Hitting the wall in incentivizing your customers to write reviews by offering a $25 gift card? How about offering a potted plant? This is a top incentive in G2’s new tie-up with Sendoso.

It’s a bold move by G2 to widen the choice of incentives for enterprise reviewers of tech software and services. It may be a proactive attempt to combat reviewer fatigue in an industry fast closing in on six million reviews – something that rival TrustRadius recently highlighted as a “hamster wheel” for vendors “to drive high volumes of shallow reviews”.

G2 is also breaking the widely accepted norm of offering reviewers $25 as the maximum payout for a published review, telling Destrier’s research team, “we never set that in stone”.

Through G2’s tie-in with Sendoso, vendors sourcing reviews can choose to incentivize reviewers from Sendoso’s marketplace with gifts as diverse as a jar of cookies, vendor-branded swag, mini-me figurines, or what we’re told is a trendy option, a potted plant.

So, if you fancy your chances of keeping the Aspidistra flying on your desktop as a reward for reviewing some enterprise software, look out for vendor-funding incentives from vendors working with G2.

Breaking through the $25 barrier
A gift or credit card with up to a “nominal” amount of $25 – or local equivalent – has become a norm for other review sites, including Gartner Peer Insights and TrustRadius.

Although rewards usually are directly or indirectly funded by vendors, the practice has become accepted as “legit”, as the review site decides to accept a review and offer the reward.

Campaigns with an incentive usually gain more traction, and it’s a mechanism to give reviewers a little thank you for their time and insight rather than focusing on reviews just submitted for the money.

GPI says the $25 limit is strict, “whether you are offering gift cards, swag or charitable donations” and has cautioned vendors against incentivizing reviewers with anything higher under pain of penalties such as “an alert on a vendor’s profile, or suspension of services”.

However, G2’s Laura Horton told us that in its pre-launch beta testing of Sendoso, “vendors who chose gifts over $50 performed at a better rate”.

The move comes at the same time that TrustRadius CEO Vinay Bhagat complained that review sourcing is “so gamified that scores have become a skewed version of reality”.

Six million reviews and counting: How many more customer reviewers can vendors find?

G2 notes that the issue is rife with vendors providing reviewers with a little extra thank you – such as some branded swag or a box of chocolates. Therefore, its tie-up with Sendoso helps ensure that G2 remains within US Federal Trade Commission compliance.

Fair enough – but we think keeping up the volume of new review submissions will be the main challenge enterprise review sites face in the next 12-18 months.

G2 has 2.5-plus million reviews, and Gartner’s Capterra is at 2m. Granted, both cover more than just enterprise tech – but add 615,000 reviews on Gartner Peer Insights and 555,000-plus on TrustRadius, both enterprise buyer-focused.

G2 motivates vendors to drive reviews with its regular seasonal awards, while Gartner does the same with its series of Voice of the Customer: Customer’s Choice reports and badges. TrustRadius also gets involved with its Top Rated and Best Of awards, requiring net new reviews, although the qualification numbers are modest.

Destrier supports vendors large and small in evolving their strategic approach to enterprise peer reviews. If you’re curious to find out more, let’s connect.