Transforming customer reviews into enterprise-wide battle cards

This article comes from Luis González’s insightful talk at our virtual Customer Marketing Summit in 2024, check out his full presentation.

Transforming customer feedback into actionable insights is a game-changer for any business.

I’m Luis González, Head of Global Customer Advocacy at Alteryx, and my journey across customer success and advocacy roles has given me a deep understanding of how to leverage customer reviews to drive enterprise-wide impact.

At Alteryx, we’ve moved beyond traditional review metrics, focusing instead on the meaningful insights that customer feedback provides—insights that power our sales strategies and inform executive decision-making.

In this article, I’ll explore the tools, tactics, and strategies we use to turn customer reviews into enterprise-wide battle cards, enabling faster ROI, higher adoption rates, and stronger customer relationships.

The power of verified reviews in B2B

Did you know that 86% of businesses consider verified reviews either important or very important?

Let’s think about that for a second. B2B buyers behave very similarly to B2C buyers. The difference is that B2B buyers don’t have the luxury of making impulse purchases like I do when I’m shopping at my local J. Crew, but they still go through the same decision-making process.

We need to market to them in a way that aligns with how they engage with their favorite brands in their daily lives.

When you’re about to buy something, whether it’s a product, choosing a restaurant, or deciding what movie to watch, what’s the first thing you do? You check the reviews.

The B2B buyers follow the same pattern. They’re constantly checking reviews to see what’s relevant, what others are saying, and how the product or service has been received by people like them.

The nature of reviews is evolving. It’s no longer just about looking at a star rating—“Oh, this has four out of five stars”—people are now diving deep into the actual content of reviews. Think about the last time you made a significant purchase or booked a trip. Chances are, you didn’t just glance at the star rating. You likely scrolled through multiple reviews, looking for detailed, in-depth feedback.

The changing nature of reviews

Now, consider this from the B2B perspective. When making any significant investment, businesses go through the same process. They look beyond the stars and into what people are saying about the product or service. The presence of qualitative commentary is now king.

Buyers want to see what others have actually experienced. Following closely behind is the distribution of numeric ratings—how many five-star, four-star, and three-star reviews does a product have? And finally, review recency—how recent are these reviews? Were they posted six months ago or last week? Buyers want the most up-to-date information to ensure they’re making a sound investment.

Do these factors resonate with your own behavior as a consumer? I bet they do. When you're evaluating a restaurant or a new product, you check what people are saying, how the ratings are distributed, and how recent the reviews are. These are the same key metrics that B2B buyers use when evaluating offerings.

The human element in B2B buying

At the end of the day, the B2B buyer is still a human being, not just a persona or a job title. They engage with products and services just like anyone else, relying on a combination of reviews, ratings, and visuals to guide their decision-making.

In fact, numeric ratings, review recency, and the presence of screenshots or videos are tightly clustered at the top of what buyers are looking for. Another factor that's gaining importance is common review themes—these provide insight into recurring customer feedback, which I'll talk more about later.

Ultimately, if you want to succeed in the B2B space, you need a review strategy that highlights what your product does best. By focusing on these key elements, you'll be able to provide potential buyers with the information they need to make informed decisions.

No gimmick review sourcing: Authenticity matters

This brings me to one of the most critical aspects of driving meaningful reviews: no gimmick review sourcing.

Here’s why avoiding gimmick review sourcing is so important. The picture below shows me with our G2 on-site rep at our conference last year, celebrating hitting 100 reviews.

While it was a fun moment, the excitement can’t end there. If I had gone back to my business and said, “Great, we hit 100 reviews, mission accomplished,” and left it at that, I wouldn’t have gotten the budget to do it again this year.

This is where many review-driving strategies fall short. I’ve attended plenty of customer marketing conferences where someone proudly shares how they generated hundreds of reviews in a short amount of time, but then the strategy ends there.

It’s not a sustainable approach. If you rely on a big push for reviews once or twice a year, you miss out on key insights and consistent themes that build over time. Instead, it’s far more effective to maintain a steady, consistent flow of reviews throughout the year.

The Alteryx approach to review sourcing

At Alteryx, we’ve developed a more consistent approach. One of the things that’s worked well for us is involving our online community and user groups in the review process. This engagement allows us to drive reviews year-round, without needing to resort to one-time gimmicks.

In 2023, we took a unique approach by creating a custom UTM link and engaging with our key accounts as part of our Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. We even coined the term Advocacy Account-Based Marketing (AABM) to describe this approach.

