Gary

Nobody cares what the vendor has to say. I often tell my CEO they care what their peers have to say. In fact, they really care what a lot of people have to say. The analyst industry is predicated on the thought that buyers want to hear from independent third parties to help them make the best purchase decisions for their business.

As a result, both buyers and vendors build relationships with companies like Gartner and Forrester, with buyers looking for answers and vendors looking for influence. User generated content and the crowdsourcing of buyer opinion has led to the growth of peer review sites Trust Radius, G2, Gartner, Peer Insights, Caffe Terra, who is acquired by Gartner, all offer a place for users to post reviews for prospective buyers to evaluate their purchase decision.

Vendors have caught on to this trend. They’ve created programs within their organizations to incentivize their teams to encourage their happiest customers to share five star reviews, with the average review score being top of mind. Often, a four star review will lower the vendor’s average score, and this causes consternation within the organization. Even when a very happy customer has left that less than stellar review.

My guest on today’s podcast, Russell Rothstein, founded PeerSpot in 2012 to create a community in which buyers help buyers make better buying decisions, while at the same time helping vendors find companies that are in active buying processes, allowing them to focus on those who need a solution for their problems.

2:11

Gary

Russell, thank you so much for joining me today. Really excited about our conversation. Please tell our viewers a little bit about yourself and about PeerSpot. 

Russell

Thanks, Gary. It’s great to be here. So I’m an enterprise software guy entrepreneur. I started PeerSpot 13 years ago. We actually started it as a different name, called IT Central Station. That’s a whole story in itself.

For the past three years, we’ve been known as PeerSpot and coming from the enterprise software world, I saw firsthand how hard it was to get good information when making critical decisions about what software to buy. And so I wanted to build a platform, PeerSpot Buying Intelligence Platform that makes it not just easy for people, B2b professionals, to make decisions about enterprise software, but to get really good content..

Because I found that actually there were a lot of and there still are a lot of places to go to find, very superficial, and questionable content. But I wanted to build a site that’s really going to make a difference, make a difference for technology professionals. It’s a place they can go and they know it’s peer-based.

So from their peers, which is how we got the PeerSpot name. And they have content that they can trust and rely on. And that’s been our guiding light, our beacon, since we started the company.

3:41

Gary

I remember when you did the rebrand a few years ago, and I think I’ve come to you in the past, I thought it was so successful I completely forgot the first name of the business. And I thought you did an excellent job with that. 

Russell

So talk about Voice of the Customer. So actually it’s a really interesting story. We went through the process of determining how to choose a new name for our company and came up, used an expert naming consultant, and came up with a lot of really bad names.

And as we shopped around those names and got input from one of our customers, she came up with the idea that, “hey, I don’t like any of those names that you’re considering, but what about PeerSpot?” And it was just such an incredible, because we are all about tapping into the voice of peers, people who are like you and getting their input rather than experts.

And lo and behold, we chose our company name or we found our new name, our great name from one of our customers. Voice of the customer is often the best way to find information.

4:45

Gary

That’s an awesome story. And I often tell my CEOs nobody cares what we as a vendor have to say. They care what their peers have to say.

And that’s so true. So true. 

Russell

Yes, you can say the exact same words. But depending on who it is, it’s saying. And I think that’s really the key is it’s not the words you say, it’s the people. It’s the person who’s saying it that really changes the dynamic. Do they have skin in the game? What’s their position? 

Are they going to make a commission on what they say or do they say it generally because they’re finding products valuable to use. And so it’s so much in today’s world about who’s saying things, not only about what is actually being said.

Gary

100%. And as both a buyer of software and a vendor of software, I really see the value from both sides of the equation and the thing that’s interesting to me is that over the last five years, I hear so much talk about how B2B buying behavior has changed, particularly in regards to how much research buyers do and where they do it before they even contact the vendor.

So even before I, as a vendor, know that  somebody is looking for a product like mine, what changes have you seen since you launched PeerSpot? 

