Nice. Look at all these people. Welcome everybody. Let's go get in the room and we'll get started.
All right. Welcome everyone to second growth. I'm Cassidy, one of the co-hosts. Carl's with me today.
Carl, how you doing? Doing great Cassidy. Thanks for inviting me. And we got our special Gassie here.
Ashley, Ashley, how are you doing? I'm good. I'm excited to crash this today. Yeah.
So I was going to ask you about what I'm going to ask Carl. What are you talking about today? QBR is the best and the brightest QBR. I'm excited to see what you bring on the table here.
I think we've seen a few QBRs that are less than ideal, you know, could use a little work. So I know you've shredded a few QBRs in your day. So pump to see what you bring to the table here, Cassidy. Well, thanks for that, Carl.
Yeah. So what we thought we would do is we obviously do a lot of quarterly business reviews for our clients and we see a lot of the work our clients do in their own company as well as I've had a lot of experiences in this mini refine labbers around this topic. And one of the things that we've observed is it's actually hard to find what we consider kind of best practices or rules of thumb of how to put these decks together and communicate those to leadership and we'll talk about what we need. So there's very different types of QBRs.
And so Ashley, while that introduced herself, has been kind of collecting those best practices and putting them into an asset within our product called the vault. But Ashley, why don't you explain a little bit more about like what you've been up to on this topic? Yeah, absolutely. So if I haven't met anyone on here, hi everyone, nice to meet you.
My name is Ashley Lewin. I am the senior director of content and CS over on the vault. And so like Cassidy mentioned, what we've been doing is we noticed that there's a huge opportunity with marketing QBRs, especially. There's a lot of opportunity for how we deliver them, how we get buy in through these resources, etc.
So we've been taking all the best pieces that we've been doing over on the lab side of the house, just some best practices in general. We've been packaging it up into a content piece that lives within our vault product. And so I'm really excited to talk about this. Like Cassidy mentioned, there's just so much room for opportunity to keep excelling and optimizing these pieces.
And one of the things I'd love to hear from all of you is obviously last few questions about your experiences creating these types of documents. But I'm going to guess a lot of you have had to do this yourself. And you've kind of perfected your own process through trial and error. So feel free to one ask those questions throughout this, because what we're going to outline is high level and you may need to figure out how to apply it to your certain situation, or share your own experiences and let the rest of this group learn from you as well.
Because we don't have a market cornered on this topic. We're just going to kind of share what we've learned. I'm sure there's a lot within this audience in terms of learning that others can benefit from as well. So with that, the way we're going to run this is Ashley's taking a few select slides out of our vault asset.
We're going to talk through those and have a dialogue. Sound good? All right, let's do it. Ashley, over to you.
All right, well, go ahead and share my screen quickly. Make sure I'm on the right page. We're not jumping ahead. All right, let's go.
So marketing, QBR best practices, I think first and foremost. Let's talk about what's currently wrong with marketing, QBR decks. You know, where are the areas of opportunities really kind of lies in these core pieces. Nailing a strong marketing QBR can be very tricky.
I think we all know this. I think this is why we're all here, right? And so when we evaluate QBRs, there's kind of a common theme that we see that we are identifying within these presentations. There's irrelevant metrics.
They lack a story. I think this is one of the biggest ones, is marketing QBRs are just a data dump. They lack a central story that we can all cling to and remember and solve for. Not paying attention to the deck details.
I think this is a big one too. And I think it really elevates a marketer as well as just the optics out of deck. Are you presenting a great executive summary? Are you having a clean design, et cetera?
Again, not reporting on the right metrics or stories as kind of goes to the first two, not speaking the same language as the audience. So typically these are either presented to the board or that you're executive team, your CEO, et cetera. So making sure that you are speaking the same language as this audience that you're representing too is just so critical. Not having going forward plans prepped for the call.
This is QBRs are truly a time that is you're coming together, you're identifying the health of the business, and you're trying to decide on how do we go forward with this, what would you recommend, how do we keep hitting these goals, or how do we get to those goals. And then also not being transparent on wins and losses. As much as we would all love to have wins in every single quarter, that's not the reality that we live in. And a lot of times you don't need to sugarcoat it.
Your audience already knows the details. So dancing around the transparency of you, the hidden number, you didn't hit the number and just being very transparent with that. Cassie, I know that you see a lot of issues when you go through decks too, I love hearing your feedback. Anything else I'm hearing that you feel like are serious that we typically see as those biggest problems before we dive into the details?
Yeah, I mean, the one universal thing I see in every QBR decker review is too much detail. For the audience. You'll hear time and time again, or maybe if you don't hear this, listen for it. If the audience is confused, or say, hey, can you just boil up the story for me at a higher level, or give me the summary points?
What they're basically saying to you is, you're in the weeds, and there's too much detail here. And I need to kind of just know the deal they are. The other is, I would say there's a lack of, there's not enough time spent on the story. And the story can sound very fluffy.
But really, the story for your quarterly business review started at the beginning of the quarter. And we'll kind of talk about that in terms of what you put in these decks as we go forward. I think there's a question about the 80, 20 rule. How much do you talk about the past versus how much you talk about going forward?
I think that depends on the situation that you're in in terms of who the audience is. The third thing I would say I see a lot of kind of tie these things together is maybe not an understanding of the importance of this type of deliverable on yourself in the entire marketing organization. So sometimes you think of this as a necessary evil, I just have to do this. I just want to get it done and check the box.
I'm just going to tie boxes and put in a minimal amount of time. But in many ways, like, you know, this is kind of a reference to your brand and your team's brand and kind of the position of marketing within your organization. So in some cases, I would argue, think about speaking to the board or speaking to an investor as one of the more important things you can do as a marketing leader is we want to make sure you're taking the time to do it right. And so too much data, too much detail, not spending time on it.
And not really thinking through what's the story first before you start putting the slides together. I know we'll go into the story on a deeper level, having a sorry about that. But I agree with this. I almost challenge like if you could summarize up what your performance was in the quarter and two cents or less, could you do it?
Or do you need all of the caveats of all of the reports, etc. I think that's very critical to challenge yourself on is if I had to summarize this in two cents or less, could I? And then everything will cascade down from there as well. Yeah, I wanted to we got a couple comments coming in and questions.
So why don't we just while we're at this hit a few of them, I want to hit all of this is, um, I agree with two in the weeds, MIT prep, QBRs, we're going to get scared about missing something important and they just stick it all in there. This is a really good point. I see this happened quite a bit. I'm going to get kind of the positive of this in my my sense.
And that is you as the presenter of the QBR or your team, it's imperative that you know all the facts. Like the last thing you want is to get a question in this meeting that you're not prepared for or don't have an answer to. However, that doesn't mean all the facts go into deck. Like you need to put in the deck, the only thing that you're the minimum you required to support the point you're trying to make.
So I get the team is scared and so forth and so on. They need to do the analysis. Everybody's prepared. I would just say the majority of that analysis is not going to go in the deck, but it will be used for your prep so you can speak with confidence in the meeting.
Yeah, I'm really glad you called that out. You have to have that understanding whether it's in a separate document. I think even forming your story, you go through a whole list of data, right? You need to look at multiple data points.
I think I usually look at 30 plus different reports and it's on the beautiful part about this is you're distilling that data and you're analyzing the analyzation is the most important part of this QBR to find out that story is that you're taking all that data. So like you mentioned, Cassie, I think that's a huge thing to highlight right there is you need to have it on hand or know it really, really well because being able to recall really fast and super important as well. So we have a quote unquote 12 step checklist to improving QBRs and so it's broken into like a planning phase and then a story and structure phase. So first of all, step one, do I know the audience for my QBR?
So who are you presenting to? We'll get into in a second what the different levels of a QBR is. There's different there's different variants. Have I considered what the executives will be looking for in the deck?
Have I preassembled that evergreen data? I'll need to formulate insights ahead of time. Like we just mentioned, you're going to be looking at a lot of data. You need to have that assembled ahead of time so you're not spending hours creating reports chasing down data.
This should already be created that you are just referencing. Can I tie performance and programs for goals and objectives? Do I have a go forward plan and recommendations prepared for the conversation? This is going to be very critical.
And then so that's your planning ahead of time. And then I think we keep hitting on the word story here. And it's by design. And so the story structure for this then is does my deck have an optimal structure?
Have I crafted a narrative? Do I have a strong executive summary? This one's a very critical one in QBRs is really nailing that executive summary. Does my main story support the executive summary and flow?
Did I tie the spend analysis back to ROIs? If you're spending, you know, are you tying that back to ROI or just saying we spent X amounts? Does not mean we leave to God, etc. You need to tie that back to ROI.
Did I use proper data storytelling? And then how does my deck design look overall? I know it's a little bit like higher level, but it does matter. Objects really, really matter in your presentation.
So that's kind of the last key element of this as well. Pass to be Carl, anything else you would add in here for like almost like a checklist that you do personally before you're going through one of these? There's one thing that I'll add. Maybe this isn't a planning is knowing what the audience knowing what you've told the audience before and they're expecting.
So you think about this, like every quarter a quarter is not an isolation. You're usually leading the previous quarter by saying these are the things we want to do next quarter. And then when you come in to the next quarter, you should be reflecting back on what did I say we're going to do and having done those things. This obviously is important internally.
I find this works very well with the board. Now a board is talking to a lot of companies and they may not remember and you may be able to get by by not letting them know what you said you were going to do the prior quarter. But I found it builds credibility to say listen, you know, last time we're here, we talked about these were the goals we're trying to hit and these are the initiatives that we're executing. Here's how we did against those things and what we learned and where we're going.
So make sure you kind of tie that back. You don't want to get caught with somebody saying, hey, but wait, you know, I have the deck in front of me and you said we were going to do this. What happened to that? So make sure that you understand that the story that you're narrating is not just a quarter in isolation, but it's something that's probably been going on for three, six, nine months or if not years.
