180. The Future of GTM Might Belong to Answer Engines ft. Eric Gilpin (G2)

And so just as we can educate our customers on who’s in market to purchase their software, we can also educate someone who’s in market to potentially churn from their software. Using those signals internally way in advance kind of allows us to get ahead of Churn. And you need to figure out how to aggregate all of these signals in addition to your, like I would say, product health scores to be able to pay attention to it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight podcast network. You lose a six figure account and then someone pulls the data and they were telling you nine months ago. Eric Gilpin has spent 25 years building two sided marketplaces. Career builder upwork now G2, where 200 million buyers make software decisions every year. He knows what Churn signals look like before they become churn. Today we get into how G2 reads the room when your own customers are already shopping around. I’m Josh Schachter. This is Unchurned.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Subscribe to our substack@ Unchurned.Gainsight.com where we go deep on every episode. Like how one post sales team at Cloudbeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more at Unturned.Gainsight.com hey everybody. Welcome to this episode of Unchurned. I’m your host Josh Schachter, senior Vice president of strategy and development at Gainsight. And I’m thrilled to be here today with Eric Gilpin. Eric is the president of Go to market at G2. Eric, thank you so much for being here.

Eric Gilpin:
No, great to see you, Josh. Happy to be here, Eric.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
A lot of folks, pretty much probably everybody here I think knows what G2 is. For those that don’t, I don’t want to just call you a ratings and review website. So correct me on this. Describe G2 in the finest here.

Eric Gilpin:
Yeah, no, happy to. So at the highest level, G2 is a two sided marketplace. On one end we’ve got close to 200 million buyers that are making software decisions. On the other side we’ve got 210,000 products that are listed that are building kind of their brand on customer voice. And so we kind of sit in the middle of this kind of matchmaking and our go to market Motion is around how do we build solutions for what we call sellers with organizations to be able to capture that buyer demand on our platform. So reviews are a piece of the story and a big part of our flywheel. But it’s not the only story.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Have you ever heard from from customers or I guess would be customers or companies that like when the G2 ratings and badges come out, it’s kind of like Christmas morning. Like everybody’s like very excited to. I remember when I was the founder of Update AI and like when the new badges came I was like oh let me go open the presents. Let see where we are, what we got. It’s like this, this moment of delight I think in the customer experience that you guys have.

Eric Gilpin:
I so I think there is a little bit of the Christmas feeling but I do get a little like Halloween trick or treat for folks that maybe didn’t win. In fact when I joined it was right before we did our annual like best of and I was excited. I was like man, this is an awesome opportunity to celebrate both our customers and our customers customers in some ways. And until the results came out and then I probably spent a week not just celebrating others but helping others understand why they didn’t win. And so but that’s when I realized that we had something though that the brand and the status associated with winning in our report grids was important. So it was challenging and exciting at the same time.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Apathy is the worst thing that you can have as somebody in business. If people are not reacting, you’d rather them react negatively than to not react at all. And I get now what you’re saying from your perspective. Perspective you probably don’t get like as many emails for the thank you for the badges as opposed to the emails of hey where the hell is my badge type.

Eric Gilpin:
Right. And even, even for folks that were like in the top 10, I mean of 210,000 products even to make it to the top 10 and actually like less than I think it’s like 06% even get like a best of badge for and so it’s. I would argue that like that is still really good kind of brand recognition but as you can imagine the SaaS community is highly competitive.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about your background. We’ll go back to G2. But. But you, you’ve spent your career 20 plus years in two sided marketplaces. I mean career builder upwork now at G2. Take us back to like the, the through lines of your career there.

