Every Excuse I Hear About SaaS and Google Reviews
Only 71.3% of software companies hold a Google review, against 88% of the businesses in my data, which is 45 of 47. I went through the four reasons founders give me and weighed each one.
Every quarter someone at your software company screenshots the new G2 badge and drops it into Slack, and three people hit it with a rocket.
By Friday it’s on the homepage, above the fold, in the row with the customer logos.
I like that ritual. I’ve watched three companies run it in the last year and the badge was earned every time.
Nobody screenshots the other search.
That one happens at twenty to five on a Thursday, on the phone of a VP who has never heard of you, ten minutes before she has to approve something with your name on it.
She types your company name into Google, because that’s what people do with a name. Back comes your site, your LinkedIn page, and whatever your customers have said about you in public.
Who at your company has ever looked at that last part?
I got curious about how often it comes back empty, so I lined all 47 industries up by it, best to worst, and read down until I hit software. Number 45 of 47.
71.3% of SaaS companies hold at least one Google review, against 88% of the businesses in my data.
It fits the pattern. Software takes every check a person can type into a box and then finishes about average on the ones that need a human being to go and do something.
Four different founders have told me that doesn’t matter, near enough word for word, and I nodded along politely the first three times.
Then I went and counted. So here are the four, and a couple of them are better than they look.
”We’re on G2 and Capterra”
Fair, and I mean that. Your industry built its own review sites, and a buyer comparing five tools in a category will end up on one of them sooner or later.
But when does that actually happen?
The category research comes first, and during it your buyer might never see your company name at all.
The name search comes later. After the demo, after your champion has to sit in a room and explain to a boss why this vendor instead of the cheaper one everybody has heard of.
That search happens on Google, and the badge you screenshot every quarter isn’t in the results.
A row of stars or a blank space: which of those would you rather have on her screen while she decides whether to sign your paperwork?
”We’re remote, there’s no storefront”
I’ll give you this one, partly, because it’s the only excuse on the list with real weight behind it.
If your company is a Slack workspace and your customers are scattered over nine countries, a map pin is a strange fit for what you do. I understand that completely.
My data can’t tell me which of these companies even wants a profile in the first place.
What it can tell me is that most of your trade ended up with one anyway, because 71.3% have already collected a review on it.
The profile exists whether you tend it or not, and your customers can write on it whether anybody asked them to or not.
Not having an office doesn’t delete it. Not having an office just means nobody at your company is watching it.
When did you last open your own profile and look at what a buyer sees there?
”Our customers are engineers, they’re too busy”
Everybody’s customers are busy. My customers are busy. I’m busy, and I still wrote three reviews last year, because three people asked me nicely at the right moment.
People don’t skip reviews because their calendar is full. They skip them because the request never arrived, or because it turned up as one line in a newsletter that landed at 6am alongside fourteen other emails.
Engineers write, by the way, and they write plenty. Hand one an opinion and a text box and you’ll get four paragraphs with a numbered list buried in the middle of it.
Your customers aren’t the hard part of this. The asking is.
When did one of them last get asked properly, by a person, on the day they were happiest with you?
”Reviews are a local business thing”
Reviews aren’t a local thing. They’re a risk thing.
The local businesses aren’t running away with it either. Scottsdale scores best of all 24 cities I audit and holding a single review is still the softest number the place owns.
A stranger reads reviews in proportion to what they stand to lose, which is why nobody researches a coffee and everybody researches a roofer.
So what does your buyer stand to lose?
Her team’s next six months. Her company’s data, sitting on servers she’ll never visit. Her own name inside the business, because she picked you, and everyone in that meeting will remember it if the thing goes sideways.
That kind of decision sends people hunting for other humans who survived it first, and reviews are the cheapest evidence you could possibly hand them.
You’re just not handing it over.
The stars you do have are good ones
Before anyone decides software companies must be worse at service than the plumber down the road, look at what your customers wrote.
Averaged over every company I sampled, a software listing carries 25 reviews at 4.4 stars.
4.4 is a solid number, so the people who bothered to write were happy with you and said so where a stranger can read it.
If that’s what the handful who wrote had to say, what would the rest of them write?
Your trade isn’t shy in general, either. 76.5% of these companies link their social profiles against 66% of all the sites I audited, and software publishes more writing than any industry I counted, which makes it stranger still that everything you publish stops at your own walls.
You’re loud everywhere the microphone belongs to you.
You’re missing from the one place where the microphone belongs to your customers.
What my numbers can’t see
A gap this wide usually has something sitting behind it, and I’d rather say so myself than have you catch me at it.
I counted what’s on the profile today, and I can’t see the reason it’s bare.
Maybe you sell to twelve enterprise accounts and a public star rating means nothing to a single one of them. Maybe your legal team has opinions about customers naming you in writing. Maybe you point every happy customer at G2 on purpose and the strategy is working beautifully.
None of that shows up from the outside, and I’m not going to pretend my numbers can see it.
So treat the gap as a question rather than a verdict on anybody.
Who’s actually asking?
I think your org chart does more damage here than all four excuses put together.
The person your customer trusts sits on support or customer success. They hear “you saved me” on a Tuesday, they say thanks, and they close the ticket without another thought.
The person who wants reviews sits in marketing, three floors and one Slack channel away, and has never spoken to that customer in her life.
So the request lives between two desks and never gets made by anyone. Who owns that job at your company today?
Move it. Give the review link to the people who are already in the conversation, and write the sentence for them so nobody has to invent one at 4pm on a Friday.
The mechanics are a single link that drops a customer straight into the review box, and it’s already sitting in your own profile waiting to be copied.
Two details matter more than they sound like they should.
Say Google out loud in the ask. “Leave us a review” gets read as G2 by a lot of your customers, and off they go to the site you didn’t need them on.
And ask one person at a time, with their own name at the top. A blast to your whole list gets you nothing at all, while a short note from the rep who fixed their problem gets you a paragraph worth reading.
Send me the page
Go and find whoever on your team talks to customers most, then ask them how many Google reviews they’ve requested this year. What number are you expecting?
If the answer turns out to be zero, you don’t have a marketing problem. You have a nobody-was-asked problem, and it’s the cheapest thing on this entire list to fix. Assisted living homes have it worse than you do, which is why I tell them to sort the rating out before anyone touches the website.
Then pick three customers who thanked you in a ticket last month and send each of them a separate note. Not a campaign. Three emails, three names, ten minutes.
And while you’re waiting on the replies, send me the page those buyers land on after the search. I’ll go through it for nothing and write back with the three things I’d change first, in the order I’d change them.
Software companies are what I build for, so I’ll be biased. I’ll also be specific, and if your site turns out to be fine and your profile is the whole problem, I’ll tell you that instead and charge you the same.