I saw a question earlier on how much is forward looking versus how much is reviewing the past and the answer is going to be it depends. I found in board meetings personally and a lot of this is driven by your CEO. So like, typically when you go speak, I go speak in front of a board, somebody who's running that meeting has more experience than I and has a longer term relationship. So kind of guide you.
But I've often found in board meetings about 80% of conversation is actually the prior quarter and about 20% of that conversation is going forward. However, when you get internal to a company where there's probably more familiarity with what you're already doing, because you're keeping your executive team up to speed throughout the quarter, you may see that mix change where a lot of it may be half the conversation is forward looking and half is backward looking. That's also going to depend on how well you did. If you crushed it, there's going to be a less conversation about the past and more about the future.
And if you didn't crush it and you didn't do well and get hit the goals and objectives, there's going to be more conversation about what happened, what we've learned from it, and maybe less conversation about how we take it forward. So those are just kind of like anything. It depends, but just a few rules of them. That's helpful.
Carly with us. Oh, I'm here. Jamie made a really good comment in the comments, which is obviously the place where the comments live. And she said it's really tough for some people to know how to analyze the data.
And Cassidy, you and I have seen this is with a lot of QBR decks, especially like our internal ones where we come to different conclusions than the team that delivered the QBR deck came to, right? So we look at the data and we're like, wait a second, I feel like it's saying this, like this is a story being drawn out from this data or this reporter when you look at like these 30 reports together. This is actually what's happening. And so we're like developing these hypotheses and then the person who delivered the QBR like actually came to different conclusions.
So what is your like advice? This is a business acumen thing. But like what's kind of your advice for developing the ability or training kind of the skill to be able to look at data and draw the most accurate conclusion or kind of narrative from the reporting, etc. Yeah.
So Ashley, I think has a really good slide in this back. I think it'll be easier to talk to you about kind of give you the the quick priority. And that is you don't start with the data. You start at the other end, which is what was the objective in the goal?
And then obviously did I need it? And if not, they use the data, they kind of figure out why and explain the story. And so why this is subtle, but important is that I see a lot of teams kind of early in their journey trying to figure out the story by looking at the data. And that's not what executives want.
They want to know like, what was the goal and objective and do we achieve or not? And if not, why not? And so you can actually simplify a lot of this by starting at the other end. What was it?
What was it that we were trying to achieve? And do we achieve or not? And then kind of critical path out now in your data versus looking at the data to try to figure out the story. Yeah, I agree with that.
I think, you know, you start at your goal and then knowing how to diagnose from there, I think is also super important. I think it's worthwhile, especially as you're building a muscle, this is a muscle that has to be built over time. I see time and time again as well. The marketers is you need to know, hey, this is the number.
How do I keep healing? I call it the onion feel like feel back an onion layer each time. Like, how do I get to what was the diagnosis? So like, let's say pipeline, you didn't hit your pipeline goal.
Okay. Well, why was that? Was it less deals with a lower ACV? Was it, you know, it took longer for your high intensity emissions to become pipeline, things like that.
But being able to diagnose from the, you know, from that goal, and knowing where to go for the data, I think is also really important to figure out what that story is and to draw those conclusions like you were talking about Carl. I like that. I was just reading Sarah's question, but we'll go to this side, which is what I was talking about. How do you approach QBRs when you're working for a startup or early growth stage company and don't have the infrastructure in place to report on the data yet?
Is setting the stage of data will get more sophisticated over time and therefore change quarter of a quarter as the infrastructure though or will you approach it differently? They turn that back to you, Ashley, before I, if you might do sense, what do you think about that? Oh, man, putting me on the spot here. So I might have a hot opinion on this.
And it's that we are constantly on the quest for perfect data or enough data. And sometimes you have to accept that what you have for data already and just say like, this is what is available to me at the current moment to make an educated decision and call out exactly like, Hey, I don't have everything in place. Make sure you're working against that place to have enough data in place moving forward. So that's no longer kind of like the asterisk on it.
So you have like, there is some data like you should be able to pull back your revenue, right? You should be able to pull back some like basic pieces of it, because they live pretty like even if it's not pretty, you might be like, freaking signing it a little bit from spreadsheet to spreadsheet, you should be able to pull some basic numbers and then just have the caveat of we are working on this. This is what we have to make a decision on moving forward. I just, I always see that if like we don't have the right data or some accurate data and it holds a lot of people back.
So I would probably challenge that it doesn't need to be perfect. Yeah, I would agree with that. I would say one thing that I see sometimes getting in trouble with is marketers in their desire to be data-driven only show data. And I think when you're an early stage company or go stage company, there's a lot of things you're doing in marketing that you can articulate quantitatively has resonated, right?
You're trying to figure out messaging and channel and you might have other programs around things you're doing in terms of organic content and getting in front of the right audience. And so we often think that those things are fluffy and that executives don't want to hear about like what are we actually doing in terms of marketing programs and all we want to hear about is the data. And what I found is that's actually not true, that you need very little data to explain the story. If you explain the story very clearly.