6:04

Russell

Yeah. That’s right Gary. So research shows that now 80% of the buying process happens online before the potential customer makes contact with the software vendor. So before they walk up to your booth at a trade show, before they fill out your form on your website, before they send an email or what have you, before they take a call from you, before they join a demo, they’ve done 80% of the buying process, and in most cases, they’ve already built a shortlist and narrowed it down to two vendors.

That’s usually where they are before they even engage with you. So that’s been a dramatic change in the software buying process. The internet and AI is empowering buyers, in many cases overwhelming them with information, but certainly giving them a lot of data that they can use. And they’re using it obviously, to that advantage. So the B2B buying process has changed significantly just in the last five years.

6:59

Gary

And it’s really interesting your comment about how they have two vendors on the short list, and the research I’ve read is similar to that. And it indicates that the first vendor that the people contact is in over 70% of the cases, their top choice. And what’s interesting to me is how I mean, ten years ago, as a marketing leader, I could have made my own decision.

I want to buy this product. I get approval and off we go. But today there’s a lot more folks involved. Frankly, buying committees are bigger. So even if I’ve got my primary vendor, there’s going to be others in the buying committee who want to check out vendor B and vendor C, is that what you’re seeing and how does that impact your world?

7:40

Russell

Yeah. So another thing that’s changed in the last few years is the size of buying committees. So like you said Gary, that those buying committees are very important. You get we’re talking about enterprise, right? Not SMB. SMB still tends to be, you know, a single buyer, you know, knows what she or he wants to do, will still make the purchase on the website and move forward.

But when talking about enterprise buying, now there’s more and more people on that buying committee. Those things are increasing. IT has always been involved, even if it’s a non-IT purchase. Obviously it’s security. Cybersecurity becomes even more important these days. And then obviously of all the business constituents involved in communications and other pieces as well. So those buying committees are increasing.

And like you said, yes, people are on different agendas and not everyone thinks in a uniform way. So there could actually be multiple products that they’re interested in. That is true. And that’s changed, as well, the buying process, in terms of you’ve gotten more people to please or accommodate. You’re never going to get consensus in these cases.

Oftentimes, a lot of people do have veto rights. So you need to often ensure that you’re picking not necessarily the best solution, but the least worst solution, or the one that’s going to, not get any, veto or red flag from anyone significant on the buying committee. And so it brings interesting questions because…

That’s a trend towards the larger software companies. Right. So the big guys: the Microsoft’s of the world, the IBM’s, Palo Alto’s, AWS, whatever it is again, choose your IT, choose one of your large, you know, $100 billion, 100 trillion dollar market cap companies. Plus obviously that these companies now have very strong marketing. They have more marketing budget.

So the challenge, but those are not as we know, those are not often the best products. There’s not the best widgets for what needs to get done. So it’s created a really interesting dynamic for the, it’s called the up and comers or the scrappy startups, for the mid-sized software companies is how to compete in that environment.

And again, going back to PeerSpot. And that’s where it’s ultimately the voice of the customer. You are not going to be the one. You meaning a marketer at a mid-sized software company. You’re not going to be the one to be the hero with a great, you know, but we’re going to put a great demo, a great marketing piece in front of someone, and that’s going to make the difference for someone to, let’s say, even sort of risk their reputation by not going with, you know, Microsoft, not going with Google or not going with IBM, etc..

But what will get you is a voice of a customer and obviously multiple customers, validated customers and customers who are in the same industry as yours, customers of people you can rely on, customers you can actually pick up the phone to, or you can message to. And you know that these are real people. Yeah, those are people that I think can help me sell why we should go with them rather than one of the large incumbents. 

And I feel really good about it, because I’m not just worried that some marketer invested in a really slick demo, but I see that this is actually the best product for me in the market, and in many cases, you can go from being just one member of the buying committee to actually being the hero who championed the software that actually brings the ROI, that actually, you know, prevents the next cyber attack, that actually is the one that, achieves the business goal that’s set out for.

And so I think it’s really the, the, the secret weapon or the not so secret weapon, but certainly the secret weapon of the up and coming and mid-sized software companies who are competing against these just large incumbents who have that brand and just broadcast their brand.

