Executive Business Review Prep

---
name: executive-business-review-prep
description: Use when prepping for an annual Executive Business Review with the customer's C-suite. Triggers on "EBR", "executive business review", "C-suite review", "annual exec review".
---

# Executive Business Review Prep

EBRs are not bigger QBRs. The audience is different (executives, not operators), the time is shorter (often 30-45 min), and the questions are different ("is this strategic for us?" not "are we using all the features?"). A QBR deck delivered to a CFO will lose you the account.

## Required inputs

1. **Customer + ARR + tenure**
2. **C-suite audience** — specific roles attending, what they each care about
3. **Business outcomes delivered, in their language and currency** — dollars saved, hours reclaimed, revenue captured, risk mitigated
4. **Strategic context** — what's their company facing? IPO? cost cutting? expansion? acquisition?
5. **Multi-year context** — what's their last 12 months looked like with you? Year 2-3 ahead?
6. **Your exec co-presenter** — who's joining from your side, what they need to know
7. **The decision you want to come out with** — multi-year contract? expansion? sponsorship of a strategic project?

If the user only has feature-usage data and no business outcomes, push back hard: "An EBR without business outcomes is dead on arrival. Spend 2 weeks getting outcome data before this meeting — talk to the champion's finance team if needed."

## Structure (8-10 slides max, 30 min target)

### Slide 1: Cover
Customer logo. Date. Attendees on both sides.

### Slide 2: Where you were 12 months ago — in their words
1 short paragraph. Their world before, with the specific pain that drove the original investment. Not yours — theirs.

### Slide 3: Outcomes delivered — in their currency
THE most important slide. Dollar value, percentage change, hours / FTEs reclaimed. Source of each number.
- "AR closing time: 14 days → 9 days. ~$1.2M working capital freed."
- "Reporting team: 5 FTE → 3 FTE redeployed to higher-value analytics."
- "Customer support tickets: down 28%, ~$400K savings."

### Slide 4: Strategic context — what we know about your year ahead
Show you've been listening. 3-5 bullets on their stated priorities, headwinds, board-level themes. NOT generic.

### Slide 5: Two paths for the next 12-24 months
Two scenarios, not five.
- **Path A (continue)**: stay current scope, expected outcomes
- **Path B (expand strategically)**: invest in [specific area], expected outcomes including dollar value
Each path with rough investment, rough outcome, rough timeline.

### Slide 6: What we recommend & why
Your recommendation, clearly stated, with reasoning rooted in THEIR strategy. Not yours.

### Slide 7: Risks we see
Honest. Risks to their outcomes that you can help mitigate, plus risks you can't help with.

### Slide 8: Asks
2-3 specific things you need from them this year. Exec sponsorship of [project], reference call, multi-year contract, etc.

### Optional Slide 9: Roadmap relevance
ONLY if a roadmap item is strategically relevant to their goals. Not a generic feature dump. If you can't tie it to their priorities, skip the slide.

## Prep doc for your exec co-presenter

Separately, build a 1-pager your exec reads in the car on the way:
- Customer in 3 sentences (history, ARR, tenure, strategic importance)
- Audience: who's in the room, what each cares about
- Top 3 business outcomes — verbatim numbers your exec should be able to quote
- The 2-3 questions the customer's exec is likely to ask, with prepared responses
- The ask: what your exec is on the hook to commit to in the room

## Anti-patterns

- Feature roadmap as the centerpiece — executives don't care about features, they care about outcomes
- Adoption / usage slides — operator content, wrong audience
- "Thank you for your partnership" filler — wastes the executive\'s time
- Reading slides aloud — for executives, every spoken word should add to the slide, not duplicate it
- 25-slide deck — even if you build it, you won't get past slide 12 in 30 minutes; cut it now
- No clear ask — meetings without an ask are theater

## Tone

- Strategic, not tactical
- Numerical, not narrative
- Direct, not deferential
- Honest about risks, including risks to your own value

## Output format

Slide-by-slide outline (~500 words). Each slide: title, 3-5 bullet content, speaker note ("the one thing you say out loud while showing this slide"). End with the verbatim 1-page prep doc for the co-presenting exec.