right and we've also identified how our we're on the same page in terms of how are we going to measure these goals we've talked that through so we have a specific mutually agreed-upon action plan and we have a way to measure our results to ensure that that by the next time we get together we will know that this is what success looks like and if in the course of that meeting you know we have our pre meeting to understand what the POV is the point of you are driving to develop our strategy if I by virtue of our conversation with our account if things have shifted we can be agile and so in that meeting we can adjust and pivot if we need to but by the time that the event is the the second part of this wraps up when we go to execute we should be on the same page and be using the same yardstick to understand what success looks like yeah all right so measure progress and value deliver it I don't know who this CSM is on this sheet but she seems to really have it together with a concrete action plan in all seriousness this is one example going back to what we shared of really giving you guys some some tactical takeaways I think really not just having a verbal plan but really having an could creep plan in place with key next steps and to measure that at mark progress and demonstrate the value delivered as you go and use those EB R's as kind of a milestone to report back out on them really makes it kind of a journey where you're constantly you know continuing to drive full value realization for your customer and this is just one example of how we do it in gain site via success plans to really mark out what are the key overarching objectives and what are the very specific tasks underneath of them that we need to do and it could be across you know across very various different players cross functionally but how are we going to come together and ultimately commit on what we just aligned with and get that across the finish line so that's great and when we do that we can have a pretty fun powerful impact right and so let's hear a pretty cool success story yes so this morning we heard Nick talk about you know his parents want him to do something important with his life and why can't parents kind of wanted the same thing you know and actually when I was younger I spent time in India and the beautiful opportunity of meeting Mother Teresa and I thought I was gonna go out and save the world and and I did a volunteer time on the south side of Chicago after college and altruism is it's just a deep part of who I am and trying to give back so here I find myself in corporate America in some days on the one hand you tell yourself well I concur we're doing a lot but maybe we're not saving the world so maybe I shouldn't lose too much sleep I think we're having a rough day but but truly I just had the honor of being on an Executive Business Review at our clients Seattle World Vision and to sit there and talk to them about making goals and objectives around what they're doing having their key stakeholders in the room and understanding the way in which we drive operational efficiency and help making the lives of their individuals out in the field that are providing clean water giving educational opportunities to children who would not they would not have them the more money we can save them and the more efficiency we can give them we are in fact doing something to make the world better so I encourage you to think about that in your business sometimes it might not seem abundantly apparent about the way in which you're making rise lives run smoother and making people's lives better but I guarantee you each and every one of you is encourage you to think about that cuz it's really a meaningful part of your work when you can help yourself see that I'm in it when we can do a really successful executive Business Review it makes all the difference brings it back to purpose right absolutely awesome all right so let's open up for Q&A we have a few minutes left and then we'll tie it all back together with a great takeaway slide for you so open up slide Oh pop them in if you haven't yet and we'll go from top to bottom all right number one do you use standard templates for business review and have and have templates loaded in games site I'll let you start and then I can elaborate on the gainsight piece I'm happy to take this one I think there are some trade-offs here around using standard templates versus creating bespoke documents every single time and what we would do at Glassdoor is we create a structure we do have a standard template but then we provide CSM's with the freedom to augment that template with bespoke analysis that really speaks to the particular concerns of each individual client I just sat in a session with BCG who shared that standardized workflows standardized processes templates are associated with more consistent outcomes data retention outcomes better growth outcomes so I think that the answer is not to try and invent the wheel every single meeting walk into with a client but at the same time I think you need to afford some flexibility to really afford your CSM to speak to the specific nature of the client agenda and their success criteria yeah I would definitely agree I think it's good to have a common framework or methodology that you're using and a skeleton but if you are truly aligning to those outcomes and speaking their language sometimes that may be different from customer to customer but you're still using the same foundation to get there I also think segmentation will come into play in this too you know if you're very high touch it may have a little bit more customization than if you're managing a long tail of customers totally true alright number two it