Using Customer Reviews as Investment Signals

This article is written in collaboration with G2, a platform for users to share business software reviews in real-time. Business professionals, buyers, investors, and analysts use G2 to select the best software and services on peer reviews and synthesised social data. You can access G2’s profile on Eagle Alpha’s data platform here.

Every day consumers use customer reviews throughout their decision-making processes. Software is no exception, and that’s where G2 comes into play. As the largest B2B software review marketplace, G2 is uniquely positioned to help software buyers and investors alike to understand which SaaS products to invest in.    

G2 Data Solutions provides investors with insights and data generated from the buyer behavior and engagement that the G2 marketplace sees across millions of visitors across the globe. Paired with G2's verified review data – which features over 2.7 million authenticated reviews – these insights enable G2 Data Solutions customers to perform due diligence, analyze competitive ecosystems, and identify emerging SaaS product, vendor, and category trends.   

What are the G2 grids?  

 If you’re familiar with G2, you’ve probably seen the G2 grids. Marketers use G2’s Grids to show off their recent product performance and positioning in the competitive landscape. The Grids score products based on reviews gathered on G2.com, as well as data aggregated from online sources and social networks. These grids can be used to compare products, streamline the buying process, and quickly identify the best products based on the experiences of your peers.  

G2 currently offers seasonal Grid reports per eligible category (including Segment Grids, Regional Grids, and Momentum Grids). G2 Grids help buyers understand the competitive landscape for a category by plotting each product or service against Satisfaction and Market Presence scores. G2 recognizes top products from a given quarter by awarding them a ‘G2 badge.’ G2 Badges include titles like: Most Implementable, Momentum Leader, Best Support, etc.   

How investors can use G2’s grid reports 

G2 Data Solutions customers can have access to the data behind the G2 grids. Investors can use this underlying data to track the momentum of a given product, identify product use cases & opportunities, source new companies entering a given market, etc. 

Investors can also use this data (paired with other data sources including Pitchbook, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, etc) to help with their sourcing efforts by, for example, identifying which companies have moved up in grid rank compared to the previous quarter. 

For the purpose of this analysis, we pulled a list of products that moved up a quadrant between the Summer 2024 and Fall 2024 grid reports as this can be a positive signal to investors. Paired with the buyer intent and reviews data, this can give investors a clear picture of where a product sits in the competitive landscape of a specific software vertical. 

For our analysis, we will focus on Salesforce Sales Cloud and Lusha specifically.  

Example Analysis: Salesforce Sales Cloud  

Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of many Salesforce products on G2.com. With over 23,000 reviews and a ‘Top 50 Sales Products’ badge, they have proven to be a strong performer in the CRM Software category. However, even with established products like Salesforce Sales Cloud, G2 Data allows investors to track indicators of recent product performance and improvements.  

G2 Data offers insight into how a product is performing across a variety of use cases. These use cases are selected by the reviewer. Many of our G2 Data Solutions clients use the product use case data as a way of seeing how horizontally distributed a software product is across an organization. Are they solving for multiple problems within the org, or just one? 

By continuing to bring in reviews across a variety of use cases, Salesforce Sales Cloud has proven that they are a top product to watch. Below we can see that Salesforce Sales Cloud has moved up into the ‘Leader’ quadrant on the Outbound Call Tracking grid.   

This last quarter, Salesforce Sales Cloud gained more reviews than the previous three quarters, making it easier for them to improve their ranking on the G2 Grids.   

This last quarter, Salesforce Sales Cloud gained more reviews than the previous three quarters, making it easier for them to improve their ranking on the G2 Grids.   

Salesforce Sales Cloud increased their rank in Outbound Call Tracking by 30 points between Summer and Fall of 2024.  

Understanding who a product is being compared to by software buyers on G2.com helps investors know who to focus on throughout the due diligence process. This is another instance of where looking into G2’s product use case data is helpful. Once competitors have been identified, the product use case data can be used to identify areas of weakness, where their portfolio company could potentially take market share.  

Example Analysis: Lusha 

In addition to our general Grids, we also offer Grids at the market-segment level, which only includes reviews from reviewers who are employed by a company within a particular market segment. G2 uses the following definitions for market segments:  

• Small Business: 50 or fewer employees 
• Mid-Market: 51–1,000 employees 
• Enterprise: 1,001+ employees  

Many of our customers look for up-and-coming products that are able to capture enterprise buyers. It’s seen as a turning point and indicator of product performance. 

With nearly 1,500 G2 reviews, Lusha, a global B2B intelligence platform, is an example of a Mid-Market company that moved up a quadrant in one of our Enterprise grids. They moved from the Niche to High Performer quadrant between Summer and Fall 2024 in the Enterprise Grid for Lead Capture Software. 

Lusha has also seen an increase in average NPS score among Enterprise reviewers over the last two quarters, with an NPS score of 100 (the highest score possible).  

Since 2022, Lusha’s Enterprise customers provided a higher annual average NPS score compared to all other reviewer segments.   

Lusha has also seen an increase in Enterprise buyers visiting the G2 profile over the last four years. 

Lusha has proven that they’re a strong product in the Lead Capture space even though it’s not their main use case. This product has the potential to overtake multiple other tools in a company’s tech stack because they cover seven G2 categories including Sales Intelligence and Lead Intelligence.  

Conclusion 

Software investors use the underlying data that powers the G2 grids in order to understand a given software vertical and make informed investment decisions. G2’s broad range of grid reports allows investors to gather insights on current buyer trends and individual product performance.