So my point kind of say is I wouldn't try to force it, but I'd be articulating very clearly what do you, what are the signals of things that are working and not working and what are you doing about that. And marketers get excited about the programs they run and I wouldn't back that off if you think it's a great program and it's providing benefit. Talk about that with some context and color versus just trying to be very much by the numbers. I would use this as opportunity though to identify where you have data gaps and what you need to close it for future kind of, on the trajectory of your company.
And so you may be getting feedback, I'm just going to speculate that, hey, don't bring up the data gaps. We don't talk about these things. When you're in a room with executives and there's something holding you back, I think it's important to be proactive about the things that you're going to need going forward that would need to be prioritized in terms of investment resources in the future. So make sure you get those things on record in a QBR, but don't dwell on it as an excuse.
Cassidy, if I could add something there, I love your point. I think when you don't have sophisticated looker instances set up and tableau, etc. I think a lot of marketers and really any go-to-market professional that's delivering QBRs is also wants data that's derived from a dashboard. And I think when you just don't have a lot of sophistication there, there's nothing wrong with telling a qualitative story.
If you're a really early stage startup, you may not be getting hundreds of in-bounds per month and your sales team may not have super full calendars. You may only have a couple of sales people. So it's actually pretty accessible to actually hear from customers and hear those discovery calls and hear how they found you and using SRA and kind of finding a creative way to aggregate some of that data and telling a story there when you don't have this super slick looker dashboard, right? Or all these time stamps and UTM's and everything else that marketers measure and track and sophisticated click-through rates and funnel analysis, etc.
So what do you think about that? Weaving in qualitative customer research-esque type of data, if you want to call it that into the narrative of a QBR. Yeah, I highly recommend that. Any time you can use the voice of a customer prospect, I would do that.
It could be formal like a case study. It could be a quote. We had a early stage product that we're trying to build traction that we had found the problem in the market that everybody had. And we put a montage together of gone calls where you had people at massive companies basically saying this is my problem and it was in the analytics space.
And so we put that together and we shared it with investors in the board and the company. And maybe there's 10 to 15 of these you know this commentary, but you're hearing from your target market that the problem you're trying to solve is a massive problem for them. And we didn't need statistical significance or anything. It got the point across.
People are like, wow, all right, we're on to something. Let's go. And so to your point, Carl, that was more impactful, frankly, than like trying to show that in the numbers. Especially when you're in early stage kind of gross stage product where it's all about traction, finding a problem that's unique, be able to solve that problem.
Hearing from prospects and customers, I think actually carries as much if not more weight than the data. Might see a sense on that one. Good question. Yeah, I agree.
We had a question here. It's kind of tactical. Maybe we'll get to this. Andrew asks, what's the best kickoff or opener for the QVR?
Descending the deck in advance is a pre read help for that. Pretty tactical, but a good question. Like, how do you open these bad boys? So I haven't ran across any executive that doesn't want to pre read.
And that could be sending the deck. It may be a process with your board where you're actually sending a more detailed write up in the slides or just a summary. You're going to kind of see, you know, you can kind of read how your company or executive team handles these things. If there is no process at a minimum, I would send the pre read.
You're the deck ahead of time. And if it's a really important meeting, you may want to write something more substantial in a document. So you kind of get the context across better and send that with the deck or send that in lieu of the deck and then use the deck as kind of a summary of the pre read. Executive summary will get to this super important.
So, you know, get in the meeting, you ask everybody if they read it. Some people have not read the pre read, some have that kind of creates problems in terms of, you know, controlling the audience, which kind of want to know that up front. And then you kind of use the executive summary to kind of level set everybody on what was in that pre read and kind of get everybody up to see before you delve into the details. I think we'll go through that a little bit more.
Does that answer your question? I will deflect that question back to Andrew. Andrew, any other additions here with that answer your question? Give me a thumbs up thumbs down.
Thumbs up. Good job Cassidy. Hi, and Nico has a point. Hum, you mentioned not worried about statistical significance, but if you choose one quote, that highlights your point doesn't mean that is actually the right answer, Cassidy.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're going to you're going to run into that. I mean, if you just have one quote up there and you're trying to say, I got one quote, therefore that proves my point in the market. I agree with you. So you kind of got to have these things working together.
We see a trend of moving in the right direction in the data, but let's hear from those prospects or those customers to kind of give the context over and above the data. And you're right. It doesn't do any good to say, Hey, listen to one customer, you know, you want to have a few here or at least kind of elude that there's others. And you know, it's really going to depend on your stage of growth.
The larger your company more established, I would say the more statistical significance you need versus when you're trying to find early signals in the market as a startup. That's my two sets. You got to go. This is knowing your audience.
You may run into an engineer CEO and all they want to know is data and so forth. The song you're going to have to manage around that. All right. Ashley, she knows the next slide.
I like this one. Let's do it. I think I stole this from you, Cassidy. Oh, great.
So kind of what you're saying is knowing your audience, you know, it's going to be very dependent and nuanced and personalized based on who they are, what they look for, what their titles are, whatever. But overall, these are kind of some themes that we see with what executives will be looking for in your QBR. So they're bucketed into results, insights, learnings and recommendations. So first of all, like on the results part, these first two are so critical is how to perform it compared to the goal or objectives.
