Most QBRs (quarterly business reviews) are either a parade of boring slides or a blame game session.
But a good quarterly business review does the opposite; it gives you clarity, alignment, and a 90-day plan everyone actually believes in.
This guide shows you the format, the template, and the structure to make that happen.
A QBR only works when your team has enough insights to talk honestly about what happened last quarter and what needs to change next. Before you start pulling charts or building a deck, it helps to understand what a quarterly business review actually is and whether your business has the foundation to make the meeting productive.
A QBR basically gets everyone in the same room (or virtual room) to look at last quarter’s performance, understand the “why” behind it, and agree on what to do in the next 90 days. When done well, it keeps every team working from the same story instead of five different versions.
QBRs tend to fall into two categories, depending on who the audience is:
These reviews focus on your own GTM teams. The goal is to understand how the funnel performed, where momentum slowed down, and what needs attention next quarter. Internal QBRs are more diagnostic than polished. They exist to help teams make decisions, not to impress anyone.
These are designed for customers and usually highlight value delivered, wins, product adoption, and what’s coming next. They’re more presentation-forward, but the underlying structure is the same: show what happened, why it matters, and what’s planned next.
You don’t need perfect data or systems to run a quarterly business review. You just need enough structure to make the conversation meaningful.
The biggest signals come down to visibility (do we actually know what’s happening?) and activation (can we turn data into choices?).
To check readiness quickly, ask:
• Do we know for certain what’s preventing growth?
• Does our data actually confirm that?
There are three areas that matter most:
You’re in good shape if your product, ICP, and quarterly goals are defined enough to review meaningfully. If the business is still shifting direction every week, a QBR won’t tell you much because there’s no stable baseline to measure against.
This comes down to whether your teams follow consistent processes. If sales updates the CRM, marketing tracks lead sources, and CS has a clear workflow for onboarding and renewals, you have enough operational consistency to talk about what happened and why.
You need:
You don’t need perfect dashboards or attribution. You simply need enough good data to avoid guessing.
A strong quarterly business review template makes the quarter make sense. It's a discussion of what happened last quarter, why it happened, and what needs to happen next.
The first question in any QBR is the simplest one: Did we hit our revenue goal?
Starting here gives the team a shared reality before anyone gets into funnel stages or attribution arguments.
A good QBR opens with:
Once everyone knows where the quarter landed, you can walk them through why it happened. This is where your data model becomes important. It helps you show the quarter from start to finish instead of only looking at one part of the funnel.
A simple model is enough, as long as it follows the whole revenue journey. This is why we use the Revenue Performance Model (RPM) behind the scenes.
It connects the dots across objects: sessions → leads → MQLs → SQLs → deals → revenue → renewals.
At a minimum, your model should show:
After you explain what happened last quarter, you need to talk about the next one. This is where the Revenue Goal Matrix becomes important.
It uses real data to show what it will take to hit your next target.
You enter things like:
And it gives you:
This is where the QBR stops being a review and becomes a plan for the next 90 days.
A good quarterly business review format doesn’t start the week before the meeting. It follows a simple 30-day rhythm that keeps you organized and avoids last-minute scrambles.
The real work begins about a month before the quarter ends.
The big steps are simple:
Once the meeting is on the calendar, your next job is to map out what actually happened during the quarter.
It’s just a clean recap of:
A simple month-by-month view works well. It helps people remember what happened early in the quarter so the conversation doesn’t get stuck on whatever happened last week.
A big part of your quarterly business review format is the dashboard you rely on. And one CRM dashboard beats digging through 20 reports every time.
A good QBR dashboard includes the core reports you’ll use quarter after quarter:
A shared dashboard makes the review smoother because everyone is looking at the same numbers, the same way, at the same time.
A quarterly business review sample doesn’t need to be complicated, it just needs to show the quarter clearly enough that anyone in the room can understand what happened without being a data expert.
Most teams overthink this part. You don’t need a giant spreadsheet or a dozen tabs. You just need a clean table that shows the journey from the top of the funnel to revenue.
A typical table includes the basics, but labeled in a way your team can repeat quarter after quarter. We use a simplified version of the RPM primary metrics:
And the conversion rates between them (CR0–CR4).
This keeps your QBR consistent and makes quarter-over-quarter comparisons way easier.