11:45

Gary

So that’s a really interesting point, Russell. And what’s the old expression?

Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft or name any other large, large vendor.

And I think you know, you’re absolutely right. Voice of the customer is where people are going. But how do those new entrants who don’t have the brand recognition of the larger vendors, how do they get in front of people? Even if you’re looking at a peer review site, how does NewCo get the same kind of time that the larger entrants get?

Russell

And it’s pain that’s felt by the companies that have the best software out there in the market, are oftentimes, like we said, not, very large trillion dollar market cap companies that are spending lots of money. Getting seen is though the voice of your customers being, what’s called maybe also the Dark Web, the dark funnel, which is that 80% we talked about of when buyers are doing their exploration before they engage with you to be able to be seen. 

There you can make a difference. You can really, we see so many marketing teams, growth teams, customer marketing teams, customer advocacy teams who are doing incredible, incredible work, leveraging their reviews from PeerSpot and having it be where those buyers are in that first 80% of the buying process. So it’s not just on their website although people do visit your website in that they don’t necessarily click the contact us or get a demo button, but they do some of the research on your website so they, you know, smart marketers put PeerSpot widgets on their landing pages and other places on their product materials on their website, so that those buyers see the customer proof validated by a trusted third party like PeerSpot. And they’re able to see that customer proof. 

Then obviously they go to review sites. They read those reviews on an independent third party review site, and they get that validation and they find our reviews elsewhere being discussed across the web. And then others, you know, other things as well. I mean, we provide the ability to, provide, pixeling and targeting of those, retargeting of those visitors to PeerSpot to reinforce those messages, but ultimately it’s about the voice of the customer.

And so social media is another example where you use voice of customer and engagement is much higher because it’s not your standard just corporate pitch. So you’ve got to be you’ve got to be everywhere that they are, but you’ve got to have the right message for them. And yes, there is a time and place to give a sales pitch or it’s a time place to give a sales demo.

That’s at the end of the, towards the end of the sales process in that first 80%, you’ve got to be ready and have your message in the voice of your customers. 

And I get it. I see your message. You don’t really control it either. And that’s another thing is you got to get it. As a marketer, you got to feel comfortable.

The fact that your your customers are not just going to articulate exactly 100% on message, how you want them to, but their authenticity is going to make a difference, and that’s going to be your best salesperson. 

15:13

Gary

You just led me to my next question. That’s awesome because I think you’re right. I mean, I’ve seen companies who pay for reviews, who incentivize either their customer success team or actually will offer gift cards to their customers.

How do you guard against inauthenticity? So sometimes they’ll only ask the customers who are going to give five star reviews, because any four star review lowers our score, right? If we’re 4.7 and it feels inauthentic if you’re really biasing that. So how do you guard against people kind of gaming their reviews? 

Russell

Here at PeerSpot, that’s been part of our DNA from day one.

Transparency is a very big part of it where the review is sourced from. So we provide that transparency. We also vet every reviewer by phone, very different than any other B2B software review site. So we talk to all those reviewers, every reviewer, and have a phone conversation and collect that review conversationally with them via phone, being sure that it’s a real person, really using the software, and have an in-depth conversation.

So that’s why also PeerSpot reviews are 8 to 10X longer, more in-depth, higher quality. Then you’ll find in other sort of Yelp like review sites of B2B software where you’ll find, you know, very common on those other review sites, you know, 2 or 3 sentences: “liked it,” “didn’t like it,” and not much more than that, just to get a gift card. 

At PeerSpot, we’re having in-depth conversations with technology buyers every day, and we get to the heart of their use case, their business case. We get into how they deploy it with other products in their environment. We get into gotchas we require them to provide. Even they said, yeah, this has been a really successful software at our company.

We require them as part of the review process to provide some critical feedback, some room for improvement. Because every software has room for improvement. There’s no such thing as perfect software. And similarly we also we don’t accept those, you know, sort of rants where people might want to just say everything is terrible about a software product, because if it’s been out there in the market, in enterprise.

It likely has some value to some users in some use cases. And so we ensure that we tell the full story. And that provides that authenticity, that trust that people know PeerSpot for.