We talked a little bit about this earlier of every single QBR shouldn't be a wild one. It should, you know, report back on what you agreed upon for the previous quarter, which is typically these goals that are set forth. Then how does this quarter compared to prior quarter and previous years? I think the previous years is also very interesting one too, because of course, we're looking forward to a record.
We also look here every year, growth is the goal. How much should we invest and what was the ROI about investments? Was it a good ROI? We spent X compared to what we spent before?
What was that return? What did you learn? How could you do better? All these different things are truly what we're looking for versus like we spent 200,000 on LinkedIn.
Cool. Why was that a good thing? Was it bad? What did we get back from it?
So I think those are just some critical business acumen pieces to realize when you're going through and looking for your story and looking to build out your deck. It's a bucket into all of these different pieces. So one of the things I'm just going to speak candidly about our learnings and maybe you can apply it to yourself. We obviously provide marketing services for our clients and every quarter we talk about the results.
We often try to find data that proves things are working or not or make the case for why you're making this investment. And there's nothing wrong with that, but that's not how I would say you should approach a QBR with leadership. It's not about your self-preservation. It's about the business.
Are we achieving the results or not? If not, let's talk about why not. So you have to be able to take a very objective view to I have to, but I would say a best practice or something you want to get to mentally. Taking a very objective view to the business in terms of your presentation around the function of marketing here in this case.
But this is for any function in terms of what's working and what's not. I know it's very hard to do. It's hard to do for any function. It's particularly hard to do for marketing.
We spend a lot of time trying to justify. And if you just make a little bit of a switch to be like, I'm not here to justify, I'm here to explain if something's working or not. And what we're going to do about it. And what you're going to do about it is massively important in these conversations.
Like becoming a journalist and just recording on the story, detaching from the performance. Yeah, I think there's a, I'll get philosophical here, but there's like this concept of one team. And like when you're ahead of marketing and you're in a leadership, you're with the leadership team, you're one team is a leadership team, not your function. You're not here to defend the function.
You're here as part of the leadership team, whether internally or in front of the board, to explain clearly what's working in the business, the strategy that's working in that business, what we've learned, what we're going to do about it, as a team. And so you got to be able to take a very objective view of your function in these conversations from my experience. One other thing to call out on identity, what executives are looking for is also a heavy emphasis on the insights and learnings. So you obviously know the performance the best.
You know the work the best. And so analyzing that performance and analyzing the work that you completed and showing what you what what does that mean? What can they take away from that? I think it's super important as well, who's really kind of getting color to what everything that you completed is, what they can take away as a story and so on.
So that's another highlight that I would just recommend, getting a high later on. Yeah, I mean, I really, I think it's a great point to emphasize. I want to say that again, like the learning is whether good or bad and how you use this moving forward to what you're going to do about it or key. Like if things are working well, how much more do we should keep doing that?
How much more should we do? And kind of when does that hit its kind of peak? And if things haven't worked and we thought we're going to work, what are we doing about it? I mean, that's where you have to be like as a functional lead.
And here's what we're going to do about it. Either double down on things we're working or fix what's not, but here's how. And you want to make sure you can get that point across and you have time to get that point across with confidence. And so that's goes back into managing the room, the meeting and the timeframe and so forth and so on.
Yeah, I won't beat this too much more. But you know, the purpose of these QBRs are to come together as a collective business unit and company to figure out how you either keep repelling or you fix the performance. And so these learnings, maybe something didn't work because you didn't have enough resource allocation. This is a perfect time to bring that up and as a company or as a business unit, how do you fix this and how do you support it because that was one of the high learnings or maybe, you know, whatever it may be, I think that's just the purpose of the QBR.
So I think it's really important. We'll keep going here, Cassidy. I know that we have a lot of different things to talk about, but we talked about knowing your audience. There's also knowing the types of QBRs and the types of audiences that you'll experience.
We've been talking about board QBRs, which are the most obvious. So these are the external QBR that you present to your company's board. There's also different QBRs that happen within a company. There's executive level leadership, QBRs where, you know, it's, you have a CEO and you have all the different department leads and you're all presenting to each other.
So you're presenting to the product department head sales, et cetera, your all-in-one rooms. So you understand your collective business. Then there's also department QBRs too, which I think a lot of us have experienced where you come together as an entire marketing work and you have a QBR to talk about it. And there's a different level of depth and different level of things that you will include in each of these QBRs based on, you know, what the audience is.
Yeah, and I would also apply, like what we're talking about here, works for reviewing your 2024 marketing strategy, any other kind of important kind of large strategic presentation that you're giving, maybe you're doing that once or twice a year. We can use the same technique here. I will point out, I think I would encourage everybody to read Tara's point in the chat. I think it's a great example of the type of context, the things that you're sharing about what's learning and what you learn, what's working and what's not.
And so it's easy to kind of say, hey, you know, talk about what's working and what's not working. You have context and talk about what you're going to do going forward. What does that look like? And I think her explanation there is a great example of the type of depth of information you may get into in one of these conversations.
