The role of G2 is exploding
In the US, 5 or 10% of the people looking for your category may end up looking at your G2 page.
Potentials customers using those tools they look at the top 10, top 5 depending on what they want to do. If you are not in the top 10 it can be a bad sign.
90% don't look at your page because you are not in the top 5.
"At 360 Learning, 20% of organic leads can come from G2. When we were in the top 20 we didn't get any lead. When we were in top 10 it was 1 or 2 lead per week that sometimes did not conclude" - Benjamin, Head of US Operations @ 360 Learning
It's tough to beat the top 5: they do have a lot of reviews, conversion tools and 10x more clients than us but if you have only reviews + 9/10 or 5/5 you get to compete with them
How to start on G2?
Understanding the G2 score
G2 scores products and vendors based on #reviews, the customer Satisfaction and Market Presence, as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks. It's important to well understand the score calculation.
Example: Impact of grades quality vs. quantity of reviews
Here is a screenshot of the LXP ranking. Look at Bridge LMS vs. 360 Learning:
Bridge LMS has more reviews but 360 Learning has a better satisfaction rate (based on grades). They both have the same Market presence score (i.e., 68-69).
But the in the end, 360 Learning G2 score is higher.
"When you have good amount of reviews (+50), a good practice is to create specific landing pages per industry with filtered reviews. It can be an additional sales material they can help sales team to convert potential customers." - Benjamin, Head of US Operations @ 360 Learning
Choose a category
- There are many categories on G2: Benchmark competitors and make sure you are in the same categories than them.
- You will need 6 or 7 categories to increase the traffic you get on your page.
Start getting reviews
Just ask your "super happy" customers
The perfect speech: Be straight forward! Tell to your customers you love working with them and how their G2 review could help you to grow in the US market. Helping a french company growing in the US it always works as a story.
"Volume of reviews to target is not specific. Look at your competitors and do more than them!" - Benjamin, Head of US Operations @ 360 Learning.
Train and incentive your customer success team to generate good reviews:
- Give them a full picture of G2 impact and track the key kpis every week (# of reviews, av. rate, ...).
- Train the customer success team to regularly ask your customer to give a review (for example, at the end of the follow up meeting, keep 5 minutes to ask and explain why it's important for the company).
- Reward them : the person who bring the most reviews in the month or define a bonus for every review above 9/10.
Use and translate your local countries customers reviews:
When you start to expand, sometimes it's hard to get a lot of customers agreed to push a review. 360 Learning did the extra-mile and translated french reviews into English ones.
Here how they did :
- Rewrote the G2 survey on an excel file.
- Send it to french customer in french.
- Once filled, translate the reviews in english.
"It's a bit of work but a review is usually 3 lines. It took 5 min per review for our customer success team to translate and they've got rewarded for this work. With this strategy, we went from 30 reviews to around 120. This allowed us to climb the ladder." - Benjamin, Head of US Operations @ 360 Learning.
Maintaining and using your G2 page
Dealing with bad reviews
if you have bad reviews you can ask the system to take them out. G2 and Capterra are flexible: if you say it was a way to pressure from the clients, they took out all the reviews we didn't like.
Dealing with old reviews
Don't loose the value of the reviews after 1 or 2 years. a recommendation is a recommendation. G2 says that reviews over 12 months are less valuable than recent reviews. most reviews are anonymous.
Buying G2 data
On G2 (and also on Capterra), you can buy the data of all the people looking for your category but that didn't visit your page. Then, you can use this data for marketing campaigns, sales calls, ... At 360 Learning, they pay around 30K€ per year to automatically get this data every week.
G2 vs ...
👉 Capterra
Capterra is a free service that help businesses find the right software for any business.
For vendors, it's a pay per click. It brings more lead but you pay way more for those leads.
👉 Gartner
Gartner delivers technology research to global technology business leaders to make informed decisions on key initiatives.
"Gartner is a real opportunity to make lobbying with analysts. With the time you get close to them and you can ask about competitors and market trends. The more you know them, the deeper you go in the discussion. When you have unknown US competitors because not present on the french market, it's good to know them with the opinion of analysts." - Michael, CEO of CommandersAct
👉 Forrester
Forrester provides proprietary research, consumer and business data, custom advisory and consulting, events, online communities and executive programs globally.
"We used to work with Forrester a long time ago. We stopped because we didn't want to share our roadmap with analysts that were close to competition." - Michael, CEO of CommandersAct
