#reviews

I have never had any luck on this, but I believe @Daniel Palay has!

I started doing this when I was at Grafana Labs and we had great success. @Daniel Palay can elaborate.

We had a lot of success with this at SolarWinds during one of our in-person user groups.

Hi Megan, Paola here from the Grafana team. Daniels on an airplane so I'll chime in until he's back online. We had a CTA at a table in our multi-city conference. This one was paired with a QR code and allowed them to get a cool keychain.

Complete a Gartner Peer Insights survey at ObservabilityCON on the Road 2025.

Help others discover what you already know about the products of Grafana Labs and win a special prize. Scan the QR code below.

What worked for us was that we had a dedicated table set up with laptops for customers to complete the review. Our AR agency sent someone to the event and he and one of our marketing managers manned the table. They explained to customers how the process worked because the verification can be really confusing.

Thanks for chiming in <@U08MBG24LRM> as indeed i am somewhere over Ohio right now I think. In fact, this week alone, at our two events, we saw 13% & 15% of attendees submit a GPI review, respectively. And at our big conferences this year, we had 18.1% and 18.4% of attendees submit reviews.

I'll second what you said <@U08MBG24LRM> as well as what @Emily Coleman said here. To build off of that a little more, we don't actually use laptops at our booth, but instead have the QR code for folks to fill out on their phone throughout the day. Fun fact, the GPI site doesn't timeout throughout the day, so you can tell people who come scan the QR code that they don't have to just hang out there for the 5-10 minutes it takes to fill out.

Just give them the instructions and to @Emily Coleman's point, our booth staff, including yours truly, will actually apologize to people about Gartner's interface and UX. That part gets a laugh most times and then people get on their merry way filling out surveys.

Happy to talk more about our process life or perhaps on a call at some point cc. @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly)

ooh, thank you. <@U08MBG24LRM> what was the special prize? Was that much of a draw or was there another driver beyond pure customer love that drove folks to the booth

It was these very beautiful patches (which I wish I took pictures of) and we also had paired this table with this annual survey we do (product agonistic but about our practice) and those had these keychains, so it was almost labeled as our "community" table so people can share their thoughts.

And beyond that we also gave out Plushy Grots (that's Grot in that picture above). Sorry I don't have a picture as the one i brought home is in my suitcase

Hi Megan, I was in your shoes recently, as this was my first time running something in-house and with GPI. Thanks to @Daniel Palay and @Evan Jacobs for providing inspiration!

Last month we wrapped our annual user conference with ~3500 attendees (all in) and we had a great response with both G2 running their booth onsite and an in-house booth capturing Gartner Peer Insights reviews. Oddly enough, each booth collected roughly 275 reviews each! This was~20% of customer attendees.

Factors in our success: highly engaged developer community, awesome and unique swag, gamified scavenger hunt within conference app, we're a Portuguese-founded company and I think having the conference in Lisbon this year added to the overall positive energy of event.

Let’s go, <@U08UZKKA7D5>. Amazing results!! Any photos to share of the booths in action?

<@U08UZKKA7D5> tell me more - was leaving a review a stop on the gamified scavenger hunt?

<@U08UZKKA7D5> also want to know about this scavenger hunt!

@Daniel Palay did you forget to ask for my address to send me the keychain? I feel like I should have one 🙂

Gartner has formal event program for this. It was covered during one of their recorded vendor webinars. Maybe January 2025? You might want to check with your Gartner Peer Insights manager. The information might also be on the GPI vendor portal. I believe they cover the cost of the incentives.

On the GPI note, besides events, does anyone have any clever techniques to help add more reviews besides the traditional "ask reps and CSMs" for nominations?

I’ve done internal competitions and spiffs and they both worked well.

I've seen some friendly leaderboard/competition between internal teams as well as giving swag to CSMs work well. CSMs were so appreciative for the swag at a company where they didn't get as much recognition as the reps did

@Lisa Wilberding I have used the UserEvidence surveys to collect the names of customers who rate us 10/10. I take that list of customer names and submit through the GPI “review collection” program where Gartner sends the email with the link to the survey to the customers. They also pay the incentive. According to Gartner, reviews are more likely to be approved and published when Gartner sends the request directly to the customers.

@Aunalisa Arellano is currently killing it with GPI reviews and an incentivization program for CSMs. She’s also deployed a specific channel in Slack for reviews where the CTO is highly engaged which has really helped ensure the entire company sees this motion as a priority.

@Amy Did you have any concerns about giving Gartner customer contact info? I love this idea but not sure we'd be able to give away this data to a third party.

I see GPI says "All lists are confidential and will not be used for any other purpose. The list will be deleted upon campaign completion." but I still worry the customers might not be thrilled with us giving Gartner their contact info.

Thanks for the support everyone!

I should say, we took in a lot of reviews but of course they weren't all approved by their respective site. G2 definitely has a high approval rating than GPI.

We're very fortunate in that OutSystems as low-code platform has the ability to build a lot of great apps in house! The in-app scavenger hunt involved sending attendees to various booths to complete an activity and collect the secret password from the booth rep to complete the challenge. Once all of the challenges are completed they got to the swag booth to collect their prize (a ball cap). The secret password changed every hour and I'll be honest the app had some glitches 😅 but our developer community is so kind and gracious overall I don't think it impacted their experience. Again, we have an incredible community of enthusiastic users.

<@U090V38S7CJ> I definitely recommend contacting your GPI program manager, they should be able to talk you through the onsite review process and call out their known pain points. And yes, you will still get complaints about the UX....it is what it is 🫠

Here's a couple pics from the event, you can see the line queueing in the background. Our customers WAITED! I was amazed. I didn't share the QR code for GPI because I figured the UX and length of the survey would force people to rush through the process with higher likelihood of their response getting rejected. Next time, I will get more seats and laptops just to accommodate busy break times.

Great re-cap, <@U08UZKKA7D5>. Actually, I almost think there’s a net positive of having folks wait a bit, since it tends to drum up some FOMO! Of course, not a long wait, but the “crowd” can generate some buzz too. Amazing work. Congrats !!🎉

<@U08UZKKA7D5> if you ever want to talk about your experience on a Friday call, we'd love to have you.

Thanks @Evan Jacobs and thanks for the offer @Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly)! We've got an upcoming (much smaller) user conference in Miami this month. I'm very interested to compare the experiences. I will reach out when those results are in!