Review sites are failing says the founder of a review site
Standard product reviews ("HOW do products work") are losing value.
Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius, one of the biggest review sites out there, recently published an article on buyer confidence and review sites.
The original value of review sites was to help buyers make confident purchase decisions.
Now,
They’ve lost focus on what buyers’ need to build confidence and pitted vendors against each other in a race to win favorable placement in 2x2s and accumulate awards.
Review sites have been gamified.
Review sites help buyers identify solutions but fail to help them build confidence to make decisions. They’ve put vendors on a "hamster wheel" to drive high volumes of shallow reviews in pursuit of awards and 2x2 placement instead of building content that helps buyers build confidence in their support for specific use cases. Scores have become skewed through gamification, and fraud is a rising challenge, leading to declining buyer trust.
Vinay believes a new approach is required to build buyer confidence and drive informed decisions. To help companies take steps in the right direction, he outlined ten ways review sites and marketers who use them are failing.
Implementing those learnings, Vinay outlined a comprehensive 5-step approach to giving buyers what they need to make a confident decision. He calls this giving them "Buyer Intelligence."
Buyer Intelligence includes:
Customer feedback your buyers can trust
Screen effectively for fraud; correct for score bias and invite all customers, not just promoters, to participate; and showcase the people behind the feedback (make it easy to visit their LinkedIn profile and validate that those profiles are accurate).
Actionable insights
Per the B2B Software Reviews 2023 survey, most buyers look for four things in reviews: product quality (68%), ease of use (62%), cost effectiveness (53%), and product security (53%).
Fast path to answers
Know your ICP, know what they care about. Don’t make them sift through tons of information, instead, do the connecting for them. Make it easy for them to find all of the answers they’re searching for.
One stop-shop
Give them pricing, integrations, security, demo, and review information up-front. Don’t make them dig for it or ask.
Collaboration
Help buying groups organize and evaluate their research to build collective confidence in a buying decision.
Buyer Intelligence allows you to recognize the nodes of trust that surround your buyers so instead of forcing your customers to go on a long hunt to find the information that’ll help them make a purchase decision, you provide it to them.
Buyer Intelligence gives buyers high quality customer insights that answer their critical questions.
Buyer Intelligence:
Gives customers a fast path to their answers by distilling reviews and other user comments into digestible summaries.
Enables customers to have conversations with peers who can give them the whole picture about what it’s like to work with a vendor.
Provides reliable data uncorrupted by sample bias or fraud.
Provides easy access to pricing, demos, security data etc.
And helps buying groups streamline their research and evaluation process.
Connor Jeffers, Founder and CEO of hapily and Aptitude 8, outlined 3 ways to create nearbound pipeline when you connect your CRM to Reveal.
Make the most of existing potential
When you begin a partnership, the first question you should be asking is, “What is our JVP? What’s that initial better-together story that promises a lot of value to our customers up-front?”
Get to the finish line with existing opportunities
The 3 I’s of nearbound—intel, influence, and intros—are extremely effective in helping you drive sales conversations and conversions.
Drive demos and upsell opportunities.
Identify in Reveal which prospects are customers of your partner and which of their customers aren’t in your CRM.
These are perfect opportunities to drive demos, secure an upsell for your partner, and deliver more value to the customer.
Learn how to leverage nearbound data in HubSpot from the people doing it best, here.
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