#40: How to Automate EBRs for CS Teams

Every customer should understand the value they get from your product.

Because if they don't, they'll churn.  

With business expenses being put through the microscope, businesses are actively divesting from anything that doesn't deliver ROI. No matter how much users might use it and like it. 

A great tool to communicate value is the Enterprise Business Review (EBR).

But, for most companies, delivering EBRs to all customers is unrealistic.

It takes too long to put the presentations together.

They are too heavy-handed for smaller customers.

What if I told you that you could automate your entire EBR creation and give CSMs the tool to generate these decks in one click?

Sounds like magic, but that's how we do it at HubSpot!

 You can hear all about it on the latest episode of the This is Growth! Podcast 🎧

 In this edition of the newsletter, I will be sharing how to create and automate EBRs, and how you scale this approach to help your team communicate value to EVERY customer.

📜 Create the Template

Standardisation is the key to automation. 

One of the main issues with the automation of Enterprise Business Reviews is that in most teams, there is no "master" EBR template.

Every person has their own way of doing it. 

The reason why you get into this situation is because historically we only used EBRs with the largest customers. So it's been OK to customise the template for each customer.  

But as you try to scale EBRs across other segments, that's a recipe for disaster.

Create a cross-functional group of CS, Sales, Marketing and Product and to create a template that covers the following:

• Agenda: What we will cover today
• Customer Goals: Why did the customer buy your product?
• Results: Where are we with delivering those goals?
• Drivers: How usage of key functionality drove results?
• Recommendations: How do we get even better results and unlock new value?

This structure makes the review about the customer, and not about you. 

My rule of thumb is to get to a template that it's 80% automated and 20% customisable.

We don't want to eliminate all the thinking and collaboration with the customer from the process.

We want to streamline the data crunching that is required to get to a usable deck.

If you need inspiration, GitLab has a public facing EBR template and process and Matik has an awesome QBR template.

🤖 Choose a Tool to Automate the Creation

On the Podcast with Nik and Brian, we talked about two options for automating EBRs:

1. Buying an Asset Automation tool (ie. Matik - not sponsored)
2. Building a tool using an Integration Platform (ie. Workato - not sponsored)

There are pros and cons for both options.

The former requires a higher ongoing investment but fewer resources to set up and maintain over time, while also giving you more innovation through new features. Plus it gives your team an interface to use to generate the presentations.

The latter requires more technical resources in-house and you need to own and maintain the solution, but you'll have more flexibility and if you are already using IPaaS, it might save you on additional subscription costs. One thing here is that to avoid inviting your whole team to the IPaaS, you will need to build an interface to request these EBRs, in HubSpot we use a Slack Bot.

I have worked with teams automating presentations using both options (Matik for a tool and Workato for a IPaaS) and feel like they are both good options depending on your company's maturity and resourcing. 

How this works with your template is that for each data point you want to use, you will need to pull it automatically from your data warehouse into the presentation.

Both solutions allow you to create graphs based on data points too.

Make sure you have a technical resource that knows what's possible to extract from your data warehouse in your cross-functional group.

If it's not measured today, it can't be automated on the EBR. 

But hard data isn't the only thing that you can pull in...

You can have a library with CSMs photos.

You can have a library with your customer's logos. 

You can use CRM fields to bring in contextual information.

The world is your oyster!

👩🏻‍🏫 Enable the team

You can have the most beautiful EBR template. You can create the EBR in just one click.

But if your CSMs are not delivering them to customers, none of it matters.

Why wouldn't CSMs adopt such a great resource?

Too many things to do. Lack of confidence. Too many other assets and playbooks. Lack of clarity.

So when you are creating an EBR, don't forget to:

• Create an alert system that notifies CSMs of  customers that need an EBR ahead of time (a CS platform can make it easy for you to manage that);
• Give CSMs guidance on how to create the EBRs in collaboration with customers;
• Enable CSMs to deliver these conversations at the executive level;
• Coach CSMs as they start delivering these to improve their skill level.

Something I have to remind myself often is that in order for people to adopt new tools like this one, you have to really think through the change management perspective.  

As Margaret said in a Change Management episode of the podcast:

Positive reinforcement is key. 

🤑 How Do You Scale?

Delivering EBRs might still be too much if you are working with the long tail of customers.

I have two ideas to share with you on how to scale this:

1.  Value Summary - Instead of building a presentation, create an automated one-pager that summarises the customer's results with automatic suggestions based on results. This can be sent on an email campaign (Matik has a great template). 
2. Your Year In Review - Last year, HubSpot did a fun campaign, inspired by Spotify's annual summary of listeners' behaviours. This is more focused on usage, but has some great benchmarks and generates quite a bit of buzz in terms of getting customers speaking and sharing online.

TL'DR

If you want to deliver EBRs or Value Summaries to as many customers as possible, you will need to eliminate the data crunch and make it easy for CSMs to get the information they need. 

• Create a standard template that can be used by all CSMs 
• Automate the data inputs using an iPaaS or Content Automation Platform
• Surface automatically the customers that need an EBR
• Enable CSMs to collaborate with business users to fine-tune the template
• Train CSMs to deliver those conversations confidently
• Get the right stakeholders in the EBR meetings

See you next Friday :D