Your review profile gets read before your homepage does. A buyer who won't open a vendor site will happily open a category page, filter it to companies their own size, sort by most recent, and read six strangers describing what went wrong during onboarding. That's the first version of you they meet, and you didn't write a word of it.
Which would matter less if the shortlist were still forming by the time the sales call happens, and it isn't. 6sense's B2B Buyer Experience Report for 2025, built on nearly 4,000 responses, found that the point of first contact has moved to 61% of the buying journey, and that "ninety-five percent of the time, the winning vendor is already on the Day One shortlist". By the time you're in the conversation the list is written, and third-party sources wrote it.
So a review profile works like a reference check the buyer runs without telling you: you don't pick the referees or sit in on the call, and all you control is who you've made happy and how recently. That's the whole program, and it's deliberately unexciting: a steady rhythm between launches beats a scramble, so here's how we run one.
When should you ask for a review?
At the moment the customer is happiest, on a schedule you set once, and never two weeks before a badge deadline. Happiness is easier to time than it sounds. It clusters after a clean onboarding, after a support case that went well, and after a renewal, and each of those is already a field in your CRM.
The program we documented at Coro ran on four request channels, and the split between them mattered more than any one of them did.
| Channel | Who it goes to | When to run it |
|---|---|---|
| Automated campaign | Customers at 3 to 6 months | Always on |
| Automated campaign | Customers past 6 months | Always on |
| Platform-originated campaign | The review site's outreach list | Quarterly |
| Manual note from the account manager | Named accounts only | Time-sensitive |
Look at what that last row costs, because a personal email from the account owner converts better than anything automated, which is why we keep it rare. Spend it on routine collection and you'll have nothing left for the quarter you fall short. Short of what, though? Badges carry a volume floor, and ours was 20 reviews a quarter minimum, which sounds steep until you divide it across a customer base and see a trickle you can automate. Miss the floor and the badge lapses, and that badge is on your homepage, in your deck, and inside your sales collateral.
Who asks, and who answers?
Different teams, on purpose. Customer Success drives collection, because they hold the relationship and know who's happy this month, while product marketing owns the responses, because a public reply is messaging read by people who are not the reviewer. So why not hand the whole thing to one team and save the coordination? Because collection rewards warmth and response rewards precision, and the people best at one are rarely who we want drafting the other.
Then there's the part nobody documents: money. Review incentives are real and they need a budget line, so we offered $20 to $25 per review, the first funded through the platform and later ones directly. Somebody had to top that card up every quarter, and the contract renewal is a second, larger conversation with finance that arrives annually whether anyone diarized it or not.
Does paying for reviews feel uncomfortable? A little, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise, because the platforms permit it, disclose it, and cap it, and what the incentive buys is fifteen minutes of writing rather than the opinion. If your customers only say good things when they're paid, you have a product problem, and no review program is going to touch it.
What do you do with a critical review?
Answer it. Publicly, quickly, and not in the voice of your legal department. Routing is what makes that survivable once volume climbs, so we build it before we need it:
- One channel. Notifications land in one place, email and chat, watched by a named person.
- Assign by topic. A coordinator hands each review to an owner who knows the product.
- Draft or delegate. The owner writes the reply, or finds the engineer who can.
- Check before posting. A peer reads it; anything sensitive goes to the marketing lead.
- Post, then route. Publish the reply, then route the substance to product, support, or the FAQ.
Step five is where a review program stops being marketing, because a critical review is unsolicited research from a customer who stayed long enough to have an opinion. And what about a review that's simply wrong? Answer that one too, with the correction and no adjectives, and let the next reader decide who sounds reliable. A wall of unbroken five stars reads as bought anyway, and one three-star review with a straight answer under it does more than the four glowing ones above it.
What do badges and profiles actually get you?
Less than the vendor's sales deck promises, and more than the cynics assume. Coro won G2 badges in every quarter I was there, from August 2022 to December 2024, including Grid Leader, Easiest Setup Mid-Market and Best Relationship, and Visual Layer, a computer vision company, was named in G2's 2025 icon refresh. Neither of them closed a deal for us, though both shortened the argument. The profile is the asset and the badge is only the receipt, so what we get alongside it is worth more:
- Grid and index reports. Your category plotted with competitors, filterable to the two you meet in deals.
- Comparison pages. Head-to-head data you can publish without writing a claim you'd have to defend, the logic behind the competitive comparison work case.
- Quotable customer language, in the buyer's words, not yours. Keep it in one sheet, and get approval before attaching a full name.
- Badges and matrices, refreshed quarterly.
That last one hides a trap, because badges expire quarterly and they live on the website, the slide template, the one-pager, the email footer, and a partner page somebody forgot. Every surface needs a named owner, or you'll ship an expired badge to the one buyer who checks the date.
What does a scramble look like from the buyer's side?
Obvious. That's the whole problem. Buyers sort by recency and filter by company size, so they see the shape of your collection rather than the total. Fourteen reviews inside one week, nine quiet months either side, and every one a variation on the same sentence: that's a campaign and it reads as one. Steady collection has no shape at all, which is the point: two or three a week, from different segments, about different parts of the product, some of them mixed.
One limit, since this is a method post. A review program won't fix your positioning, and it won't rescue a product people dislike. What it does is put an accurate version of you in front of a buyer who was never going to call you first, and that is now most of them.
Key takeaways
- Ask on a schedule, timed to when customers are already happy.
- Customer Success collects, product marketing answers, finance funds it quarterly.
- Answer critical reviews fastest, and route what they say to product.
- Give every badge surface a named owner, because badges expire.
- Two or three a week beats forty in the fortnight before a deadline.
If your category page is thin and there's a launch in the calendar, bring it to a free 30-minute call. We'll work out who to ask and when, and you'll leave with a request cadence and a routing your team can run without you.
