What Are You Missing Between QBRs?

The Silent Signals Slipping Past Your Customer Success Radar

For most SaaS businesses, Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) are the linchpin of customer success strategy. These high-stakes sessions are meant to rebalance value, reaffirm partnerships, and course-correct where necessary.

But here's the question nobody wants to ask: What's occurring in the 89 days between QBRs?

Spoiler: a lot—and not all of it good.

How Many Warning Signs Are Missed Between QBRs?

Churn doesn't trumpet its arrival with a drumroll. It sneaks up on you—through quiet changes in behavior, ignored emails, and flatlined product usage. Most teams miss it until the post-mortem. Why? Because QBRs are snapshots, not streams.

Consider it:

Did usage decline 6 weeks ago and nobody realize it?
Did a new stakeholder come on board who wasn't onboarded?
Did support tickets blow up in one particular module but nobody escalated?

The reality is, trailing indicators overwhelm QBRs—by the time you're discussing them, the customer has already begun to drift away.

Do You Know When Executive Sponsors Check Out in Real Time?

You get on board with the VP in January, synchronize goals, get aligned on a roadmap. In March, they're not attending calls. In May, they're gone. But you learn in June—when suddenly the renewal hangs in the balance.

Without real-time visibility into stakeholder interaction, you're not shepherding relationships—you're shepherding ghosts.

And it's not only about sponsor changes. It's about:

Attendee drop-offs at meetings
Shifts in responsiveness to email
Silence from previously active Slack channels or success check-ins

Your CS team must know when high-priority personas begin to drift away—not after the QBR deck is out.

How Much Opportunity or Risk Is Slipping Through the Cracks?

QBRs tend to spotlight the previous quarter's successes and failures. But in between? Expansion opportunities, upsell, deeper adoption, or value realization are ignored. Warning signs of risk—product confusion, usage declines, or passive dissatisfaction—linger without response.

You don't need more meetings. You need more intelligence between the meetings.

The Case for Continuous Customer Intelligence

Customer success shouldn't rely on 4 meetings a year.

What you need is:

Signal-driven alerts on usage, sentiment, and engagement
AI-powered summaries of customer behavior changes
Proactive nudges when things begin to go awry—not after

It's time to make the move from a calendar-based model to a signal-based system.

Final Thought

QBRs matter. But they are no longer sufficient.

If you’re relying on them as your primary window into customer health, you’re operating blind 95% of the time. The real magic—and the real risk—is in the in-between.

What are you missing between QBRs?