Views on Reviews is a series of interviews with B2B SaaS professionals who provide a real-world perspective on what it’s like working on reviews. The twelfth interview is with Natalie Marcotullio, Head of Growth and Operations at Navattic.
Natalie Marcotullio is the Head of Growth and Operations at Navattic, a solution to make interactive product demos. She has been leading Navattic’s partnership with business software review sites G2 and TrustRadius to enable vendors to add interactive product demos to their product profiles. She also helps work on review generation for Navattic.
Natalie regularly posts on LinkedIn about how SaaS companies can give their prospects a better buying experience.
Without further ado, here are Natalie’s views on reviews.
Key Takeaway
If you’re short on time, here’s the key takeaway:
Interactive demos on review site product profiles help boost engagement and conversions:
- Engagement: buyers are twice (2x) as likely to click on an interactive demo than a screenshot or a video on a review site product profile*
- Conversions: 8.5% of buyers convert after viewing Interactive Demos, which is 1.7x higher than after viewing screenshots**
*According to G2 data on the buyer behaviour on their site; see the 13 minute mark in this video, Rise of Self-Service Buying: An Enabled Buyer’s Market.
**According to sources at G2.
Here’s the full interview with Natalie.
How do you increase engagement and conversions on review sites?
Before you started your career in B2B SaaS Marketing, you studied Marketing at Willam & Mary. How did you decide that you wanted to get into Marketing?
I always loved art and psychology – marketing seemed like the practical combination of the two.
You used Navattic to make an interactive product demo when leading growth at Map My Customers. How did your experience as a Navattic customer lead you to the Head of Growth Role at Navattic?
- I already knew the team at Navattic before becoming a customer, but once I became a customer, it was obvious I wanted to get involved.
- Map My Customers was a PLG company with a free trial as the main CTA. It was hard to substantially impact conversion rates when I couldn’t control the #1 growth lever – the free trial.
- Once I saw how Navattic gave marketers the ability to create these interactive demos entirely no-code and let them control their main growth lever, I realized how powerful it could be.
You’re now leading growth at Navattic. How do you approach reviews for Navattic?
- My approach to reviews is always to focus on longer-form, high-quality reviews over the quantity of reviews. Obviously, quantity is important but I think readers can tell the difference between an automated review campaign and really thoughtful personal reviews.
- So for example, we don’t offer gift cards for a review. We may send a thank you gift or gift card after but not upfront. I’ve seen gift cards work well for other companies, but in our case, we think it makes the experience more transactional.
- Instead, we typically have our CSMs ask after a few months of a positive experience with a customer.
- As a marketer, you have to be careful not to ask your customers for too much. So we also strategically decide who we should ask for reviews, case studies, or other asks, and try not to overlap.
What have you found works and doesn't in review generation (when asking for reviews)?
We have found asking personally from our team (and not in an automated campaign with gift cards) has been most effective. We may generate less reviews this way but we find the reviews are much more personalized and higher quality.
How do you get internal buy-in to spend resources on review generation?
We saw the power of getting to use reviews in the sales cycle. We are in a competitive market so having an external party validate some important selling points for us (like ease of use and customer experience) made it much easier for our sellers to differentiate. Once the sales teams shared some stories of how it helped in their deal cycle, it became obvious to focus on it.
Have you ever had reviews as a company-wide goal? If so, how did that come to be?
Not company wide but usually it is a shared goal between marketing and customer success. Since CS is the one in our org tasked with asking for reviews, it is so important they are part of the goal.
Measurement can be a tricky part of customer marketing, particularly how to measure the value of reviews. Can you share an example of how you've measured the value of reviews?
- I sort of mentioned this in the above question but it really has been qualitative so far. We ask sales to call out deals won that they used reviews or a product comparison in the sales cycle.
- We are also starting to get more leads that come directly from review sites like G2. In that case, we’ll be able to measure how those leads perform against other sources. If it performs higher it will be another good measurement of the reviews value.
Can you summarize what it means to operate in an enabled buyer's market for those who missed your webinar with G2 and Modern Sales Pros on the Rise of Self-Service Buying?
- Essentially it means creating a sales process that is designed around the buyer experience, instead of your internal process. For example, instead of asking a series of checklist questions you need to put into Salesforce during discovery, ask questions that will actually help you better tailor the sales process to the prospect’s needs.
- We ran this talk with G2 and pulled a lot of data from their 2022 G2 Software Buyer Behavior Report. In their report they show how buyers have lost trust in the sales process and that is why they are demanding this buyer first approach.
You made three predictions for interactive demos in 2023. One of them was adding them (interactive demos) to review sites. Why should B2B SaaS vendors consider adding an interactive demo to their review site product profiles?
- Review sites are generally a pretty high-intent action. If they are reading reviews of you and your competitors, they are probably an active buyer. Instead of them potentially waiting a week to two weeks to see your product from that point, letting them walk through the product immediately speeds up the sales cycle and lets the prospect understand if you are a good fit for their needs (saving your sales team from bad fit prospects).
- Part of a buyer first approach is giving the buyer more information about your product upfront so by the time they talk to your sales team, they know what they signed up for and are fully interested in your product. We see adding interactive demos or videos to your review sites as a need to have to fit into this buyer first approach.
In your blog post on How to add Interactive Demos to G2 and TrustRadius, when it comes to optimizing an interactive demo for review websites, you mentioned that what looks good on your website or in an email may not look great on a review page. What should vendors be mindful of with how to make an interactive demo look good on a review profile page?
- On a review site you don’t get the full screen like you may on a website or linked out from an email to show your product. With that in mind you want to play around with embed sizes or what features you show.
- Also unlike a website demo that is pretty top of funnel, a review site demo you can dive more into the feature functionality since they are directly comparing your features against competitors.
Now that Navattic customers can now add their interactive demo to G2 and TrustRadius, are other review sites like PeerSpot and Gartner Digital Markets (Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice) up next?
It is up to the review sites but I would be surprised if others didn’t follow.
You posted on LinkedIn that review sites are growing in popularity partly because of a shift in demographics, with almost half of Gen Z and Millennials checking review sites as their first buying step. How do you foresee the business software review sites evolving in the next 5-10 years better to meet the needs of Gen Z and Millennials?
- I see review sites becoming more and more open source. So for example, in the B2C world when looking for a restaurant to go to in New York you used to first look at Google reviews or Yelp. Now, Gen Z and Millennials would probably turn to their friends, an instagram account about a foodie in NYC, or Tik Tok to find a restaurant over traditional review sites.
- I think B2B will follow where it will be less reliant on traditional review sites and more niche sites specific to your use case or industry. I also think these sites may become more of a review aggregation site rather than be responsible for helping to collect the reviews or even have product pages.
In Conclusion
You can reach Natalie on LinkedIn.
To learn how to add Navattic interactive demos to G2 and TrustRadius, see:
- Navattic reviews roundup and summary on B2B SaaS Reviews
- How to add Interactive Demos to G2 and TrustRadius, Natalie’s blog post
- TrustRadius Free Interactive Demos for Product Profile Pages
- G2 Documentation: Interactive Demo
If you’d like to share your experience generating, leveraging, or measuring B2B SaaS reviews, please email me: joe@b2bsaasreviews.com
