I’m actually a little apprehensive about offering this hack because I know it’s a good one. But here goes: I’d never heard of G2 before August 2017. Capterra, GetApp, TrustRadius, and just about every other software vendor review platform were a mystery to me.
What I had heard of was Forrester and Gartner. The monsters of industry that seemed to sway public opinion on what the future would look like.
But one of the things I’ve always wanted to see from their reports is what the users of these products actually felt. There’s a big difference between what the CIO believes, what an analyst writes, and what the end user needs.
So when I got an email from Josh Marsh, one of G2’s (best) Account Executives, I was curious to better understand their user focused review platform. Based on the profiles of companies like Slack, Asana, Lucidchart, and Dropbox, it was very clear that the reviews were very transparent, objective and often critical. This was key. As one of the early team at Zight (formerly CloudApp) I’m not looking for praise and adoration, I’m looking for users to help me understand how we can improve.
I was hooked. My brain immediately jumped into ‘Beautiful Mind’ mode, imagining all of the possibilities of getting user feedback out in public:
- Prospective customers could feel more comfortable with buying
- More product feedback, more product suggestions, more bug reports
- More sales opportunities by reaching out to users who left reviews at bigger companies
- Identifying users who might be great thought leaders or larger case studies
But we had a problem. We had zero reviews. We had nothing on our G2 profile for Zight (formerly CloudApp) and like many things at a startup, we had to start from zero.
So here’s where the hack comes in.
Zight (formerly CloudApp) is an incredibly powerful tool that’s been used by millions of people. It helps businesses work at the speed of sight and use visuals to be more productive. We get thousands of new sign ups every month and many of these users give us great feedback regularly, but most of it gets trapped in NPS Review tools or in case studies on our website.
I now had a platform (G2) to expose the feedback, and a tidal wave of new users every month that I could steer towards it. So with two simple emails we went from 0 reviews to 275 in less than 6 months and were added to G2’s Top Software companies list.
And here’s how we did it:
1) NPS (Net Promoter Score) Reviews
When a customer gives us an NPS Review of an 8 or higher, we send a triggered email using Customer.io to ask if they would be willing to give us a review on G2. We offer a small incentive (sunglasses like these or a $5 Amazon Gift card).
2) Activation Success
When a user of Zight (formerly CloudApp) has completed creating ‘25 drops*’ we send a triggered email to congratulate them on their success, remind them how much time they have saved using Zight (formerly CloudApp), and ask if they would give us a review on G2. We offer a small incentive (sunglasses like these or a $5 Amazon Gift card)*A ‘drop’ is a GIF, screen recording, or annotated screenshot created with Zight (formerly CloudApp)
That’s it! A simple email to drastically increase the number of reviews you get, and start to build more credibility for your business.
p.s. shoutout to some of our favorite tools used here include:
- Delighted (for NPS capture)
- Customer.io (for event triggered emails)