So I think I read that, and Tara, you're welcome to come on and talk about that. If you like, all right, I'm just looking through some of the questions here. Laurie, you made a point about objectivity, yes, but as a head of marketing, I believe you still need to be a champion of marketing to leadership of the board. Yeah, I do it.
Absolutely. You want to come across as proud of your team and the work that the team has done. And you should have your excitement come through if your team's crushing something. Don't, you know, don't depress that.
They share it. What you don't want to come across as trying to defend the marketing team at all costs. And that's where I really want to be my objectivity. So I'm not trying to take the emotion out of what you're presenting at all.
But I also don't think it's helpful to try to always be defending marketing as you know wrong versus kind of being objective of, yeah, we got something right. I'm super proud about that. And if some things we thought were going to do that didn't happen, and here's what we learned from it. And I assume you agree with that too.
So I just want to kind of pull out that point as a good one. All right. Cassidy, this image again was stolen from you. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the socialization and how you look to tie performance and programs to objectives and goals within QBRs.
Yeah, I think what I've found, I just applied to QBRs, but it just applies also to marketing planning. I find often we can get into the weeds very quickly in terms of like a marketing plan. And so this is a framework I sold for a very simple marketing plan. I got 20 years ago, and I've used it over and over.
And it's very simple. Like there are a couple goals and objectives that your company is trying to achieve next quarter. It could be strategic objective about penetrating new market or brand awareness. It could be a revenue objective.
There's usually kind of one or two of each. But there's only a few. And so then as a marketing leader, what you want to make sure your objectives do is ladder up to the goals and objectives of that company. And so you need to be able to connect that dot right away.
And then from there, what are the few things that we're doing in order to kind of move the needle on those objectives? And there's a reason there's three here because it shouldn't be five or 10. And so you really want to be able to boil this up into some high level programs in order to have these types of conversations. And then yes, there's a bunch of things you're doing in those programs to kind of make them work.
And that can be some of the context that you talk to in terms of the readout of what's working and what's not somewhat of what Tara said in her comment. And so what I encourage people to do is really be simple at kind of the strategic level in terms of company. The company's goals were these. These are the marketing goals that help hit the company's goals.
These are the three things we're doing this quarter. And here's how that performed. They're good, the bad, et cetera. And so just keep it simple whether it's for QBR or marketing planning.
That's the intent of this. All right. So we've talked a little bit about kind of the deck. I think we've alluded to the executive summary.
Let's let's take into it. I think this is really important to talk about the meat and the outline of what a QBR entails. And so Cassidy, walk me through. So when you go through it, there's essentially kind of three main parts of the QBR.
You have your executive summary, which is incredibly critical to really master. You have your main story, which are going to be subsequent slides that support that executive summary or support that story that you're telling on the executive summary. And then you have the appendix, which I feel like is kind of like a hidden super power bit where you can add in more slides that support the story. But you don't want to flutter up your story, right?
So you're not trying to flutter up your deck. You're not trying to flutter up your main story. So you push it to the appendix so you have it there just in case you get asked on it, you go, yep, let me flip to it right there. But let's talk about the structure of it and we can really kind of just go into the meat of it and how we can get some actionable, you know, takeaways for people completing these QBRs.
Yeah, so you know, somebody just will depend on how much time you have. But the reason I like to be this succinct is that most of the conversation you're having should not be reading what's on the slide. The slide should only be there to facilitate the conversation. So for example, I may park on the slide in a board meeting and it's one slide, it's a high level, and talk for five to 10 minutes and kind of give the context.
And this is where practice and planning comes in and knowing the data. And so instead of kind of going through a lot of slides really quickly, with a lot of dense data on it, we're just hitting a couple of highlights. I recommend the reverse. I actually have forced yourself out fewer slides and then go in more depth in the story and the context that you're talking to, like you're having a conversation with a peer in terms of the actual presentation.
And so what I try to do here, and this was something we use with our team is I wanted it very concrete and dense in order to force us to figure out what was most important and how best to communicate that story. Now you'll change this based on your situation, like you're presenting for an hour, you're probably going to want more slides and you'll have more points in the executive summary. But oftentimes in these meetings, you have anywhere from 15 to 20, maybe 30 minutes max to kind of get the summary across. And if that's the case, I wouldn't want any more than this.
Makes sense? I was not to hear you do the QBR narrative. We talked a little bit about like the executive summary. Let's look into what you're talking about more, Cassie.
So I'm also looking at John's question. I think it's a good one. Let me stop here for a second. So John had this question about today's environments, QBRs, maybe too late using methodology, okay, ours, last for agile planning evaluation.
Yeah, it's a good point. So let me kind of give you a full context of how we think about this with our customers. And maybe this is an interesting framework for everybody here. And that is we tend to want to start a quarter by saying, here's the goals objectives for the quarter and the main programs we're going to run to your point.
John, and then obviously we're going to review that at the end of the quarter. But we're also going to have monthly reviews, which are how are we pacing to the plan for the quarter? And then depending on like the factors in your business, you may be looking at this by weekly or weekly, or at least in your marketing team, you're probably looking at this weekly, right? So in your marketing team, you may be looking at the results on a weekly basis.