17:43

Gary

It’s funny because it’s almost as if you’re saying that those four star reviews, warts and all, are more influential or more authentic than the five star reviews.

Russell

That’s right Gary. Some research has shown that Google’s shown that in the B2C world, that four star reviews are more influential in a positive way than five star reviews. Now we all know that, right? Go to Amazon. I see a five star review. I glaze over it especially, you know, if the title, the review, is all positive and my eyes certainly go towards the ones that have a mix of pros and cons.

And so yeah, we all know that that’s how we look at our own reviews when we’re doing shopping. And so, so certainly with software buyers there, they take the same approach. 

Gary

I almost sometimes look at the one star reviews to see how much I can discount them, what they say. Awesome. And it’s funny, you remind me in my LinkedIn posts, people will say great post and I’m like, it would be nice if you had said why?

Or maybe asked me a question so that we can engage.

Russell

And that’s more and more coming from people using AI to automatically, you know, we’ve moved past the or, and we still are in the place of AI generated spam, LinkedIn messages. And now we’ve moved on to people using AI to create spammy comments and LinkedIn posts as well.

So it’s all about building that authentic connection with people.

19:10

Gary

AI is a really interesting and kind of polarizing topic, right, Russell? Has it found its way into the peer review, the voice of the customer world? 

Russell

Yeah. Well, there’s the good news, and the bad news. Let’s start with that first..

Unfortunately, some sites have provided a way for people to create AI generated reviews in order to game their ratings and rankings and all that. A recent study showed that a couple of other review sites, one of them had up to 30% of its reviews were fake or AI generated. And that’s really a shame because that’s unfortunately giving a bad name to the entire B2B software reviews industry.

And that’s really unfortunate. And so that’s the dark side of the AI. Good side of the AI is that AI can be very valuable in terms of vetting users, in terms of summarizing content, real user generated content in an effective way, in terms of editing reviews, in terms of doing sentiment scores. So we took advantage of those things that always making sure that the raw content, the reviews are 100% real and authentic and genuine.

And that’s really important, especially given the latest FTC ruling. Gary, I don’t know if you heard about this, but the FTC issued a final ruling on fake reviews, fake and AI generated reviews, and this is something that they had been looking at for over a year and then came out with their ruling, just recently. And the FTC will now be issuing fines to companies who are facilitating or tolerating fake or AI generated reviews.

And so fake reviews include giving people gift cards and incentives in order to provide five star reviews. It’s allowing people who are not real users or customers to provide reviews, etc. and a fine of $50,000 per violation. So fake reviews, that’s a half million dollars and you can do the math. If it becomes hundreds or thousands of fake reviews again, which you might see on other other platforms and you know, when that came out, we celebrated because first of all, I sleep really well at night knowing we’ve got clean, 100% authentic, real reviews on PeerSpot and two is because we’ve been beating this drum since the outset, since we started the company, and it was really great to see the FTC validating that with their latest ruling.

21:51

Gary

No, that’s awesome. And it’s important. It’s, because at the end of the day, it’s all about trust that if you cannot trust that the reviews are authentic or by real users, are not influenced by the promise of some compensation, then the whole thing falls apart because you’ve lost interest in the whole thing.

So that’s so important.

Speaking of trust right there, there’s so many third party sources, right, that buyers go to, go to review sites. We go to analysts firms and obviously go to the various vendor websites. What is the most meaningful, the most valuable places for buyers, you know, to get the information they need to make their best purchase decisions?

22:35

Russell

And, well, there’s a role for all of these sources and sites. Again, we’re talking about especially in enterprise software buying. And we were never, of the illusion that analysts will disappear off the face of the earth or consultants will disappear off the face of the earth, or technology news sites will disappear. There will be a place for all of those sources.

But our belief is that Voice of Customer is the number one most influential source. And like I said, we started this company 13 years ago. And since in those 13 years there have just been, in, in society, in our country, in the world, more and more crises of trust, trust in our political leaders, people who we see on social media, people we read about and and other so-called experts in the industry.

