Get the most out of G2 Crowd reviews, buyer intent data, and Grid reports for your go-to-market efforts. Read this blog for best practices and tips.
This blog was co-written by Cece Lee, Chief Marketing Officer, Enable Us, and Lynn Pietryga, Chief Customer Officer, Enable Us.
According to Gartner, a majority of the B2B buying process is done without sales interaction. When sales finally get time with prospects, 17% of the buying process is spent with suppliers. In fact, when B2B buyers begin researching a solution, they cite web research (56%), vendor websites (39%) and peers/colleagues (35%) as the top three resources (Demand Gen Report, B2B Buyers Survey Report, 2021).
This is why technology and software review sites are an important part of a go-to-market strategy. While there are several available, such as Capterra and TrustRadius, we are specifically focusing on G2 Crowd. Positioned as the world’s largest tech marketplace with over 1.7M authentic customer reviews, both of us have worked closely with G2 Crowd currently and in previous companies.
With our combined experience, we pulled together this overview on how to get the most out of G2 Crowd for your sales and marketing programs. While G2 offers multiple services, we are focusing specifically on the following three areas:
Out of full transparency, Enable Us is a customer of G2 Crowd (check out our G2 Crowd reviews). We were not paid nor have we received any other consideration for publishing this blog post. Some of the features described below may require a paid subscription plan with G2. With that out of the way, let’s dig in.
G2 Crowd provides an efficient platform for users of your product to leave honest, transparent reviews of their experience — and for prospective buyers to learn more about actual user experiences as part of their discovery process in your company or product category.
Users can either write unsolicited reviews or be incentivized by your team to submit a review. Each user is required to submit a score of how likely they are to recommend your product on a scale of 1-10, what they like about your product, what they dislike about your product, and what problem your product is solving. Users can then decide to answer optional questions - on topics such as quality of support, ease of use, whether the product meets their requirements — which do not appear on the review page but do impact the placement of your company on G2 rankings and reports.
Since prospective buyers may try to research your company on G2 Crowd, it’s important to start collecting reviews for them to find. If you’re not sure where to start, here are a few tips to point you in the right direction:
The foundation of G2 Crowd is the wealth of customer reviews that is captured about your product, services and company.
Did you know that Enable Us provides a simple, quick Customer Reference tool? Contact us to learn how your customers can tell your story.
G2 Crowd displays a real-time grid for each software category on their site that compares all companies with at least 10 reviews in that category. Every quarter, G2 Crowd also releases Grid Reports and awards companies with badges for their quadrant placement and any additional factors where they have the highest score, such as Easiest to Do Business With or Highest Quality of Support. The grid ranks companies relative to each other based on their Satisfaction and Market Presence scores (more on those below) and plots them into one of four quadrants:
While G2 has a proprietary formula for calculating their scores, the top factors that go into Satisfaction and Market Presence can be regularly monitored by users on your G2 account. The top two metrics for both scores are your total number of reviews for that category and the number of reviews received in the last 90 days. So, a focus on collecting reviews and a process to collect reviews regularly over time are key components for your grid placement.
Satisfaction scores also focus on:
Market Presence scores also focus on:
Buyer intent is the ability to identify which prospects intend to purchase a solution as part of the buying process based on the specific behaviors that the prospect displays.
Based on the buyer behavior, sales and marketing organizations can determine:
“6M in-market buyers come to G2 every month to research their next software purchase.” - G2 Crowd
G2 Crowd captures every interaction that buyers have as they research and review solutions on their website. With over 6 million visitors monthly, they can provide sales and marketing with an incredible amount of intel on potential buyers.
While the identity of individual visitors are anonymous, G2 provides the following information to refine your sales and marketing efforts:
You can then set up notifications or search filters to identify the companies with the highest likelihood of evaluating solutions like yours. If you have ICP requirements, such as company size, industry or region, you can further refine the search to focus only on those companies.
Due to the type of buyer intent information available, your sales, marketing and customer success team can benefit:
We’ve covered the minimum programs to experience the benefits of G2 from a sales and marketing perspective. This includes:
But at the core of everything regarding G2 Crowd are our customers. For us, the voice of the customer is key to driving our success as a company and product with transparent communications, feedback, and collaboration.
By incorporating the G2 Crowd user review and grid report process into our voice of the customer activities, we have another channel for objective feedback on our efforts.
And we’re happy to say that we’ve received top kudos by garnering multiple G2 Crowd awards for our product, ease of doing business, and more this past year - check them out:
