The quality of your customer business reviews is your number #1 profitability driver. Business reviews either accelerate or kill your profitability.
It does not matter whether your company offers a product, a service, software, or a mix. When the bell rings on a new sale, the team celebrates, but the hard work is just beginning.
Now, the Account and Customer Success teams need to start onboarding, training, and supporting users. And too often in the rush of delivery, the account and customer success teams lose sight of the customer why – why did they buy from us in the first place?
Your Business Review call needs to be your why call. Whether you do it monthly, quarterly, or annually, it should reconnect the customer to their original goals and progress toward them.
Here are four ways to structure a Strategic Business Review with customers to drive renewals, expansions, and long-term value.
▶️ Start with Success to Date
Open each business review with a clear agenda: outline the goals for the meeting and and what you hope to accomplish. And make your first agenda item, your shared success to date.
After the agenda, immediately recap progress to date: “Here’s what I understand about why we started working together—and what we’ve achieved.”
Success might mean driving revenue, finding cost efficiencies, changing a user experience or implementing across multiple offices. Whatever it is, the real moment of alignment comes when you ask, “Does this reflect your understanding of where we are today?”
That question brings shared ownership and sets up a collaborative, value-focused discussion.
▶️ Connect Product and Business Value
It’s tempting in your business review calls to talk about product metrics—usage, adoption, coverage. But those are only part of the picture. You have to translate product data into business impact.
In your business reviews, make sure to connect adoption back to their goals. It might sound like, “you shared that faster insight or more funnel velocity, or improved employee retention were priorities. Are you seeing how adopting our product or service is helping with movement toward these goals?”
Making that connection is what turns implementation into value—and helps both teams know whether they’re on track for renewal or falling short.
▶️ Connect to White Space
Once you’ve recapped value, it becomes much easier to explore new opportunities.
Think of line of questions that sounds something like, “We’ve delivered value in this business unit or with this team—could similar success apply in other locations or offices?” Would you be interested in exploring other business outcomes that we can support?
Be sure to prepare your business reviews with a few of these types of expansion discovery questions. This isn’t a sales pitch. It’s an invitation to build on what’s working. You’re extending a success story, not starting from scratch. That’s how strategic expansions take root.
▶️ Make it Executive Friendly
Finally, a common challenge for many account and customer success teams is losing contact with the original executive sponsor—the VP, SVP, or C-suite leader who championed the project.
Why? One reason is that the business reviews slip into tactical territory. To re-engage executives, shift the focus back to outcomes and market insights.
Start with business progress, then ask: What trends are we seeing in this market? What are peers doing differently? Where might there be an opportunity to get ahead?
Executives come back to the table when you help them see the opportunity to learn something they didn’t before—about their business, their competitors, or their market.
In conclusion, run your business reviews with these four steps—recap success, connect product to business value, uncover white space, and elevate the conversation—and you’ll see stronger renewals, more expansion, and a more profitable customer base.