This lets you compare:
Once the table is filled in, the next step is one of the most helpful tools in the whole QBR: color coding.
Red, yellow, and green immediately show where to look:
This keeps the room focused on the areas that matter instead of getting distracted by numbers that don’t tell you anything useful.
Once you know what happened at the top of the table, you need to figure out why it happened. This means breaking down the big numbers into smaller pieces that reveal the real story.
Teams usually look at the data from a few angles. Inside the RPM, these are called secondary KPIs, the partitions that explain why the primary metrics moved.
Those breakouts include things like:
• product or service
• lead source
• segment or ICP
• new business vs renewals vs expansion
As an example, a drop in conversion rate means nothing on its own. But a drop in conversion rate because a new product has a lower deal size, or a new rep is ramping, or a channel underperformed, is something the team can act on.
Every red or yellow cell has a reason behind it, and this part of the QBR is where you uncover those reasons.
One of the main goals of your QBR is making sure the room hears one clear story instead of a bunch of opinions.
People naturally jump to conclusions when they see a chart without context. They grab onto the first red number they notice, or they interpret something based on their own role instead of the whole picture.
Your job is to make sure the story is told out loud, not left for people to guess.
That means explaining:
The Pyramid Principle is really just a simple storytelling order: start with the main point, then share the reasons, then show the proof.
It works perfectly for a QBR because it keeps everyone focused on the “so what”.
The structure looks like this:
Most BBR decks fall apart because they treat slides like labeled buckets (“Pipeline,” “Marketing,” “Sales”) instead of telling people what the slide actually means.
A better approach is simple:
When every slide has a point, a small amount of data, and a clear takeaway, the whole deck becomes easier to follow, even for someone seeing the numbers for the first time.
A QBR only runs smoothly when the agenda is clear, predictable, and easy for everyone to follow.
You don’t need half the company in the room. You just need the groups who actually touch the revenue engine and can speak to what happened last quarter.
In most companies, that’s:
Depending on your size, you might also invite:
The rule is this: If the team affects revenue, they should be there. If they don’t, they shouldn’t.
A QBR shouldn’t feel like a brand-new meeting every quarter.
A simple, reusable quarterly business review agenda looks like this:
You can have great data and a solid agenda, but if the conversation goes sideways, the whole meeting loses its value.
Running a QBR well means keeping people engaged, keeping the discussion focused, and making sure the meeting leads to real decisions
A good QBR should feel like a conversation.
A simple way to manage this is to set “question checkpoints.” You move through the story in clear sections, then pause briefly to let people jump in.
Those pauses usually work best:
This gives people space to ask questions without interrupting every slide.
It also helps you stop derailments. If someone goes deep into a side topic, you can redirect easily. This keeps the room engaged and keeps the meeting on track.
There will always be moments where someone challenges the numbers or calls out an underperforming area.
This is where your data model helps. When performance is off-track, you can point to:
The data model helps the room stay focused on what happened instead of who is at fault.
A QBR only matters if something changes afterward. The best way to make that happen is to capture decisions in real time, not after the meeting.
Every decision gets a simple, repeatable structure:
When decisions, owners, and deadlines are captured live, the next quarter starts with clarity..
The whole point of reviewing the quarter is to decide what needs to happen in the next one.
This is where you take the insights from the meeting and turn them into a clear, realistic plan your teams can actually execute over the next 90 days.
Once you finish the deep dive and the discussion, your job is to turn those ideas into specific initiatives.
A simple way to do that is to tie each initiative to:
For example, instead of “we should improve handoffs,” you create something like: “Fix MQL → SQL handoff by updating the playbook and refreshing the workflow.”
A clean month-by-month view often looks like this:
You can also map out:
And if you’re a recurring-revenue business, make sure the plan includes at least one initiative tied to Net Revenue Retention, the metric the RPM centers on. Your 90-day plan shouldn’t stop at “close more,” it should also protect the revenue you already earned.
A QBR isn’t a one-and-done meeting. You need to close the loop so the decisions you made actually show up in the next quarter’s numbers.
That usually means:
A good QBR should make the quarter make sense. That’s why we offer a free GTM & customer journey analysis. In just 30 minutes, a Lead RevOps Strategist will walk through your business model, your data, what’s working, what’s not, and where the biggest opportunities are hiding. It’s the fastest way to get clarity and head into your next quarter with a plan you can actually trust.
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