# Quarterly Business Review Template (QBR Template) > A QBR template built as a short memo, not a slide deck: six sections, what goes in each, how to run the meeting, and how to prepare it in an hour. --- [Skip to main content](#main-content)Strategy # QBR Template: A Quarterly Business Review Customers Want to Attend A QBR template built as a short memo, not a slide deck: six sections, what goes in each, how to run the meeting, and how to prepare it in an hour. cl **ClosedLoop AI Team**Nov 9, 2026 · 5 min read [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fclosedloop.sh%2Fblog%2Fqbr-template)Copy link On this page - [What a quarterly business review is for](#what-a-quarterly-business-review-is-for) - [The quarterly business review template: six sections](#the-quarterly-business-review-template-six-sections) - [Slide-deck QBR vs memo QBR](#slide-deck-qbr-vs-memo-qbr) - [How to run the meeting](#how-to-run-the-meeting) - [Prepare a QBR in an hour, not a week](#prepare-a-qbr-in-an-hour-not-a-week) - [Where ClosedLoop AI fits](#where-closedloop-ai-fits) [Customer Conversations](https://closedloop.sh/tag/customer+conversations)[Customer Lifecycle](https://closedloop.sh/tag/customer+lifecycle)[CRM Data](https://closedloop.sh/tag/CRM+data)[Support Tickets](https://closedloop.sh/tag/support+tickets)Key takeaways - Most quarterly business reviews are vendor slide shows of usage charts, which is why customers send a deputy or cancel - A better QBR template is a short memo built around what the customer told you last quarter and what you did about it - Six sections cover it: their words, their outcomes, what changed on their side, what their team is saying, the roadmap that matters to them, and commitments on both sides - Send the memo before the meeting and spend the meeting on decisions, not on reading slides aloud The usual quarterly business review template, or QBR template, is a slide deck: logo, agenda, usage charts, a roadmap slide, a satisfaction score, "questions?". Customers have sat through dozens of them, which is why the executive you invited sends a deputy, and the deputy joins with the camera off. There is a better shape, and it comes from an unlikely place. In 2004, Jeff Bezos banned slide presentations from Amazon's senior leadership meetings. Teams wrote narrative memos of a few pages instead, and every meeting opened with everyone reading the memo in silence before anyone spoke. His reasoning was that bullet points let a presenter skip the hard thinking, while full sentences force it. A quarterly business review is exactly the kind of meeting that format was built for. It is supposed to be a decision meeting between two businesses. Most of the time it is a slide show. ## What a quarterly business review is for A **quarterly business review**(QBR) is a scheduled meeting between a vendor and a customer to look back at the last quarter, agree on what is working and decide what happens next. Done well, it answers three questions for the customer: - Did we get what we were promised? - Were we heard? - What happens next, and who owns it? Usage charts answer none of these directly. A customer's own words, and what you did about them, answer all three. ## The quarterly business review template: six sections Write it as a memo of two or three pages. Each section is a few short paragraphs or a short list, never a wall of charts. Section What goes in it The question it answers 1. What you told us Three to five things they asked for or complained about last quarter, quoted, with what happened to each Were we heard? 2. Your outcomes Progress against the goals they set when they bought, in their terms, not your feature list Did we get what we were promised? 3. What changed on your side New people, new goals, a reorg, a new system, a new budget cycle Do they understand our world? 4. What your team is saying Themes from their support tickets, calls and messages, with two or three quotes What is it like to use this every day? 5. What is coming that matters to you Only the roadmap items tied to their asks, with honest dates What should we plan around? 6. Commitments for next quarter Three things you will do, and three things you need from them, each with an owner Who owns what next? Section one does the most work. Opening with "last quarter you told us exports were slowing down your month-end close, and here is what we changed" tells the customer, in the first minute, that this meeting is about them. Section four does the second most. Executives rarely hear what their own team says about a tool day to day. Bringing it to them, in their team's words, makes you the person in the room with information nobody else has. ## Slide-deck QBR vs memo QBR The slide-deck QBR Opens with your logo and agenda Usage charts the customer cannot act on A roadmap slide with everything on it Ends with "any questions?" The memo QBR Opens with what they told you last quarter Their outcomes in their own terms Only the roadmap items that answer their asks Ends with commitments on both sides, each with an owner ## How to run the meeting - **Send the memo two days before.**Busy executives read on their own time and arrive with questions instead of politeness. - **Open with ten quiet minutes anyway.**Some people will not have read it. The Amazon habit of silent reading at the start puts everyone on the same page before anyone speaks. - **Spend the rest on sections five and six.**The look back is in the memo. The meeting is for decisions about the next quarter. - **Write the commitments down live**and send them within the hour, in the same format as your [call notes template](https://closedloop.sh/blog/call-notes-template). ## Prepare a QBR in an hour, not a week The memo format has one catch. Sections one and four need the customer's actual words from the whole quarter: every call, every support ticket, every Slack thread, every promise made by anyone on your team. Gathering that by hand is where QBR prep turns into a lost week, and it is why so many teams fall back on usage charts. Charts are easy to export. Listening is not. A quick way to start is to treat the QBR like a long version of [pre-call planning](https://closedloop.sh/blog/pre-call-planning): who will be there, what changed, what they said, what you promised, your one goal, and where the landmines are. The six sections above are the same questions with a full quarter behind them. ## Where ClosedLoop AI fits ClosedLoop AI already holds every call, ticket and CRM note for the account, so the hardest sections of the memo come pre-filled. A [pre-call brief](https://closedloop.sh/features/pre-call-brief)for the account gives you: - **Every open ask in the customer's own words,**quoted from the source, with what shipped since and what is still waiting. That is section one. - **The landmines,**whatever is blocked, stalled or sore, before the executive raises it. - **The wider pattern,**how many other customers share the same pain and what it is worth, which turns section five from a promise into a plan. You still write the memo. You stop spending a week finding what to put in it. [See the pre-call brief](https://closedloop.sh/features/pre-call-brief)or [book a demo](https://closedloop.sh/demo). ClosedLoop AI Team We build tools that turn customer conversations into product decisions. ClosedLoop AI analyzes feedback from 44 native integrations to surface the insights that matter. [More about ClosedLoop AI →](https://closedloop.sh/) ### Get insights like this in your inbox Product insights delivered weekly. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. 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