Paid Reviews Collection Process

The process begins when a review program is sold. Once it is sold (a “win”), The Customer Success Manager and Reviews Delivery Manager will have an internal meeting (Internal Kick-Off meeting) to discuss the goals of the reviews program from the vendors perspective.

Once a win is documented in Salesforce (Status: "Closed Won"), Raisa will automatically receive a notification email from SalesForce and will begin preparing the kick-off documents for the vendor. Raisa updates the kick-off documents to make them customized for each program. Raisa sends the kick-off documents to the Reviews Delivery Manager for approval before sending them to the Customer Success Manager for the vendor. The Reviews Delivery Manager looks at only a few points- including slides 1, 3 and 6 specifically, as shown: 

Make sure the “vendor dashboard” link goes to the correct vendor dashboard:

Raisa is responsible for updating the Kick-Off document template with all relevant links as mentioned above. Both the calendly and PeerAnalyst links are found on the Review Content App page in SalesForce: 

Those links are automatically created from DealHub once the program is officially sold and populated in SalesForce. 

For generating the QR codes, Raisa should be using Johnny’s paid account on https://me-qr.com/ . Do not use free QR code programs due to past issues with free services. 

After the Kick-off documents are created and approved, the Customer Success Manager shares them with the Vendor (client). Included in the Kick-off documents (on slide 6) are the Strategic Themes Template and the Customer Contact Sheet.

Strategic Theme Questions are specialized questions designed to capture deeper, more targeted insights than standard review questions. By focusing on a vendor’s specific competitive differentiators, new features, and key performance metrics, Strategic Theme Questions allow reviewers to provide high-value content that directly supports a vendor’s strategic goals. These responses often serve as powerful fodder for marketing campaigns, as they offer authentic validation of the specific benefits a vendor wants to highlight in the marketplace.

To develop these questions, the team pulls information from vendor questionnaires, emails, or recorded discovery calls. Ideally, vendors provide details on differentiating features, recent updates, valuable data points, and common sales objections, along with "ideal" customer quotes for each. While the quality of this input varies, the goal is to strike a balance: if a vendor provides too little information, more is requested; if they provide too much, the team works with Customer Success to prioritize the most impactful topics to ensure the review remains concise and effective.

Strategic Themes Template (example) is completed by the Vendor. It contains topics and/or features the vendor wants the STQ to focus on. See the STQ process for more info. 

Customer Contact Sheet (example). Often, but not always, vendors will provide a list of customers we can use for outreach to collect reviews. Having these contacts are helpful for outreach and collecting reviews. 

Once the Customer Contact Sheet is provided to the Customer Success Manager, they create a Trello card on the Reviews Programs Request Trello board which is sent to Mitch for upload into SalesForce. The process for uploading is found on this Trello card. When Mitch uploads the contacts, she first runs the contacts through ZoomInfo for data enrichment, and also connects the contacts to the product opp within Salesforce. ZoomInfo is a program that enriches data like adding phone numbers, job titles, and more which are helpful to the call center before performing outreach. Once the contacts are uploaded into SalesForce, they can be viewed (along with their stage and other info) on the Product Opp page in SalesForce: 

After Mitch enriches the data, she uploads the list into SalesForce, the contacts are added to customer.io and to SalesLoft, either as Seth A or Seth EMEA and placed into a cadence, and the call center begins outreach. Customer.io is an emailing storage program that also allows for mass emails or outreach. SalesLoft is the program our call center uses to make and track phone calls to capture reviews. In SalesLoft we have two different "programs" which assign leads to different call representatives. We have the North American program (called Seth NA) and the EMEA program (called Seth EMEA) for all lother countries. They are divided in this way for ease of assignment within SalesLoft. We have a sync with SalesLoft and SalesForce, so all call data recorded in SalesLoft is also recorded in SalesForce. Mitch uses the email domain to determine which cadence a lead belongs. 

The standard cadence for the call center begins 3 days after the contact is uploaded, which is when call representatives will begin outreach via phone.  After that, they will continue phone outreach every few days until either collecting a review or by marking the contact as "unreachabe". 

We have a call center and an outreach team- both of whom are external teams. The call center (LimTC) mainly focuses on making phone calls. They generally will begin outreach with the phone numbers provided in the contact list (either from the vendor directly or from what was provided from ZoomInfo). 

The outreach team (called Rocket) finds users via LinkedIn, Redditt and other avenues and performs outreach and will either schedule reviewers with the call center, or will send reviewers to PeerAnalyst for reviews. The call center and Rocket can be wokring simultaneously in collecting reviews. Rocket (the outreach team) begins nurturing and finding leads and will either send the leads to schedule a phone call with the call center, or to complete a review using out internal tool called PeerAnalyst. Internally, Rocket is encouraged to send users to PeerAnalyst, but may also sends users to the call center.

Reviews Troubleshooting Ideas

Programs don't always run as planned. We don’t want programs to fall behind, so we are as proactive as we can be. Here are a few things we do to try and boost the reviews count to ensure programs stay on schedule: 

1. Pull PeerIntent data for the product and send it to Rocket for focused outreach. The date range should be leads that came in between 2 years before today's date to 3-6 months before today's date. 

2. Something that happens automatically when a program enters the “At-Risk” Stage is there is a trigger to our “Reviews Refresh Campaign” on Customer.io. This sends an email to reviewers who had a review expire recently or are at risk of expiring in the coming few months and reminds them to refresh their review or provide a new one for a $20 incentive. 

3. Another new initiative we have started with Customer.io is an automatic triggered a one time email to any reviews which have either recently expired or are set to expire in the coming months for a program that has just become active and asking if the reviewer for a review refresh.