# How we draft QBR decks for key accounts

The QBR-prep agent we run on Kortix — connected to Postgres, HubSpot, Google Slides, and Google Docs. Weekly, for every account due a quarterly business review, it pulls usage trends, account health, support activity, and expansion signals into a draft deck and briefing doc for the CSM to review and present.

Canonical page: https://kortix.com/use-cases/qbr-prep

A quarterly business review is only as good as its prep. The account's usage
trend lives in the product database, its health score and CSM notes live in
HubSpot, the support history is scattered across a quarter's worth of tickets,
and the expansion angle is usually in someone's head. Pulling all of that into
a deck by hand takes an afternoon per account, and with a book of a few dozen
accounts, QBR week turns into a slide-building sprint instead of an
account-strategy exercise.

We run a QBR-prep agent on Kortix that does that assembly every week. It reads
across the source systems, drafts a deck and a companion briefing doc per
account due a review, and stops there. It never writes back to a source system
and never presents anything — the CSM opens the draft, edits the story, and
walks into the room with it.

- **Team:** Kortix
- **Runs on:** Weekly cron
- **Connected systems:** Postgres · HubSpot · Google Slides · Google Docs
- **Mode:** Read-only across sources · draft deck + briefing doc per account

## The problem

The material for a QBR is real but scattered. Product usage trends sit in
Postgres. Account health, CSM notes, and the deal history sit in HubSpot.
Support friction is a quarter's worth of tickets no one has time to reread.
Expansion opportunities are pattern-matched from all of the above, usually
from memory, right before the meeting.

Templates help with layout but not with assembly — someone still has to pull
every number, read every note, and decide what's worth a slide. Doing that for
one account is an afternoon. Doing it for every account due a review, every
week, is the part that gets skipped, rushed, or handed to whoever has the
least on their plate that week — which is exactly when a CSM walks in
under-prepared for a renewal conversation.

## What we built

On Kortix, a weekly cron triggers an agent. It spawns an isolated session with
read-only access to Postgres and HubSpot, finds every account whose next QBR
falls due in the coming window, and for each one pulls usage trends, value
delivered, account health, a support summary, and expansion opportunities.
It assembles that into a draft deck in Google Slides and a companion briefing
doc in Google Docs with the backup detail, then stops. Nothing is shared,
presented, or sent — the CSM reviews both and takes it from there.

## How it works

### Run on a weekly cron

A **cron trigger** fires the agent once a week. Each firing spawns a fresh
**session** in its own sandbox — this run doesn't remember last week's, so it
recomputes who's due and what their numbers look like from the current state
of the data every time.

### Give the agent the QBR structure

What goes in a QBR deck, and in what order, lives as a **skill** that travels
with the agent: how we define a usage trend, what "value delivered" means for
our product, how account health rolls up, how to summarize a quarter of
support activity without burying the one issue that matters, and what counts
as a credible expansion signal versus a guess.

### Connect the sources read-only, and the deck read-write

Through scoped **connectors**, brokered server-side so no raw token reaches
the model, the agent:

- **Reads usage trends from Postgres** — activity and adoption over the
quarter, per account.
- **Reads account and CSM data from HubSpot** — health score, CSM notes,
support ticket history, and the deal record, to find who's due and why.
- **Writes the draft deck to Google Slides** — the QBR deck itself, one per
due account.
- **Writes the briefing doc to Google Docs** — the backup detail behind every
slide, for the CSM to reference when a question goes deeper than the deck.

### Set the guardrails

Postgres and HubSpot are **read-only** — the agent cannot change a usage
record, a health score, a note, or a deal, even though it reads deeply from
all of them. Its only writes are the new deck and the new doc it creates.
Credentials are encrypted in the Secrets Manager and injected at runtime,
scoped to the agents you grant them to.

### Land the draft, stop there

Each due account ends the run with a draft deck and a briefing doc under a
shared folder, named for the account and the quarter. The agent reports where
each one landed and stops. The CSM reviews the story, edits the commentary,
and is the one who opens the meeting and presents it.

> **The pattern**
> A weekly **cron** spawns a session with read-only **connectors** into
> Postgres and HubSpot. The deck structure lives as a **skill**. The agent
> reads the account's quarter and writes exactly two drafts — a deck and a
> briefing doc — then stops for the CSM.

## Guardrails

The agent reads deeply across account data, so its access is scoped and its
output is bounded:

- **Isolation.** Every run happens in its own isolated sandbox. The session is granted access only to the systems it's scoped to, and only the new deck and doc are written back out.
- **Scoped secrets.** The Postgres and HubSpot credentials are encrypted in the
  Secrets Manager and injected into the sandbox at runtime, scoped to the agents you grant them to.
- **Read-only across the source systems.** Postgres and HubSpot are read-only
  connectors. The agent cannot change a usage record, a health score, a CSM
  note, or a deal — it can only draw from them.
- **Draft only, nothing sent.** The deck and briefing doc are drafts. The
  agent never shares, presents, or emails either one — the CSM reviews and
  presents.
- **Everything is code.** The deck structure, the skill, and the per-system
  permissions are files in the repo, versioned and changed through a reviewed
  **change request** rather than a dashboard setting.

## The outcome

- **Weekly:** Every account due a review restaged before the CSM's meeting
- **Read-only:** Nothing written back to Postgres or HubSpot
- **2 drafts:** One deck and one briefing doc per account, every time

The afternoon of pulling numbers and rereading tickets now happens automatically,
every week, for every account that needs it. The CSM opens a draft deck that
already has the trend, the health picture, the support summary, and a
candidate expansion angle, edits the story into their own words, and presents
it themselves.