Are your cybersecurity efforts paying off with clients? Can you justify the value you’re delivering? Not just in the number of “ticket resolutions,” but also in how well you’re reducing overall risk and aligning with their unique business goals.
A Quarterly Business Review (QBR) can demonstrate value through actionable metrics, helping your clients understand the full scope of your work and how you’re proactively securing their business with measurable ROI.
A QBR is also your opportunity to highlight wins in terms of KPIs, introduce new offerings, and most importantly, ensure customer retention. Let’s focus on what should be included in an effective QBR between MSPs and clients.
What Every MSP Quarterly Business Review Should Include
When you sign a contract with a client, it’s your responsibility as an MSP to uphold your side of the agreement and deliver services with the highest standards. You must demonstrate why you’re an asset to the client instead of a fixed cost. This can mean the difference between building long-term client relationships and being replaced by a competitor who better communicates their values and shared goals.
An effective Quarterly Business Review should consist of the following:
- Strategic Planning and Business Goals: Each client has their own unique challenges. Whether it’s implementing a new EDR tool to support a hybrid workforce and improve remote device posture, or restructuring their entire IT strategy under new leadership, your QBR should translate security outcomes to these specific business objectives.
- Benchmark success by reviewing goals defined in the previous quarter. For example, if you helped integrate the EDR solution, you might set a goal of how many endpoints were encrypted or the overall device health score of secured endpoints.
- Performance Metrics (KPIs): The most basic measures of success. Were you able to resolve tickets faster? Were you able to improve Client Satisfaction (CSAT) Score during the onboarding process for new technologies? How about response time for security incidents?
These is a handful of actionable KPIs that you can present during a QBR to demonstrate success. It’s hard to argue with numbers, and if you’re continually showing value, clients are far more likely to renew contracts, upgrade service plans, and see you as a long-term strategic partner. The Guardz platform includes a useful dashboard (right) highlighting security stats, improvements and areas for attention.
Service Level Agreement (SLA) Review
A lot can change within a quarter. Your client might have expanded headcount or shifted business direction, which could impact certain systems or service expectations. Your SLAs should reflect these priorities and key changes to ensure that support coverage and deliverables remain aligned with the level of service the client expects as their business grows or shifts direction.
Action Plans
The final step of a Quarterly Business Review is to plan ahead: review existing security measures, licences, and address any gaps from the previous quarter to redefine KPIs for the next QBR. This is where you can introduce new service offerings or upsell clients on complementary solutions that align with their business objectives. You’ll have the confidence because your recommendations are backed by real data, past performance, and projected outcomes that show clear ROI. You know, the things that matter most!
Reevaluate existing security stacks and suggest upgrading tools or infrastructure based on key findings. Set aside budget and resources for unexpected incident response, critical system failures or outages, cloud migration (if you provide that service), user onboarding for security solutions, or urgent compliance updates. Take the initiative to consider every possible outcome or scenario. Your clients will reward you with trust, loyalty, and long-term renewable contracts.
QBR best practices
Now that you’re prepared with the right content, there are several best practices to enhance the quality of the meetings:
- Come prepared: This might sound obvious, but if you’re not fully prepared to hear the client’s concerns, accept constructive feedback, review performance metrics, or provide strategic recommendations backed by data, the QBR can quickly become a missed opportunity or, worse, a negative experience for the client.
- Bring something different to the table: Are you telling your client things they already know, or are you going the extra mile for them? Did you take the time to prepare a competitive analysis deep dive or let them know of a breaking trend that MSPs are buzzing about across Reddit? It’s one thing to focus on continuous improvement and delivering expected value, but it’s another to surprise and delight your client with insights they didn’t think about.
- Be transparent: Don’t sugarcoat bad news. Transparency goes a long way. It shows accountability and a plan of action, which helps reinforce their confidence in your leadership and expertise.
- Follow up: It’s one thing to discuss KPIs and areas of improvement. It’s another to actually follow up with the meeting notes. Document every single detail. Send out an email to your client summarising the entire discussion the next day to show that you’re already on top of things.
Show Value with Guardz and Manage Protect
The Manage Protect team are always available to provide detailed product information, industry trends and relevant statistics to help with your QBRs.
Guardz helps MSPs convey cyber risk and exposure in terms of business impact. Their Security Business Review provides a summary of security activities, compares current and past data to track progress, and includes a behavioural analysis to identify user habits and potential vulnerabilities.
Interested in Guardz cybersecurity? Speak with us today.
Content originally published by Guardz.com