It’s a process that has proven immensely valuable for us. By engaging our top accounts through targeted advocacy efforts, we not only drove more reviews but also deepened relationships with our most important customers.

Leveraging advocacy platforms for consistency

Do you have an advocacy platform? If so, use it as an always-on faucet for reviews.

As advocates join the program and go through onboarding, they are naturally funneled into providing feedback. This method ensures a steady flow of reviews—around 10 to 15 per month for us—rather than the large spikes you get from one-time campaigns. This consistency allows us to track trends and recurring themes in customer feedback, which according to Gartner’s research, is crucial for long-term success.

Maximizing events for review collection

Another tactic that’s worked for us is bringing our review vendors to our largest user conferences.

If you’ve got the budget and time, this can create a lot of excitement and lead to a noticeable spike in reviews. But the key is that it complements the consistent review generation we maintain throughout the year.

A big push at a user conference works well when it’s part of a broader, ongoing strategy—not a one-off event.

By focusing on authentic, no gimmick review sourcing, we’ve been able to build a review strategy that goes beyond quick wins. Our advocates are real customers who are deeply engaged with our products, and their feedback helps us maintain a strong pulse on how we’re performing.

This steady stream of reviews ensures we capture genuine insights that resonate across the entire enterprise, creating a solid foundation for our enterprise-wide battle cards.

Overview of review vendors and their powerful tools

Let’s talk about the two main review vendors we leverage: G2 and TrustRadius.

Both platforms offer user-friendly portals where you can easily track, approve, and respond to reviews, as well as create UTM links for new review campaigns. This functionality is fairly standard, but where they both stand out is in their buyer intent data.

G2 recently updated their buyer intent data capabilities, allowing you to see which stage a potential buyer is in, whether it’s awareness or decision-making. This is based on how often they visit your product page—a powerful indicator of mid-to-late funnel activity.

On the other hand, TrustRadius offers a unique integration that triggers alerts to our Account Executives (AEs) when someone from one of their accounts is comparing or reviewing Alteryx against other products. It provides a crucial clue to help our sales team engage at the right time.

Where G2 and TrustRadius differ

While both platforms offer fantastic features, they do have some key differences:

G2’s asset creation service: G2 really shines when it comes to creating custom assets like GIFs, social media graphics, and infographics that align with your brand messaging. These assets have been invaluable to our marketing efforts, and I'll showcase an example later.
TrustRadius’ Chrome extension: This tool has been a game-changer for us. The extension allows you to quickly grab TrustRadius customer quotes and insert them into a presentation or email at the click of a button. This capability helped empower over 1,600 reps globally last year. Within just two weeks, we drove $200,000 in sales-accepted opportunities. It’s always available in your browser, making it easy for your teams to leverage real customer quotes in their communication.

Badges, qualitative reviews, and reports

When it comes to badges, G2 leads the way with a wide variety of options. They even offer regional badges, which allows you to share the love with your global teams. This kind of recognition is great for social media and internal motivation.

However, TrustRadius has a stronger focus on qualitative reviews, which is critical since, as we saw earlier, over 52% of buyers focus on the quality of what people are saying in their reviews.

Both platforms offer robust reporting capabilities, but in slightly different ways:

G2’s reports are powerful for tracking performance and understanding how your brand stacks up against competitors.
TrustRadius’ smart review taxonomy allows you to quickly deploy a website widget that helps customers find product-specific reviews with just a few clicks. This can be particularly valuable when helping prospects or existing customers navigate their buying decisions.

Persona-based battle cards

Now, let’s get into G2’s coolest tools and how they’ve helped us create enterprise-wide battle cards.

One of my favorite features is G2’s ability to create persona-based reports. For example, we developed a report specifically for the Office of Finance persona, which includes:

Optimized content for demos and lead generation
Quotes from actual customers in that persona
Relevant reviews, use cases, and performance badges
Reports showing how we’re outperforming the competition in this category

We’ve built these persona-based reports for five different groups, and they’ve become a vital part of our sales process. By sending these customized URLs to specific personas, we provide tailored content that resonates with the exact audience we’re targeting.

Infographics and reports

Another great tool from G2 is the ability to work with their team to create infographics. These are designed with strong customer sentiment in mind, powered by data from their algorithm, and backed by the voice of the customer. The infographic to the right in my slides is an example of this—concise, visually appealing, and data-driven.

