Joe Kevens

PartnerStack

PartnerStack is the only company that has built a platform, marketplace and payments layer that powers indirect software distribution. Built to help B2B SaaS companies grow, PartnerStack drove over $120 million in revenue for businesses in the past year alone, through its network of partners.

PartnerStack has been named:

• #1 Best Workplace in Canada (0-100 employees) by Great Place to Work®
• #1 Partner Management AND Affiliate Marketing software by G2
• One of Canada's fastest-scaling private companies on the 2021 Narwhal List

Director of Demand Generation

Senior Marketing Manager

B2B SaaS Reviews

Marketers, business leaders, and software professionals (mostly) agree that reviews are (still) important, but often have doubts about if and how to use them. B2B SaaS Reviews is a site dedicated to providing resources that foster the educational tools – best practices, processes, and resources – to help organizations get the most from user reviews.

Founder

LevelJump Software

Demand Generation Manager

Influitive

Self employed

Traveller

Infuse Consulting Limited

Marketing Manager

Intelliware Development Inc.

B2B Marketing Specialist

Eloqua

Sales Development Representative

Toronto Global

Manager, Business Development

PricewaterhouseCoopers

Marketing Intern 

Hi there 👋  - I'm the Founder of B2B SaaS Reviews.com, Director of Demand Gen at PartnerStack, and Father of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, Clara. 

Before PartnerStack, I worked for other go-to-market B2B SaaS companies: Influitive (Advocate Marketing designed to generate more reviews, references, and referrals), LevelJump (Sales Enablement) (acquired by Salesforce) and Eloqua (Marketing Automation) (acquired by Oracle).

My professional passion is figuring out how software companies can align their go-to-market with today's B2B buying journey. This has led me to user reviews and leveraging the trusted voice of the customer and to partnerships, which are also generally more trusted than traditional sales and marketing.

If you're in B2B SaaS and want trustworthy advice on getting reviews, prioritizing review sites, and leveraging reviews in your go-to-market strategy, subscribe to my LinkedIn posts and my email newsletter on B2B SaaS Reviews.com.

What do SaaS companies that "win" on G2 have in common?
 
I studied G2’s top products for 2024...

To make it easy, I pulled the winners list into a spreadsheet and enriched it with some Keyplay growth and website signals. We aggregated G2’s “Best Software for 2024” across three categories – highest satisfaction, fastest growing, and best software products.

Full spreadsheet here → peersignal.org/g2-list
 
We then compared G2 winners list with the broader PeerSignal.org B2B Software Index (~5K companies). Winners stand-out on user satisfaction (ratings) and market presence, but what else shows up?

Here's what we found:

1.) G2 winners prioritize PLG and Community.

– 58% have a free plan or free trial vs 45% in our index.
– 55% have transparent prices vs 36% in our index. 
– 44% have some kind of owned community vs 29% in general
– As a practical matter, having an engaged community and/or large user base means you have more potential reviewers. 

2.) G2 winners are riding the AI wave.

– AI is infiltrating SaaS – 54% of our index now promotes some kind of AI angle, but the G2 top companies are even more AI integrated.
– 63% of G2 winners prominently message AI.

3.) G2 winners lean into their ecosystem.

– Multiple clues that suggest G2 winners are prioritizing their ecosystem a bit more than the average SaaS company.
– 53% have a partner program vs 44% in our index.
– 42% market multiple integrations vs 29% in our index.
– 40% have a public API vs 35% in our index.

4.) G2 winners aren’t just big tech.

– It’s rare to see Startups win Gartner quadrants or Forrester waves, but smaller orgs can make progress on the more user-driven G2 platform.
– 22% of the winners analyzed have <50 employees
– 49% have <250 employees.


Today's PeerSignal.org newsletter has more charts & analysis.
 
I hope the spreadsheet gives you some SaaS role models to explore. I'd love to add more to this in the coming weeks.

 
What else would you like to see here?


#b2b #SaaS #marketing #PLG #AI

Here’s a look at how the reviews growth at some of the main software review sites over the past few years. 

