I've sat through more QBRs than I'd like to admit, on both sides of the table. Almost none of them earned the hour they took. The deck was thick, the conversation was thin, and the next one got scheduled out of habit rather than appetite. 

The conversation between Berit Hoffmann (Coral), Simon Farthing (Bloomreach), and Rod Cherkas (HelloCCO Consulting) on our recent panel changed how I think about whether QBRs should even keep that name. Three operators who have spent years inside this problem from different angles, putting reframes on the table I hadn't heard packaged that cleanly before.

Simon Farthing floated this line on LinkedIn a few months back and watched a debate run for weeks. Nobody in the comments claimed their team had nailed QBRs. Everyone agreed something was off about the format itself.

The mechanic is the giveaway. A team spends two to three weeks preparing a deck, which means they're optimizing for the presentation, not the conversation. The slide quietly becomes the deliverable. The customer never asked for that.

Rod Cherkas wants to retire the name entirely. He frames it as a quarterly relationship review, not a business review, because the actual work is building the relationship with the people on the other side of the table. Customers have a shrinking amount of time and a growing list of vendors fighting for it. An hour with their senior team is something you have to earn back every single quarter.

Cherkas described a client he advised recently who came in with a 56-slide first draft for a sixty-minute meeting. The insights and recommendations didn't appear until after page 40. Even at a slide a minute, nobody was getting to the part that mattered.

His fix starts from the wrong end. Decide what conversation you actually want to have, then build the artifact around it. The data belongs in an appendix the customer can ignore, not in the body of the meeting.

Berit Hoffmann made the same point sharper. If she could have read the deck and gotten everything out of it that the meeting was going to give her, the meeting didn't need to exist.

For most of post-sale's history, personalization at scale was a contradiction in terms. Tailoring messaging across roles, regions, and life cycle stages meant leaning on local teams, which produced inconsistency the moment those teams disagreed about what good looked like. Bloomreach was hitting this wall across EMEA, APAC, and MENA.

Farthing's team now uses AI to synthesize call history, account priorities, competitive context, and stakeholder mapping into briefings the human can actually walk into a room with. A German enterprise procurement lead, a relationship-driven Australian stakeholder, and a CMO in the Middle East don't want the same conversation. Until recently, prepping for each one at scale wasn't a real option. It is now.

Cherkas pushed it further into the strategy layer. Ask Claude or ChatGPT what would make the leader you're about to meet with want to spend an hour with you, given everything you know about their business and where they're trying to go. Then build the agenda around what comes back.

The warning Farthing left on this is the part most teams will miss. "AI doesn't automatically make your QBR better. It gives you time to make it better yourself, if you ensure the right contextual data is available."

One of Farthing's customers had an exec sponsor who went quiet. The default move would have been to keep pressing for a quarterly business review until the calendar invite stuck.

Instead, his team used AI to surface a strategic initiative the customer was investing in, built a specific recommendation around it, and led with that. The meeting was on the calendar within 48 hours.

Cherkas's takeaway from cases like this is structural. The QBR is not an entitlement. The best way to get the next one on the calendar is to make the current one a better use of an hour than anything else on the customer's day.

Most teams measure churn, NRR, and NPS. Almost none of them measure whether the QBR itself was any good, which means the conversations driving those numbers stay invisible.

Farthing's signal is behavioral. Did the customer ask when the next meeting is? Did they take an action afterward that the meeting set up? Those are the indicators that the QBR actually created the conditions for the relationship to grow.

Cherkas added the analytical version of the same idea. Tools like Gong can tell you what percentage of the meeting was you talking versus the customer. If the talk-time skewed toward you, the meeting was a readout, not a conversation, and the customer noticed even if they were too polite to say so.

The line Farthing closed on is the one worth carrying out the door.
Don't scrap the ritual. Just upgrade it.

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