TechBytes with Adrienne Weissman, Chief Marketing Officer at G2Crowd

MarTech brands are increasingly relying on customer experience and feedback management to build their B2B customer base. Naked Marketing, a necessary but seldom understood, has grown to become a key factor to achieve success in B2B marketing. Last month, the leading business software review platform G2 Crowd took a giant leap in the industry by raising $30 million in Series B funding. Coming on the heels of a phenomenal year that saw the company grow by 300%, G2 Crowd’s position in MarTech expounds the paradigm shift occurring in B2B buying market where SaaS buyers are increasingly behaving like retail consumers. We spoke to Adrienne Weissman, Chief Marketing and Customer Officer at G2 Crowd to understand how the leading B2B review platform influence software buyers to make the right decisions based on naked marketing of insights and feedback from professionals.

MTS: What is naked marketing?

Adrienne Weissman: Naked marketing stems from the reality that your brand and the solutions are completely exposed. Business professionals are regularly sharing both their positive and negative experiences with one another. These interactions strip away your fancy marketing tactics and expose your naked product.  Brands have historically shied away from facilitating these conversations, fearing that their business’s flaws would turn off prospects. But the interactions between a brand’s customers and prospects can be the key to the business’s success.

By embracing their nakedness, brands can add their own voice to the conversation that their current, former, and potential customers are already having. Customer advocates can do the selling for you as they objectively highlight your business’s strengths. Conversely, feedback from unhappy customers can simultaneously drive your product improvement efforts, increase the trustworthiness of your customer-reported strengths, and identify which customers may need a little extra attention.

MTS: In what ways can marketers expose their brands?

Adrienne Weissman: The best way to expose your brand is to encourage prospects to engage with current and former customers. Previously, businesses accomplished this through hand-picked reference calls.  But often those potential customers would search out other people using the product and ask for their unfettered opinions. Today, it’s accomplished through review sites, like G2 Crowd. Building a comprehensive library of authenticated customer reviews, on third-party sites like G2 Crowd, establishes transparency and trust with prospects – a critical component of closing business deals. Plus, the immediacy of review sites can shorten your sales cycle significantly.

MTS: What are the benefits of embracing negative reviews?

Adrienne Weissman: Negative reviews are a fundamental component of naked marketing. How you respond to and assist unhappy customers plays a large role in how prospects view your business. Publicly engaging with your unhappy customers and addressing their concerns show them (and prospects who are reading) that you care about the customer experience. Additionally, prospects researching your product expect to see some negative commentary. They know that no business solution is perfect and view a lack of negative reviews as untrustworthy. Negative feedback makes your solution, and its strengths, seem more credible to and helps set realistic expectations for those considering your product. All in all, negative reviews are essential to customer retention.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us Adrienne. We look forward to having at MarTech Series again for more insights.

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