Run agency quarterly business reviews that expand accounts — the four-part QBR agenda (results retrospective, goal re-alignment, roadmap, expansion proposal), an expansion trigger inventory, land-and-expand sequencing, and price-increase timing. Use when an agency owner says "our QBRs are just bigger status meetings", "how do I grow existing retainers", "when do I raise this client's price", or "the client's goals changed and our scope didn't". Do NOT use for SaaS customer-success QBRs run by a CS team — use customer-success-qbr instead.
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name: agency-qbr-upsell
description: Run agency quarterly business reviews that expand accounts — the four-part QBR agenda (results retrospective, goal re-alignment, roadmap, expansion proposal), an expansion trigger inventory, land-and-expand sequencing, and price-increase timing. Use when an agency owner says "our QBRs are just bigger status meetings", "how do I grow existing retainers", "when do I raise this client's price", or "the client's goals changed and our scope didn't". Do NOT use for SaaS customer-success QBRs run by a CS team — use customer-success-qbr instead.
---
# Agency QBR Upsell
The cheapest revenue an agency will ever win is the next $2,000/month from a client already paying $6,500 — no pitch, no audit, no onboarding cost, and it lands at existing margin. The costly mistake this skill prevents is the QBR-as-status-meeting: ninety minutes of recap with no proposal, which wastes the one scheduled moment each quarter when the client's decision-makers are in the room expecting to talk about the future. Every QBR ends with a forward-looking ask — an expansion, a renewal confirmation, or a repriced scope.
Work the example agency throughout: Northbeam Digital, an 8-person marketing agency with 11 retainer clients averaging $6,500/month and a 62 percent gross margin target. The QBR is the top rung of the cadence ladder in client-comms-cadence; a founder attends every one.
## Operating procedure
### Step 1: Prepare from the record, and gate on capacity
Pull the quarter's three monthly reports from agency-monthly-report — the QBR retrospective is those reports rolled up, never a new analysis the client has not seen. Pull the client's margin from retainer-economics-calculator, because margin decides the play:
- Client at or above the 50 percent floor: expansion candidate.
- Client below 50 percent: the QBR proposal is a reprice or re-scope, not more scope at the same broken rate.
- Client below the 30 percent fire-or-fix line two months running: the QBR is the fix conversation.
- Agency above 85 percent utilization: do not propose expansions anywhere until capacity exists — sold-but-undeliverable expansion is churn with extra steps.
### Step 2: Run the four-part agenda (60 minutes)
1. Results retrospective (15 min). The quarter against the goals set last QBR, led by the client's metric-that-matters. Misses stated plainly with corrections — by now none of this is news, per the no-surprises rule in client-comms-cadence.… install to load the full skillSign in to rate and review this skill.
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