You can also see a sample G2 report in the bottom left corner.

The real magic happens when we take these reports and dig deep into what our customers are saying. Instead of just reporting the number of reviews or shiny badges, we focus on giving our sales teams real, actionable insights that resonate with their audience.

By focusing on both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of reviews, we can provide our sales teams with the tools they need to engage with prospects more effectively. And at the end of the day, it’s about giving them something real, impactful, and relevant—because that’s what truly resonates with your audience.

Crafting a compelling message for our sellers: From reviews to ROI

Let me walk you through how we’ve taken customer reviews and insights to craft a powerful narrative for our sales teams.

What you're looking at here is the opener slide from the pitch decks used by our sellers globally.

But we don’t stop there. We back this up with customer-driven data, such as the fact that our customers report seeing a 3.5x faster ROI than our competitors, with 85% faster implementation and a 51% faster user adoption rate.

These stats, directly derived from our customer reviews and G2 reports, have become the cornerstone of the message we’re delivering to the market. Here’s how we’ve crafted this narrative:

Time to value

Time to value is the spark that ignites business ROI. To reduce time to value, companies need a platform that’s easy and fast to implement.

According to our customers, Alteryx ranks number one in implementation for enterprise analytics, with an average time to go live of just over three and a half months. Compare that to the industry average of over four and a half months—we’re 85% faster than our competitors.

High usability and adoption rate

One of the biggest cost drivers for most SaaS offerings is underutilized licenses. Our customers ranked us number one in usability, with an adoption rate 51% higher than the average data and analytics platform (40%).

Relationship score and customer satisfaction

Once customers are up and running, the story doesn’t end there. Our customers rank us 10% higher than the average at 92%. This shows that our customers find us easy to do business with.

Equipping our sellers with customer-driven data

All of these insights and stats have been carefully crafted into golden pitch decks for our sellers worldwide.

We’re extremely proud of what we’ve built, combining real customer feedback from our reports with a sprinkle of creativity to help our teams communicate the true value of Alteryx.

These slides are no longer just about numbers; they’re about telling a story—one that resonates deeply with potential customers by highlighting real-world results powered by our platform.

Leveraging customer insights at the C-suite level

Our approach to using customer-driven data doesn’t stop with the sales team—it’s now making an impact at the C-suite level as well.

Let me share two real examples from recent blog posts written by key leaders at Alteryx: our President and CRO, Paula Hansen, and our CMO, Keith Pierce. These examples highlight how the insights we've gathered from customer reviews are being used to communicate our value proposition across the entire organization, right up to the executive level.

If you take a closer look at these blog posts, you'll notice that they’re not just marketing fluff. They’re based on the real data points we’ve uncovered, and they’re being used to reinforce our message to the market.

For example, in a post by Paula Hansen titled "From Economic Crisis to Opportunity: Accelerating ROI on Tech Investments," she calls out the 3.5x faster ROI stat that our advocacy team discovered through customer reviews.

This message is crucial, especially considering the economic challenges we faced in 2023. Paula uses this data to communicate how Alteryx helps companies accelerate ROI on their tech investments, even in tough times.

What’s particularly powerful here is that these insights aren’t just residing in the minds of our sellers—they’re being adopted by our executives to communicate with the market at large. This ensures that the value we deliver, as expressed through real customer feedback, is showcased consistently across the entire organization.

By integrating these customer-driven insights into C-suite communications, we’re empowering the entire enterprise. Whether it's our sellers on the front lines or our executives making high-level strategic decisions, everyone is armed with data that demonstrates Alteryx’s differentiation and ability to deliver tangible business results.

The impact of this approach is significant. It creates a unified message that resonates with both customers and the market, showing that Alteryx is not just another tech provider—we're a partner that helps companies achieve faster ROI and navigate challenging times with confidence, all backed by real customer experiences.

TrustRadius tools: Unlocking the power of customer reviews

Let’s shift over to TrustRadius and the cool tools they offer. One of the standout features is their review taxonomy, which allows us to tag reviews in alignment with our business needs and customer feedback.

What's remarkable is how TrustRadius seamlessly integrates these tagged reviews into their Chrome extension, making it incredibly easy for us to access relevant customer quotes on demand.

TrustRadius Chrome extension

The Chrome extension lives in your browser bar, always ready to use. At any time, I can open it, filter reviews by industry, persona, or other segmentation criteria, and it instantly provides me with the right Trust Quote—a snippet from a full review based on the tags we’ve set up in the backend.