But I agree with you, like you're not going to get to the end of the quarter and the leadership team does not know if you're on pace. And so what I've encouraged people to do is break up their quarters in terms of sharing the highlights and that may be async or maybe in a monthly leadership review where you're kind of going over the results. But I always do that in the context of the quarterly plan, if that makes any sense. Here's where we are in the month.
Are there any things that we need to kind of adjust in terms of our programs if we're pacing ahead or pacing behind? And so don't know if that helps me. That's obvious. I want to add that in to your question.
Looking ahead, Kathy, we have about 10 minutes left and we have a couple different topics that we can hit on here. We've hit on the QBR narrative and why you need a central story. I think another thing that we can quickly hit on we won't spend too much time on is the usage of your headline real estate is another huge opportunity to story tell in a really great way. You can see here typically like headers say, introduction, pipeline performance, they're very typical when you see a side deck.
Really powerful decks also challenge that and can tell a story. You think about this presentation is going to get sent out of context ahead of time or afterwards without you presenting. Typically human behavior is to flip through a deck. And if the only thing that that reader is going to look at is that bold, huge real estate of your headline, can you tell the story within your headline sequence?
I think it's really interesting as well. Something that we see with powerful decks. Yeah, I would give two examples here. Think of it as horizontal storytelling.
I should be able to read the headlines and know the story. They need to tell a story horizontally as you flip through them. And what you'll tend to find, you'll find some executives, especially the executives came out of a consulting background who will only read the headlines as kind of the first step. And then vertical storytelling is the headline should support the main point of the slide and largely the slide should have one point that you're trying to illustrate.
And so this kind of gets into another level of detail. But we often try to cram five or six points into a slide and then give a generic headline. And really what you want to do is like, this is the main point of the slide. And then the slide only has enough data to kind of support that point, if that's clear.
So thank vertical storytelling. Headline supports what's on the slide. You put on the slide only what supports the headline. And then horizontal storytelling.
I should go to read the headlines and understand at a high level what's going on. Any other questions in general before anything that we did hit on, we have a couple of slide examples that we can pick apart to show this in practice. But is there anything else you'd add or anyone else in the chat, feel free to drop any questions as well? Oh, I had one other thing.
I mean, don't beat yourself up. If you have a bad GBR, I mean, this is something that you don't get a lot of practice doing. And there's not a lot, there's not a playbook out there for, you know, first time marketers to go do this. Now you'll probably get some support from your CEO and so forth and so on.
So listen to the constructive feedback, asset construction feedback and get better as you go. I mean, I did this for three plus years in board meetings and I go back, I look at my first month board meeting slides and they were awful compared to the board meeting slides I did, you know, three years later. So it's a humbling experience. But to get better at this, you just got to be practicing, take feedback, improve your storytelling.
But it's important as a marketing leader, this is one of those skills, you need to be able to do well to be successful. All right. A lot of your comments in here in terms of other people's tips and tricks, I encourage everybody to read the chat. I'm learning a lot as I go through as well.
All right, you want to do one example, wrap it up? Let's do it. Okay, so we have a couple of different ones we can go through. I think this is a very common slide that we see.
Let me, let me actually flip through these, Cassie, and you pick which one you want to choose here. So got this one here, this one or that one, which one would you like to, let's pick apart? Yeah, we can start with the first one. Carl, what do you, what do you like to dislike about this line?
Oh, it's amazing. Easy to read, easy to present. No, obviously, a couple things, right? Like the data table at the bottom is just, you're just horrifying, super difficult to read.
I mean, it would take me a couple minutes to just look at this and try to digest what I'm looking at. And I think like, at a high level, you talked about it, Cassie, you know, just a few minutes ago, just like the headline doesn't really like tell me anything, right? Q2 inbound funnel metric performance, right? First of all, that sets me up.
If I'm like a board member to like, I'm already like funnel metric performance. Like what does that even mean? What are we doing here? What is this slide?
You know, I feel like I'm prepping for something to see data that I probably don't understand. So lack of story, obviously overwhelming amount of information that is not easily digestible. And then the headline doesn't set me up, you know, narratively to like understand and frame what I'm about to digest. So I think we probably all agree that this is not what you do it.
This is what you do. So yeah, I would agree. I would get one subtle piece of feedback in this and that is, I've seen this quite a bit. It's a quarterly review.
So I would try to reframe from showing monthly. And I understand there's like, Oh, but there's contacts in the monthly in the quarterly, you're talking quarterly in these meetings, I would keep everything quarterly. Obviously you wouldn't have the chart spreadsheet at the bottom. But in terms of the overall conversation, keep it at the quarter, not the month, you can do the monthly while you're pacing every month in those meetings.
Don't put them both in one slide. And like pick, pick something to talk about, right? Like, because I mean, if you actually dug into this data, like there's some wins in here, right? So it's just unfortunate that like your wins and your success gets buried.
I mean, if you look at the very bottom, right, ad, cat, cat, payback dramatically decreased over time, ACV slowly increasing, win rate slowly increasing. So it's like, this actually could crush and a board would love to see a lot of this data, but you shot yourself in the foot with how you presented it. You know, this could make or break a lot of things. It could make a break.
