Resources · Executive business reviews
Running EBRs that renew
I have sat through a lot of executive business reviews, on both sides of the table. Most of them were status reports. Thirty slides of usage charts, a support summary, a roadmap preview and a "thank you for your partnership" slide at the end. The executive nodded, checked their phone twice and left a few minutes early.
Then, six months later, the renewal was hard, and everyone wondered why.
An EBR has one job: make the renewal conversation easy. Everything in it should serve that job. Here's what that looks like in practice.
Start with the goals they set, not the features they used
The executive in the room didn't buy your product to use features. They bought it to hit a goal: reduce support costs, close the books faster, get shipments out on time. If you don't know what that goal was, the EBR is already in trouble.
Capture the goals at kickoff, in the customer's own words, with a number attached where you can. "Cut month-end close from eight days to five." Then open every EBR with those goals and where they stand. Two of three met is a great slide. One of three met is a better conversation than thirty charts, because now you're talking about what to change.
Show three numbers, not thirty
Pick the three numbers that tell the story of the quarter for this customer. Usually that's one adoption number (what share of seats are active), one outcome number (progress on their goal) and one relationship number (support volume, resolution time, or how many of their teams now use the product).
Everything else goes in an appendix. Executives respect a CSM who has done the work of deciding what matters. They do not respect a deck that makes them do it.
Say the uncomfortable thing first
If adoption in one department has stalled, or a support issue dragged on, say so in the first ten minutes, with what you're doing about it. The executive almost certainly knows already. Hearing it from you, with a plan, builds more trust than any success story.
An EBR where everything is green reads as a sales pitch. An EBR that names one problem and fixes it reads as a partner.
End with a recommendation
The last slide should never be "thank you". It should be a recommended next step: roll out to the finance team, fix the integration that's failing, run a training session for the 40% of seats that aren't active. Something specific, with an owner on each side and a date.
Sometimes that recommendation is an expansion. That's fine, as long as it follows from the data you just showed. At Northwind Analytics, CSMs add a recommended next step to every EBR deck, and it's often where expansion conversations start. Their net revenue retention went from 104% to 113% over four quarters.
Don't spend a day building the deck
None of this works if each EBR takes a CSM six hours to prepare. When the work is that expensive, teams run fewer reviews, and they run them only for the largest accounts, which are rarely the ones most at risk.
Lighthouse Payroll's twelve CSMs were spending about 1,200 hours a quarter building EBR decks by hand: exporting usage, building charts, copying support numbers. When the data assembled itself, prep time fell from about six hours to 40 minutes per deck, and they now run reviews for their top 350 accounts instead of 200. The CSM's time went into the story and the recommendation, which is the part only a person can do.
A simple EBR outline
- The goals they set at kickoff, and where each one stands.
- Three numbers that tell the story of the quarter.
- One problem, named plainly, with the plan to fix it.
- What their peers are doing that they aren't yet.
- A recommended next step, with owners and a date.
Five sections, twenty to thirty minutes, and time left for the executive to talk. That last part matters most. The best EBRs I've been in, the customer spoke more than we did.
If you'd like to see the EBR Builder put a deck like this together from your own data, book a demo.