🔍 Here’s the Breakdown*:

G2

Continues to lead the review race. It took them about 7 years to hit the 1 million review mark in 2019. They’ve added another 1.5 million reviews in the past 5 years. 

Gartner Digital Markets 

A close second, they keep pace by acquiring review sites. To add to Capterra, getApp, and SoftwareAdvice, they acquired a fourth review site, UpCity, to get into the services space and surpassed the 2 million review mark in mid-2023. They’re probably near the 2.5 million mark now (unconfimed). 

Gartner Peer Insights and TrustRadius

They're neck-and-neck with review counts, playing mainly in the mid-market and enterprise space. 

Salesforce AppExchange 

I included them to show that user reviews aren’t just made on dedicated review sites but also increasingly on app marketplaces like the AppExchange. Salesforce is at the forefront here.  
___

Of course, for B2B SaaS vendors, review counts are not the only thing considered when evaluating review sites. 

There’s relevance (by traffic for your category page(s), the quality of reviews, review competition in your category per site, etc… 

…And probably other important considerations that others could add in the comments. 

However, review sites get most of their traffic through search engines. 

And lots of user-generated content in reviews provides the Google juice that helps these sites dominate search results. 

So, review counts are one imperfect growth indicator for review sites. 

*review counts are based on what I could find online on each of these sites (i.e. what review counts each site discloses.)

#SaaSReviews #B2BSoftware #ReviewSites

AI-written reviews have spiked in business software since the introduction of ChatGPT. 

This is according to an analysis of 245,000 reviews on Capterra, G2, and TrustRadius by Jon Gillham at Originality.AI. 

The three key findings were: 

✅ Depending on the site, 10% to 30% of reviews since the launch of ChatGPT are likely to be AI-generated.

✅ High ratings were more likely to have AI-generated reviews.

✅ Two of the sites, G2 and TrustRadius, have seen reductions in the percentage of reviews that are potentially being generated by AI, possibly due to AI-detection efforts.

Based on the chart, it looks like TrustRadius has done the best job, followed by G2, and then Capterra lagging behind (though it has had a drop recently)

So, while software review sites have manual verification processes which are highly effective at rejecting fake reviews, they’ll need to continue to find better ways to detect and reject AI-written reviews to maintain their authority and trust.

As a buyer on a review site, consider using one of the free AI detection tools — GPTZero, ZeroGPT, Writer, QuillBot — ​​ if you come across a review that sounds AI-y, like the use of “Moreover,” "It's important to note," and “To summarize.”

Thank you, Irwin Hipsman, for sharing it in the Customer Marketing Community Slack community and Scott K. Wilder for nudging me to see it.

Trust in peers continues to rise, even to an absurd degree. 

Peers are now on par with scientists (when it comes to trust and who will tell the truth about innovation), according to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer. 

😬. 

I first learned about the Trust Barometer Study when I was at Influitive in 2018. 

The company cited the study to support the customer advocacy movement (the category is created and was leading). 

The gist of the message: It matters less what you say and more who says it.

At the time, the 2017 Trust Barometer found that trust was in crisis worldwide. The general population’s trust in all four key institutions — business, government, NGOs, and media — declined broadly.

Also, Influitive cited the 2005 Trust Barometer, the year that trust shifted from authorities to peers, and what that's meant for the rise of peer influence on B2B buying. 

The 2005 study noted:

“People are replacing their trust in traditional authorities with trust in each other. They create personalized "webs of trust," cherry-picking information from sources and people they feel they relate to—colleagues, friends, family. And they now require multiple exposures to a message from a variety of sources before they will accept it.”

In 2021, Edelman declared an "information bankruptcy" and a "failing trust ecosystem unable to confront the rampant infodemic" in which "people don't know where or who to get reliable information" and "calling for institutions to provide trustworthy content that is truthful, unbiased and reliable."

And now in 2024, many trust those nearest them (peers) over scientists (the most dependable authority?). 

In business, it is safe to say that the messages that peers communicate are more than trusted by companies. 

Your buyers will trust what your customers and partners say about you more than what you do yourself. 

Then, after over-relying on our peers leads to mistrust in them,  you'll have to incept an idea into someone's mind because no one will trust anybody but themself ( 😉 )


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