You getting more budget. It could make a break. You going from VP of marketing to CMO, right? Even though like you're winning and crushing it here, just the way you tell the story really kind of like make a breaks, like, you know, just everything, right?
So yeah, and circle back to one of the comments earlier, this chart below every executive or every board member expects you to know this stuff. But they don't want to see it. So to call it your point, pull out the things that matter, only talk to that, be prepared when they ask you questions that you know this information in this spreadsheet. All right, let's do another one.
Want me to kick it off? Yeah. So I mean better, right? What's an improvement from the last one?
Still, like the graphs, like, I just don't I don't know what they add here. And again, like, we've got highlights similar, right? So I think really probably pretty similar to the feedback on the previous slide. But all right, we got, you know, the cool little green arrows for the bullet points.
So there's some now like highlights that have been teased out introduction as the slide title, not good, right? And the graphs are even harder to read. So if the last slide was like a one on a scale of one to 10, this is like a 1.8 or a two, it's like we're moving in the right direction, but we're still not doing, we're still not communicating anything of value. We're still overwhelming with the charts and the graphs and the data in fact, we made it more difficult to read.
And so whenever you have a distracting slide like this, that's difficult to read. What do I do? Right? As an executive, it's reading this like I squint and like I lean in and I try to read this, which means I'm not listening to you anymore, right?
Because I can't like do both. I can't like try to read this chart and make sense of what I'm reading and also listen to your potentially really good voice over of all the great wins that we're seeing, right? So here's a common mistake. Look at that.
We go in and we talk about all these highlights. The takeaway on the slide is we didn't hit pipeline play on effects. Like in its buried, like it's under the struggles as an executive. I'm like, wait a minute, you said down here at the bottom out of all the way to hit the plan.
Okay, let's talk about why we didn't hit the plan. Instead, we try to put in all these other things like 370 submissions and we spent X to 98% the budget, like, okay, so we spent the budget, you know, a lot of stuff's in material to this conversation. The thing is material is why didn't we hit the plan? Yeah, there's also some kind of the struggles are interesting, right?
Like specifically that second struggle, like we saw market competition and trends increase. What does that even what's a trend, right? Like what does that even mean? It feels like an excuse like, oh, we missed because more startups started up.
You know, what is it? I don't know, right? I don't know what it is. So if I'm listening to this as an executive, I'm going to come to my own conclusions.
And the only conclusion I that I can really draw from this is like this marketing team, I don't know if I got the right people here on the bus handling this. I don't feel a lot of trust and credibility. And even though, again, there are some wins buried in here that are critical and probably tied to larger organizational priorities. Well, I know we're out of time.
I sorry, I did ask that we have anything in here, Ashley, that actually is good. I think we have one that was pretty decent. Carl approved, I don't know about Carl approved. Every slide.
By the way, you know who the worst person putting slides together is? Carl. Yeah, smart. We've been to smart people and the designers.
I think, yeah, this is a well, everybody's helped. This is solid. This is kind of like going in the direction. For us, I mean, put this in context.
What you're seeing are kind of our own slides, I believe Sydney made this comment of like things that we improved on. So like for kind of what we do and what we explain. I think this is the best example by far we have in the deck. Yeah, I love the headline.
I don't have to actually do any thinking. This is amazing, right? The marketing leader here did the thinking for me. I don't have to do any deducing.
I don't have to do any math. I don't have to do any analysis or conclusion drawing of my own. In Q2, we spent 10% more money and we got 33% more revenue per dollar spent. Boom, that's awesome.
Next slide, right? Too crazy to do. I had that in there, Ashley. It was good.
A few things. Yeah, a few subtle things. I think somebody mentioned the font. We can get very picky on this.
You probably don't need a headline on the chart if you've covered that in the headline and on the right hand side. So it's a few small things. Yeah, I don't think you need like the 98% to budget because again, the point of this slide here is to celebrate and win and show trends over time. I don't think you need the total media spending Q2 was 300k and it was only 98% of budget.
It's kind of like a distraction from the point which is we spent a little more money. We're investing in the right places and we're winning. Oh, I have one more comment. I think Andrew's point, isn't it the simpler headline 3.3x ROI?
It's a good question. I don't know. I think that's kind of dependent, right? We know that's a shorthand but there's something about being able to say, listen, for 10% more spend, we generate a 33% more revenue.
And so I think this is preference. This is knowing the audience. It's knowing like, would you guys already have a shorthand? If you have a shorthand, then yeah, I think you can tighten that up.
If the audience is not as well versed, that kind of the lingo, then maybe you want to kind of spell it out. Very like that's, if we're nitpicking those types of things, I think we're in a good spot. Great question. All right.
Thanks everybody for joining. Enjoy the conversation. If you ever want us to take a look at a QBR decks, shoot them over on LinkedIn. Happy to always give you feedback as it is Ashley and of course Carl loves giving feedback on other people's work.
So feel free to hit them up and them over. Carl at RefiLive.com. All right, everybody. Have a good day.
Take care.