seems like quarterly business reviews can be too frequent how often do you recommend conducting an EB are larger you want to take this one certainly oh it really does depend on the client the size the investment level for your organization and what really makes sense it does make sense to have a recommended framework within your organization for the kind of the level of touch for any client we have clients for whom that is absolutely expected that we would conduct an executive Business Review quarterly alternatively we have clients that want to meet with us once a year and we have great relationships on both sides but it really depends on you the client the investment level absolutely all right next a part of our EB ours included product roadmap conversations this is a good question should this be kept as a separate meeting Chris what do you think yeah it's a tricky question and I think my answer would be it depends I think it depends on the nature of the client and their specific concerns my initial inclination would be to say that if your EBR is like a one-hour meeting then it's going to be difficult to speak to the product roadmap in a detailed way and talk to everything else that you want to speak to that client about as it relates to their success criteria and demonstrating the value of your products and services with that client but without kind of specifically knowing those client relationships it's hard for me to say what do you think Laura I absolutely agree the it really depends on the life cycle where your client is sitting I think that has a big part you know some of them clients that are newer or maybe not as familiar with your organization they might appreciate it but more than anything when you're preparing for the executive Business Review and have a pre call to review the set agenda and stakeholders and make sure that we're all on the same page this could be a question I want to confirm with you we have presently the product roadmap on our agenda for this meeting what does it make sense to continue to have that conversation when we have the right players in the room to have that conversation and then take it from there yeah I like checking for alignment like get their thoughts one thing that we've also done I don't know if you've ever done it but if you feel like the product roadmap needs to take like the place within that conversation we've even broken it into two parts letting the executives know maybe they stay for the first 45 minutes or hour where we're talking more strategic items and then depending on the other personas that may be participating use the second half of that to get a little bit more tactical go deeper and product things like that and that's been that's worked and been effective for us as well okay this is a fun one how do you tell a client they are performing worse than their competition yeah I guess this is really a data visualization exercise in general I would say an executive wants to know that they're performing worse than they're competitive if that's the case and that's actually a meaningful insight like to the extent that you are not delivering that insight in your your to kind of conceal that information then I think you're we're not necessarily delivering the value that you could be delivering to the executive so then I think it's a question of how do you position that data how do you present it and what benchmarks are you showing and perhaps it's a combination of showing how that organization has tracked over time and hopefully they're showing certain levels of improvement on a number of factors but also highlighting that there's further room for improvement like the way that you it's easy to choose a benchmark that is both like better than or worse than like any organization so how you present that data to actually deliver insights to the client is is very critical so I would just think about other ways that you can present perhaps on multitude of different benchmarks or data points to share I guess progress as well as opportunity yeah on the messaging and potentially even sharing how they were able to get there like the storytelling piece of tail on that one of the things that I've done with clients is if they're in a challenging state and not quite on and we'd like to see them in comparison to their competition is to set a goal is you know I'd really like to see you as a future guest next year at our client event for us at fusion it's an annual client event I'd love to have you come up on stage and talk about how right now we were here and next year at this time this is where we're going to be and by the way you get a free pass you know if you've come and your team can come and you know it's it sets a goal for them so then they can start to visualize what that looks like in their engagement level and their accountability it cranks out yeah you put the positive spin on it right like it awesome well I think we're out of time for questions unfortunately but we did want to leave one key learnings and takeaways slide for you so in summary the executive Business Review is truly a process we really can't think of it as a one-time event you need to plan for your success you need to deliver with a very clear point of view and a strategy to actually make that happen and last but not least make sure that there's you need to execute and have a really concrete plan on what those clear objectives and next steps look like so we hope your next EBR you'll walk out feeling like this all right thank you all for your time today I Spit on

Channel: Gainsight

Views: 28,999

Keywords: business presentation

Id: LWbvzj0-KPs

Length: 44min 49sec (2689 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 19 2018