How To Use Your Competitors’ Buying Signals To Protect and Grow Your Revenue

Software buyers are researching, comparing, and making decisions based on the social proof and insights they find on G2. But what if these buyers never make it to your product profile to directly look at your features and pricing? Perhaps you’re new to G2, and there’s a competitor that has a stronger standing as a G2 Grid® Leader. 

With G2’s newest Buyer Intent signal, buyer interest in your competitors can now help you spot risk and drive pipeline.   

Our partners and customers at Factors.ai, an attribution platform that helps B2B marketers capture demand and measure ROI, recently conducted an analysis that revealed that these signals are not only a massive source of high-intent buyer signals for demand generation teams, but they’re also a great tool to get even more personalized in outreach messaging. 

G2 Competitive Insight Signals drive higher buyer intent volume

Factors.ai analyzed G2 signals across 50 mutual customers, and the results showed that the launch of G2’s competitive signals substantially increased overall Buyer Intent volume for products listed on G2. As a reminder, competitive intent signals are gathered from product profiles in a shared category with your product, including: 

• Views on a competitor’s product profile 
• Visits to a competitor’s pricing pages
• Activity on comparison pages featuring your competitors 

While signals from your own G2 product page remain valuable, the volume of activity on competitor pages is significantly higher, as it is collected from multiple products across G2.

Factors.ai compared competitive intent to product profile signal volume: 

• Category intent: 9x more signals than your own product page visits
• Alternative intent: 13x the scale
• Looked at competitor features: 2x the scale
• Looked at competitor pricing: 6x the scale
• Looked at competitor profile views: An incredible 60x the scale

Consistently, more in-market buyers are actively researching your competitors than they are visiting your product page alone. Accessing these signals represents a massive, untapped opportunity to increase your signal volume and gain a larger audience to target. This expanded visibility from G2 provides clearer insights and an opportunity to get in front of buyers at the very moment they are evaluating solutions.

Connecting the dots: What competitive intent signals mean for your team

These signals provide a new lens for prioritizing your demand generation and sales efforts. While the volume on competitor pages is quite high, Factors.ai also found that conversion rates vary significantly based on the type of page visited.

Here’s how the signals stack up in terms of average conversion rate to inquiry (a form submission on your website) within 60 days:

• Your product page: 5.5% conversion rate
• Competitor features: 1.03% conversion rate
• Alternatives page: 0.73% conversion rate
• Product category page: 0.65% conversion rate
• Competitor pricing: 0.54% conversion rate
• Competitor reviews: 0.53% conversion rate

Additional insights revealed that conversion rates also improve when selecting specific competitors’ or competitors’ signals, rather than all of them in a shared G2 category. Signals are usually triggered 20-30 days before conversion, so acting early can give you a competitive advantage.

Your new playbook: Actioning G2 Competitive Signals

So, how do you put this into action? Activating these signals in the available integrations will be your first step. Competitive Signals are now available in Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, Demandbase, Snowflake, LinkedIn, and our APIs. 

Here's a simple playbook to get started with putting these signals in the hands of your sales and marketing teams:

Bottom-of-the-funnel sales activities:

• Focus on: Signals from your product page and competitor pages.
• Action: Immediately alert your sales team via integrations with tools like Slack, Salesforce, Factors.ai, and more. These accounts are prime candidates for a personalized, timely outreach. Offer templates with placeholders to personalize outreach to make activation seamless if you have the tooling to trigger automated messaging flows. Be sure to provide sales with the specific activity their account took on G2, so they can tailor their message. This isn't cold outreach — it's a warm, intent-driven follow-up.

Middle-of-the-funnel demand gen campaigns:

• Focus on: The high-volume signals from competitor reviews, alternatives, product category, and competitor pricing pages.
• Action: Use these signals to power targeted advertising campaigns through G2’s platform integrations with Factors.ai and LinkedIn. The goal is to reach these accounts with tailored content and social proof. The messaging shouldn't be a hard sell. Instead, it should focus on educating them about your differentiators and proving why your solution is the superior choice. G2 Grids, Indexes, or Comparison Reports are perfect examples for this type of campaign asset. 

• Focus on: Customer accounts which show any signals that show competitive research, such as product category, alternatives, competitor products, features, and pricing. 

• Action: Notify customer account teams through integrations like Factors.ai, Salesforce, and Slack, when signals appear for current customers. These signals can also be used for targeted customer ABM campaigns. The goal is to spot signs of churn early in the customer’s research process and mitigate any risk of losing a deal. Tailored messaging should include competitive differentiators and have a feature-specific focus to help retain customers, drive adoption, and differentiate the brand from the competition. 

By implementing this playbook, you can move beyond just tracking signals from your own products listed on G2. 

You can start proactively engaging with accounts that are actively exploring solutions in your category and significantly increase your sourced pipeline to prove a greater ROI on your G2 investment.