Alliance Management – Demise of the Quarterly Business Review (FINALLY)!
“What a great meeting, can’t wait until the next alliance QBR....”
Anybody who knows me, knows that I’m not a big fan (understatement) of the Quarterly Business Review (QBR) for Strategic Alliances. Seriously, what executive wants to wait 3 months for an update (and if needed, course-correction) on these mission-critical business relationships (remember many companies are expecting alliances to generate upwards of 40% of total revenue). No other core element of the business is run at this leisurely cadence!
Believe it or not, the pandemic can help. The restrictions on business travel and the corresponding switch to remote-only meetings may finally put an end to the traditional QBR. But before we discuss what comes next, let’s highlight the Top Four Reasons why the QBR needs to go:
1. Costs - Weeks before the QBR, a multi-person team stitches together spreadsheets, presentations and sticky-notes into a QBR deck and then goes through multiple review iterations all for a two-hour meeting. Add the travel and expense costs for the meeting itself to the team labor costs and a QBR is a VERY EXPENSIVE (but not particularly valuable) proposition.
2. Data Fidelity - The alliance team attempts to anticipate what the executives want to see (or what the alliance team doesn’t want them to see) but at best case, the disparate information available to the team is stale and at worst case, inaccurate.
3. Technology Limitations - Spreadsheets and presentations are by nature, one dimensional, so QBRs tend to go off the rails pretty quickly. Usually by Slide 2 of the QBR deck, an executive asks a follow-up question that requires data the team doesn’t have readily available. Waiting three months between updates to only get the “we’ll get back to you” answer frustrates everybody in the room.
4. Fact vs. Fiction - Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news, especially to Company and Alliance executives, and because of Reasons 1 – 3 and the three-month QBR cadence, a QBR is generally an exercise in “spin control”. Deals and opportunities get embellished, risks and issues get downplayed, and executives are assured that everything will be even better by the next QBR. Unfortunately, executives never get the facts in time to course-correct.
Honestly, when I share my QBR rant with most alliance professionals, I don’t get a lot of pushback…they’ve all experienced first-hand the ineffectiveness of the traditional QBR. But they ask; what’s the alternative to a QBR when we need to communicate with executives who are not involved in alliances on a day-to-day basis?
The answer is simple (ok, maybe not exactly simple but still, it’s the right answer) …move your alliances to a virtual ABR (Anytime Business Review). Why shouldn’t an Alliance or Company Executive be able to have a discussion about the health and status of an alliance literally “anytime” they want or need one!
Clearly, there are a couple of technology considerations to being able to host virtual ABRs:
Videoconferencing – good news is that the pandemic has solved that for you, not only has videoconferencing technology been proved reliable in industrial-strength applications, but your teams and executives are all comfortable using it.
Alliance Management Platform – You’ll need a purpose-built integrated digital solution with some very specific capabilities:
Must be a high-fidelity and trusted source for detailed alliance data – joint deals and opportunities, financials, etc.
Must have executive friendly visualizations – Dashboards, Balanced Scorecards, Heat Maps
Must have the ability to drill-down and drill-through to get to the lowest granularity of data
Must have ability to filter, sort and group data as well as perform ad-hoc analyses in order to answer executives’ questions in real time
For those of you who have an Alliance Management Platform, I encourage you to leverage the pandemic and start hosting virtual ABRs NOW…you and your executives will never go back to a traditional QBR.
If you don’t have an integrated digital solution, then use the pandemic as a means of acquiring one so you too can move to the virtual ABR and say goodbye to the ineffective, expensive and antiquated relic known as the QBR!
So, here’s what I hope you got from our Blog today:
A once-a-quarter business review doesn’t support the mission-critical nature of Strategic Alliances
QBRs are costly, ineffective and don’t provide executives accurate or timely visibility into the status and health of alliances
A virtual Anytime Business Review (ABR) should replace the QBR and the pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to move in that direction
Two foundational technologies are required for an ABR – Videoconferencing (ubiquitous due to pandemic) and an Alliance Management Platform
If you have an Alliance Management Platform, move to ABR NOW, if you don’t have one, get one and get on the ABR train STAT
For more details or questions please contact me at bobjones@collabtogrow.com or visit our website.