This tool also enabled us to deploy TrustRadius’ Trust Quote Widget on our product website pages, a move that proved especially useful in promoting one of our niche products, Intelligence Suite. This product specializes in natural language processing and predictive analytics, and finding the right customer feedback to highlight on the product pages was critical.

Instead of manually sifting through hundreds of reviews, I used specific tags like "natural language processing" and TrustRadius instantly surfaced the most relevant feedback. Their review taxonomy deserves a lot of credit for that efficiency.

Supporting sales with trust quotes

Let me give you an example of how the TrustRadius Chrome extension works in practice.

You can see Trust Quotes pulled from the Chrome extension above. One quote highlights our strategic partnership with Snowflake, another is focused on competitive scenarios (such as competing with Tableau Prep), and there’s also a quote offering a high-level executive vision of how our solutions are perceived.

This tool has been invaluable for our SDRs (Sales Development Representatives), especially when they need to align their messaging with specific personas.

For instance, they can easily filter Trust Quotes by industry—say, consumer packaged goods or supply chain—and instantly produce relevant quotes to support their claims. Instead of simply telling a prospect what Alteryx can do, our SDRs can now back it up with real customer feedback.

Here’s an example:

Persona: Office of the CFO
Need: Automation
Trust Quote: "Alteryx automates the office of the CFO."

This gives the SDR the ability to showcase customer success stories in real-time, making the conversation much more credible and engaging. The extension even helps tackle tough personas like the CIO, providing quotes that speak to governance and control over access to data.

Internal success and case study results

To demonstrate the value of this tool, we ran a campaign with our global SDRs. We provided them with solutions blueprints, and they used the Chrome extension to pull Trust Quotes that aligned with their prospects' personas and industries.

We incentivized the team with a fun spiff: they had to prove that they used the Chrome extension in their follow-up with prospects.

The results were impressive. In just two weeks, over 1,600 reps were using the tool, which directly resulted in three sales-accepted opportunities worth over $200,000. This quick success was even showcased in a TrustRadius case study, highlighting how the deployment of the Chrome extension led to real business outcomes in a very short time frame.

The TrustRadius Chrome extension has become a game-changer for us. It allows our teams to pull real customer reviews and quotes at the click of a button, making our pitches far more powerful.

Key takeaways: Focus on impact, not just numbers

Let me leave you with a few important takeaways. You may have noticed that I didn’t mention NPS (Net Promoter Score) or renewals—and yes, that’s intentional. These are often seen as critical metrics, but reviews tied to these moments in time are exactly that—just moments.

They can be influenced by specific circumstances, both good and bad. For example, even a renewal can be a negative experience. I’ve seen it happen: the negotiation goes badly, but the client renews anyway because our platform is so ingrained in their business processes. Salesforce might just show that "X client renewed," and there might be a process in place to request a review after that renewal, but the context behind it could be far from ideal.

That’s why I’m not a fan of cookie-cutter review requests tied to specific events like renewals. Instead, I prefer to think of review sourcing as a steady leaky faucet—one that drips reviews throughout the year.

This method ensures a constant flow of reviews, creating consistent messaging over time. As I mentioned earlier, according to Gartner’s data, buyers look for consistent themes in reviews, not just isolated positive moments.

If your review strategy is non-seasonal and not tied to a specific point in time, you’ll start to see those recurring themes emerge. At Alteryx, we engage advocates year-round, prompting them to provide reviews steadily. This approach is even part of their onboarding into our advocacy programs.

And when we win awards from review vendors, we always close the loop with our advocates, letting them know their reviews made a difference.

The impact of reviews

You probably noticed that I didn’t focus on the number of badges we’ve earned or how many reviews we’ve received. Except for the one instance at our conference where we hit 100 reviews in a few hours, I’ve been more focused on the impact those reviews have driven.

It’s the incredible stats derived from customer feedback that have helped our business. These are the stats that are now part of our global pitch decks and being leveraged by our CRO and CMO. It’s not the volume of reviews that matters as much as the quality of the insights they provide and how those insights can be applied across the organization.

So, my advice is this: focus on the impact, not just the activity or output. It’s the insights from these reviews that will continue to help your cause, secure more budget, and elevate your function within the organization.

Reviews should be seen as a strategic asset that drives real business outcomes, not just a box to tick. That’s how you’ll make a lasting impact and continue to grow your review strategy into something that benefits the entire enterprise.