In my last post, I compared the football huddle to your sales forecast call and explained how success is really all about showing up prepared, understanding the signals, assessing your coverage, and calling your number with confidence. This week, as I sat down to write about another important sales moment, the Quarterly Business Review (QBR), the football analogy kept coming back!
Let's start with the concept of "instant replay." In football, teams, referees, and spectators have the advantage of getting a second look at questionable plays. In fact, they can watch them over and over again in the moment from various angles. The immediate objective, of course, is to make sure that officials made the right call. In a way, that's the goal of your QBR too—or at least it's one of the key objectives. But for those of us in sales, the review process is more complex than that.
Sure, you want to revisit last quarter's calls to see what you got right and what you may have missed. But you also want to look at what's happening right now in real time and get a window into the future, too. For that, you're going to need more than instant replay. That's where Clari comes in.
There are important events every week, month, and especially every quarter that shape how you execute sales. These events or moments include 1:1s, forecast calls, and more, and collectively they comprise what we at Clari refer to as the sales operating rhythm. At every interval, there are key questions you need to be able to answer quickly to drive your opportunity-to-close (OTC) process and predictably achieve your goals. Your QBR is one of those key moments—and Clari can help you ace it.
Are You Missing Your Moment?
The QBR is your moment to reconnect with your team and assess what worked last quarter, what didn't, and what's next. But you may be missing your moment if you're relying on a stale slide deck to drive your QBR conversation.
If you spend the days and hours leading up to your quarterly meeting cutting and pasting static spreadsheets into a presentation, you're wasting precious time. And you're probably not getting an accurate read of what really went down last quarter and how things are shaping up this quarter. There's a more efficient, accurate, and easier way to prep for and run your QBR. Think of it as having access to your own instant replay—only better.
Get Full Visibility into Forecast Accuracy, Deal Progression, and More
When you run your QBR from Clari, you get at-a-glance answers to your most important questions, like "How much of last quarter's commit did we really close and why?" or, "Do we have enough pipeline coverage to be able to hit the number?" These are the kind of answers you need to set your team up for success in the coming quarter.
And because Clari automatically tracks activity—including emails, meetings, and files exchanged between reps and prospects—you don't have to chase down reps to find out what's what. It's all there, accessible in real time so you can also get tactical and identify the risky deals and also the ones you might be able to pull in to make the number. You can even see an AI-driven opportunity score for each deal indicating the overall health of the deal and the likelihood of a successful outcome. That's the kind of insight a pro quarterback would kill for. And it's the kind of data you need to create predictable wins quarter after quarter.