Prove value and run a business review
Objective. Run a business review that compares suitable baselines, explains confounders honestly, and keeps capacity value separate from financial realisation - producing an evidence-backed QBR the customer validates and a next-quarter plan.
A QBR either earns the renewal or exposes that there was never a value story. This lesson teaches you to build the review on a defensible baseline, to pre-empt the confounders that would otherwise sink your claim, and to be scrupulous about the difference between capacity released and cash realised - so the customer validates the numbers rather than quietly discounting them.
See it in the demo
The customer problem
Leaders are asked by their own bosses to justify every tool. A QBR that shows pretty dashboards but cannot connect to a baseline and an outcome gives the sponsor nothing to defend, and a sponsor who cannot defend the spend will not fight for renewal or expansion. Worse, an overclaimed QBR - 'we saved you a million dollars' with no baseline and obvious confounders ignored - actively destroys credibility the moment a finance partner pokes it. Business impact: the QBR is the single highest-leverage CSM event; done with discipline it converts usage into a renewable, expandable value story, and done carelessly it converts goodwill into skepticism. The skill is honest evidence, not optimistic storytelling.
How Time Champ addresses it - baselines, confounders, capacity vs cash
Three disciplines carry the review. (1) Suitable baseline: compare against the pre-Time-Champ starting point you captured in C01, measured the same way, same scope, same definition - not a cherry-picked low week. If the baseline was never set, say so and present the period-over-period trend honestly instead of inventing a baseline. (2) Confounders: name the other things that changed - volume mix, seasonality, headcount, a new client, a process change - and show your measure with those acknowledged, so the customer trusts you are not claiming credit for their own actions. Work Output lets you compare only after aligning work type, complexity, period, tenure and quality; respect that. (3) Capacity vs financial realisation: the Value Leakage recovery screen explicitly separates recovered capacity from cash recovered - present released hours or avoided rework as capacity, and only call it cash where the customer actually removed cost or converted capacity to revenue. Build the QBR from RCM Operations outcomes, Work Output cost views and Value Leakage verified recovery.
What to say / do - structure and customer validation
Structure the QBR as: (1) The agreed outcome and baseline (from the success plan). (2) What moved, with the measure, the baseline comparison, and the confounders named. (3) Capacity realised vs cash realised, kept separate and clearly labelled. (4) What the evidence does not yet show - the honest gaps. (5) The next-quarter plan with owned milestones. Crucially, get customer validation before the meeting is over: 'Do you agree this is a fair reading of the baseline and the confounders?' A number the customer has validated survives the finance review; a number you asserted does not. Talk track: 'This quarter the pilot team released roughly 180 hours a month against the baseline we set in January, after accounting for the volume increase - that is capacity; whether it becomes cash is your call on redeploying or removing it, and I would like that to be next quarter's milestone.'
Keeping the value types separate
The most common way a QBR loses credibility is conflating four things RCM Operations keeps distinct: recoverable value, billed value, collected cash and capacity value. A finance partner knows these are not interchangeable and will discount your entire deck if you blur them. Present each as what it is: 'recoverable' is an opportunity, 'capacity' is released time, 'billed' is what went out, 'collected' is cash in. Similarly, in Work Understanding, overlapping friction findings cannot simply be summed into a savings claim, and a simulated improvement (Intraday, Scheduling) is not an achieved result. The discipline feels conservative, but it is exactly what makes the one number you do claim believable. A QBR that claims less but proves it beats one that claims more and crumbles.
Objections and honest limits
'Can you make the number bigger?' - no; a bigger unvalidated number is a smaller renewal probability once finance reviews it. 'We did not set a baseline, so just estimate the before' - present the honest trend and flag the missing baseline as a lesson, do not fabricate a before. 'The improvement is all down to Time Champ, right?' - name the confounders; claiming the customer's own volume or process changes as your impact is the fastest way to lose trust. Honest limits: you can evidence what the product measured and the customer validated; you cannot assert financial outcomes that depend on the customer's decisions. Where a measure's production source or definition is uncertain, show it with the caveat and confirm with product rather than presenting it as settled fact.
Interpretation check
A value claim is only as strong as its baseline and its treatment of confounders, and capacity released is never the same as cash collected. Claim less and prove it rather than claim more and lose the finance review.
In the field
KnackGlobal's renewal QBR under ProHance pressure must show output-per-FTE and cost-per-clean-claim against the pre-deployment baseline, name the confounders (seat growth, payer mix), and present released capacity separately from any cash the customer actually captured - a disciplined, validated story is the displacement defence.
Practical task
Build an evidence-backed QBR for KnackGlobal or OVO: the agreed outcome and baseline, what moved with the measure and baseline comparison, named confounders, capacity realised vs cash realised kept separate and labelled, the honest gaps, and a next-quarter plan with owned milestones. Include one explicit customer-validation question you will ask in the meeting.
Self-check
Why must you name confounders in a QBR rather than attributing all improvement to Time Champ?
Because the customer's own changes (volume, headcount, process, seasonality) also moved the number. Claiming them as Time Champ's impact is easily disproven and destroys trust in the whole review. Naming them makes the credited portion believable.
Distinguish recovered capacity from cash recovered, and say why the QBR must keep them separate.
Recovered capacity is released time or avoided rework; cash recovered is money the customer actually gained by removing cost or converting capacity to revenue. The recovery screen separates them, and a finance partner will discount the whole deck if they are blurred.
No baseline was set at onboarding. How do you run the QBR honestly?
Present the period-over-period trend with its limitations stated, flag the missing baseline as a lesson, and make 'establish the baseline' a next-quarter milestone - rather than inventing a 'before' number that cannot be defended.
Why seek explicit customer validation of the baseline and confounders inside the QBR?
A number the customer has agreed to survives their internal finance review and becomes a renewal asset; a number you merely asserted gets quietly discounted the moment someone questions it.
Verified vs demo. The outcome, cost and recovery screens and the capacity-vs-cash distinction are demo-shown. Actual customer results, baselines and financial conversion are account-specific and customer-owned - never invent them; present only measured, validated figures and flag uncertain definitions as 'confirm with product'.