Three Powerful Ways G2 User Data Shapes Smarter Market Strategies

Customer feedback is now essential for strategic growth. By combining traditional analyst research with direct customer insights, organizations can build a more complete market intelligence strategy. Through our strategic partnership with G2—the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace, featuring over 3 million verified reviews on more than 180,000 software products and services across 2,000+ categories—Spotlight has empowered clients to uncover valuable intelligence that shapes product development, market positioning, and go-to-market strategies.

Let’s explore three impactful case studies where our approach of combining rich G2 data with expert analysis has meaningfully informed strategic decisions within organizations.

Overcoming Cost and Adoption Hurdles in the Mid-Market

Spotlight worked with an employee recognition platform that set out to test a hypothesis: Do mid-market companies have fewer internal resources to implement transformative people and talent initiatives compared to enterprises? By reviewing G2 data, we were able to confirm that mid-market organizations require fundamentally different approaches than enterprise clients. This finding suggested that the platform’s full-service solution may not align with the budget and resource constraints of most mid-size organizations.

• Mid-market organizations in this category were 8% pts. more likely to switch platforms based on cost considerations than enterprises. 
• 20% of G2 mid-market users cited adoption challenges as a primary pain point.
• While the client demonstrated strong early ROI (32% of mid-market achieving ROI in less than six months), other competitors showed more concentrated ROI achievement in shorter timeframes.

These insights underscored the need for simplified onboarding and cost-effective pricing models tailored to mid-market buyers, promoting the company to refine its go-to-market strategy. Spotlight took these key findings to product team leaders to help them focus on standardization and predictability to better compete in the mid-market segment, where buyers typically have less tolerance for implementation complexity and longer ROI timelines than enterprise customers.

Bridging the Gap: How G2 Data Illuminates the Space Between Basic and Enterprise Solutions

When a conversational marketing organization gained market traction, they sought their next chapter, expanding into email and marketing automation. To navigate this shift, they turned to Spotlight for a deeper understanding of leading competitors, user sentiment, and capability gaps to best position themselves. G2 data provided precise direction for market entry:

• Nearly 1/3 of users expressed frustration with the current landscape. Many users cited feeling trapped between oversimplified solutions and prohibitively complex enterprise platforms as a top dislike.
• 36% of administrators mentioned a need for powerful automation capabilities without steep learning curves or technical expertise requirements as the top switching driver. 
• Growing companies were particularly drawn to the need for flexible scaling without punitive cost increases, as they felt caught between outdated basic tools and enterprise solutions they couldn’t afford.

Armed with these insights from Spotlight, the client considered developing “smart defaults” that offer pre-configured best practices and industry-specific templates—balancing ease of use with the advanced customization users desire.

Prioritizing Operational Efficiency: Shifting Focus from Features to Functionality

A design software company sought to create a new category by focusing on design and make industries. They needed to understand the gaps and pain points faced by architectural, engineering, and construction users. By leveraging Spotlight and G2 data, the company uncovered key insights that revealed these users were primarily concerned with operational challenges rather than just expanding technical capabilities:

• 45% of these users mentioned facilitating collaboration and data management as a top business problem to solve when selecting a solution.  
• While 72% of users cited cost as the top reason for switching solutions, 1 in 10 administrators pointed to limited collaboration and workflow as key drivers for change.

With these findings in hand, the company adjusted its product development strategy. Instead of focusing on adding new features, they prioritized simplifying data management, improving data quality, and fostering better data sharing among project stakeholders—addressing the most immediate needs of users.