Driving 83 G2 Reviews (w/ Nick Bennett, Alyce)

The metric: G2 Reviews

Learn how Nick Bennett drove 83 G2 reviews for Alyce in 1 quarter, in order to drive signups, improve retention, build social proof, and tons more.

How They Moved The Needle

Along with the rest of the team, Nick is focused on driving retention and shortening the time it takes for customers to realize the value of the product. As a team, they try to do that in a few main ways…

• Growing internal enablement: helping CSMs be better equipped
• Reducing time to value: getting new customers to send their first 20 gifts
• Building use case adoption: inspiring and educating customers on ways they can use gifting at their company
• Identifying customers at risk of churning, and running proactive outreach to prevent it
• Turning high-performing customers into advocates: finding customers who are very successful with the platform, and showcasing them in events, case studies, success stories, etc.

One of the other ways Nick knew he could make an impact, was by proactively growing their G2 presence. As a G2 customer, Alyce had always put a lot of weight into the badges and reports they received. But they hadn’t really tried to drive more reviews there.

At the time, Alyce would run a quarterly NPS score, and get 250-400 users to fill it out. So Nick went to the engineering team and asked for all users in that list, who had given a G2 review in the last 90 days, weeding out any duplicates. The total list was 330~.

Next, he sent a Marketo email, coming from him. He made it sincere and personal, hoping people would take the time to engage with it. In it, he offered a gift for an honest review: good or bad. All he wanted was honest feedback on how they could improve, or why they loved Alyce. That email drove 83 reviews within a couple of weeks. Most rated Alyce high, while some were slightly lower and offered product suggestions.

He then took these and began to repurpose them for a few uses. Here are a few he employed:

1. Soliciting feature requests or ideas for improvement.

Along with the reviews, he had received dozens of feature requests or ideas to improve the product.

He passed it along to the engineering team, and many of them got added to the roadmap.

2. Identifying relevant use cases for customers

Nick went through the positive reviews, broke them into buckets, and put each customer’s use case into a category:

• for ABM
• for demand gen
• to book meetings
• for events
• for customer success
• or “other”

He pulled specific snippets of each use case and shared them with the Sales and Customer Success teams. Those teams could then share these use cases with prospects or customers who wanted to know how to use Alyce in a similar way. These use cases helped close 4 new logos alone.

3. Identifying areas where product education was needed.

Nick isolated reviews where the respondent said, “I wish they had ___ feature”, to see if that feature already existed. Often, it did and the reviewer was just unaware of it. This allowed Nick to go through the product training with them, on how to use that particular feature. It also surfaced areas where the team could do a better job highlighting those features which were going unnoticed.

4. Using the reviews to boost social proof.

Finally, Nick would ask if Alyce could share specific G2 reviews on their social accounts, or if he could get certain reviewers to record a short 30-second video. These might be added to social, used in paid ad creative, etc.

Results

Before Nick began focusing on G2 as a dedicated channel, they’d get anywhere from 5-15 reviews on any given quarter. After taking active control, Nick increased that number to 83, and used them to drive upside in other areas for the company.