And that disillusionment also is happening in the B2B world. So if you look at the data more and more, there’s less credence in the analysts, in journalists, technology journalists. I remember the days where those used to be very influential sources. You know, you don’t find that, nearly as much today. Consultants, people continue to use that. Voice of customer, reliable, voice of customer continues year after year to be more and more influential.

And now the most influential source in the buying process. So I think all of those pieces will continue to exist. This question of what the right mix is and where you are in the buying journey, and what we’re excited about at PeerSpot is that voice of customer can be used in the early stages of discovery, or even before that when you’re just learning, “do I actually have a problem that I need to buy something for?” 

You can tap into the wisdom of the crowd and the voices of other users to get that information. Maybe like Reddit, when you’re doing that early discovery, you can use our product  recommendation engine to find out based on people like you, what are the other products I should be adding to my long list when we start the buying process and then further down the funnel and and bottom of the funnel towards the end of the buying process.

There’s also obviously lots of very, very important ways that voice of customer and peers are helpful to make a good decision.

25:00

Gary

Thank you. Russell. Now, at this point in every episode, I put my guests on the spot and ask for three key takeaways for our viewers. What are the three best practices that vendors should consider to best leverage customer reviews to maximize their selling opportunities?

Russell

Okay, so the first one is to do it in an authentic way.

and that means providing attribution to the review platform that is super, super important. The voice of the customer. Don’t abuse it because if you abuse it and you’ll just become like the next case study.

We all see what happens in marketing case studies. These flashy, shiny marketing case studies are supposedly voice of customer because that’s what the customers say about your product. But because it’s got in-house by marketing teams, gone through legal, gone through communications, got the approval from the customer. It’s all positive. It’s all polished. It has zero marketing value.

Right. What provides much more value is that authentic customer. So ensure the voice of customer. You’re using it in an authentic, balanced way. You’ll get much further than trying to put a marketing spin on your voice of customers. That’s number one. 

26:22

Number two is it’s really important to drive business. You want reviews, voice of customer to have business outcomes.

And this is something that we talk a lot about with different members of the marketing teams at software companies that work with PeerSpot, there are some teams that are very outcome ROI centric demand gen teams, digital marketing teams, etc. There are other teams in marketing that don’t often, and not saying that they don’t want to, but don’t often spend the time and resources to prove the ROI, the value of their marketing investment.

And so my second takeaway here is that when you invest in a reviews program, when you invest in voice, a voice of customer program, ensure you’ve got the right tracking in place, the right attribution in place, even if it’s not first attribution, you know, ensure you’ve got some way. Because believe me, voice of customer will be influencing those buyers.

It will be, no doubt about it. 

The only question is will you be able to show it and prove it? Because at the end of the budget cycle, someone will ask, what do we get from our investment in customer marketing, customer voice of customer content, etc.? So do that work up front. It’s really, really important, especially in today’s market.

I think the third is to focus your time. 

Your customers are busy, your customers are very busy and you’ve got limited ask to that. Right? In order to generate voice of customer contact, you may be asking your Customer Success manager to contact a customer you or you may be doing it yourself. In the marketing team, if you have access to your customers, you may be sending them an email and whatever it is, you’ve got a limited number of bullets, you’ve got a limited number.

So ensure that those asks are going to give you the value that’s really going to make a difference, and you want to get from those customers high quality content, in-depth content, not just a one sentence sound bite that’s not going to influence a potential customer. You want an in-depth story. You want that long form content. So when you make that, ask to your customer, make sure it’s going to deliver the customer content. The voice of customer that you really need to move the needle.

29:03

Gary

You’ve given some really, really great value to our viewers today. Russell. Awesome. Excellent takeaways. I really appreciate you spending the time with me today. And for our viewers, just wanted to remind you to like, comment, share, hit the subscribe button and, subscribe to the What Great Looks Like podcast.

This is one in a series of excellent episodes. We’ve got more more coming up for you. Super excited to have had spent some time today with Russell Rothstein, the CEO of PeerSpot. Russell, thanks so much. And until next time everybody. 

Russell

Thank you Gary.