Go to market smarter - G2 makes a bold pitch to vendors

G2 has long been a place for people go to research products. After all, the best resource to tell you if a product is good comes from someone using it. But did you know that when a person completes a review on G2, only a portion of over 40 data points is offered on the review site? That leaves a lot of helpful information sitting in the backend, not being used. Now, with G2's Market Intelligence interactive dashboard, it can be.

To be fair to G2, all that data in the backend was being used, but it was mostly for static reports for paid customers. It was very much a ‘point-in-time’ look at how a product/vendor compared to its competitors.

That's changing today with a new interactive dashboard that aims to enable G2 users to dive into the details of their market position in real-time, providing insights around products, competitors, and customer preferences.

I spoke with Sara Rossio, G2 Chief Product Officer, about the new offering. Rossio has been with G2 for the last two and a half years and is responsible for the new product development team:

I've spent 25 years in new product development and 25 years trying to understand the market and anticipate what would happen next and just be like at the forefront. And when I came to G2, I started looking at all of this amazing consumer data and sentiment that we've collected through our review platforms and review forms, and I was like, this is just amazing. There's a lot of insight that we could share.

The interactive dashboard is the first step to providing vendors with the ability to keep their pulse on the market, track competitive products, and understand customer perceptions of their products and customers.

From a buyer's perspective, G2 shares a lot of information about product features and how easy it is to implement a product and do business with a company. But the company was capturing a lot of data around things such as what products were replaced, why, what they were looking for, how fast it was to recognize value and more. Rossio explains:

These questions that are very typical of, you know, win-loss or anticipated win-loss and then also really just understanding what value meant to them around pricing and contract information because there are so many shifts going on and how people package and value software.

Market intelligence in real-time

The G2 Market Intelligence is a real-time interactive dashboard built on verified customer reviews, containing three types of actionable insights: Product Perceptions, Win-Loss, and Pricing and Contracting. All insights are for the customer and the competitors they include in their analysis.

Product Perception is focused on aggregating data for a vendor and up to five competitors in a category. It visualizes how people feel about the products over time based on what she called the 'simple six (feature set, ease of setup, ease of doing business, meeting requirements, how easy as an admin it is to set up and use, and the quality of the support). G2’s pitch is that product marketers and strategists can dig into the data to help improve their products and how they market them.

With Win-Loss, vendors can learn what products their product is replacing or what their product is replaced by, in theory helping a vendor to understand a market over time and learn who is gaining market share and why.

The last set of insights focuses on pricing and contracting, showing how quickly products provide value and average discount and contract length data.

The data can be sliced and diced by different segments, including time, segment, industry, category, and region. Also interesting, you can dig down into the individual anonymized reviews that drive the data.

The Marketing Intelligence Dashboard is an add-on for G2 customers that is available immediately.

My take

Figuring out the best approach to go-to-market is challenging. Doing it based on guesswork or incomplete data makes it even harder. But that's what most companies find themselves doing.

Access to the G2 data from over 1.9 million reviews (obviously not all for one product) would be extremely helpful, especially when you have it in real-time and can dig into the raw data (the reviews) that drive the overall charts and data.

This is a smart move for G2 and does put it ahead of other review platforms that could be offering the same reporting.

Sangram Vajre, CEO of GTM Partners, explained why they chose a partnership with G2 to help his company evaluate vendors, saying that small surveys aren't enough. But that's what many companies use to understand their position - small studies often slanted towards the vendor that sponsored the study.

The key for G2 is ensuring that the reviews are verified and accurate. Otherwise, the data isn't going to tell the real story.