Eric Gilpin:
Yeah, well I’d say The first one was just luck, meaning I, I kind of fell into it by accident. And so actually my first job out of school, I worked for a company called headhunter.net and it was an early job board that was acquired by Career Builder. And you know, our mission at that time was to empower employment and help, you know, job seekers and organizations connect by, you know, leveraging the world Wide web as the new meeting place. Our traditional kind of status quo competitor was the newspapers as an organization were still, they were still running full page ads in the Chicago Tribune to acquire talent. So the Internet was that kind of first kind of wave of helping them both democratize but get access to talent at scale. And I ended up spending 15 years there, I think almost 16 years. I think that my story for that part of my career was like, I won as a result of this awesome machine. And so I started there and just continued to build and grow into new experiences.

Eric Gilpin:
And my passion and want is like, no matter where I go, how do I give that back and build a similar machine that team members can continue to win from? And actually that story kind of showed up for me for an upwork, which it was almost like a build story for me. I went from a very large distributed sales team to a very small, you know, team as we were taking another two sided marketplace. And so we had hiring managers and freelancers, so still in the HR tech space, but different, you know, delivery model and you know, like, how did we leverage technology to take, you know, the work to the worker? Meaning like talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not. So how do we leverage the cloud to be able to give you access to the most high demand skills? Understanding that we would remove that kind of location constraint, but that became like, how do we build that machine all over again? And so spent another seven and a half years there before finding my way into G2, which to your point is my third kind of marketplace experience. Buyers and sellers just maybe different goods in this equation. And so I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but yes, I’ve only done marketplaces for 25 plus years.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It’s good for somebody who’s forging a career that you’re forging. I mean, and you took upwork, you helped take up work from 30 million ARR to 650 million ARR. Correct. In those seven years. I don’t even know what question to ask you that doesn’t go into a three hour podcast because there’s got to be so many lessons from that. But like, I don’t know, like, what stands. Is there anything that stands out to you from that experience?

Eric Gilpin:
Yeah, well, the, the 30 to 6, 50 story, because we were a consumption business, and so we didn’t necessarily have like, the ARR framing. We had what we call gsb, so just gross sales volume. But if you think about it, like, fractional labor, or what some might call the traditional staffing industry is already a trillion dollar business. And so, if anything, we were just challenging the status quo and, you know, kind of linking the old to the new. Like the delivery model is the only thing that changed. But the fundamental concept of access to, like, high quality talent and demand. Cool. We’re just saying that, you know, the world’s your oyster now.

Eric Gilpin:
And, and I think it was teaching organizations, some of the world’s largest enterprises, that quality didn’t have to sit right next to you. You know, when. When we would say freelancers, we thought it was hip, it was cool, it was the future of work. When we said that to a Fortune 100, what they heard was like, people at home in their underwear stealing your trade secrets. And so I remember early on when we were trying to find kind of market fit, and you would ask at Fortune 100, do you hire freelancers? And they’re like, no, never. Like, we try to keep them out. And I’m like, but do you hire contractors? And they’re like, oh, yes, thousands. I’m like, well, that’s what we do.

Eric Gilpin:
And so a lot of it was trying to link the old to the new, kind of removing some of the. Or de. Risking some of the, you know, maybe scarcity of. Of what we were trying to do. And, you know, most organizations spend, you know, tens, millions, if not billions on fractional labor. And so it was really just capturing that market. And then, as you can imagine, Josh, like, we sold remote work. And so in March 2020, like, we would have liked to have gotten there a different way, but we didn’t waste, you know, the pandemic to accelerate, you know, the idea that we’re all in this experiment and, and quality outcomes can happen regardless of location.

Eric Gilpin:
And so I would like to say that a lot of the hard work that we did was getting ready for that moment versus that moment happening to us. But it was definitely a paradigm shift.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I mean, you create your own success, right? You put yourself in a position. You create your own luck, rather. Right? So you guys put yourself in a position for that, I’m sure. And it’s funny because sometimes the nuance just makes such a difference. You’re not freelancers, you’re contractors. And boom. And that’s what, that’s what this motion’s all about, right? Is listening to those prospect calls and customers and being iterative based on what they’re telling you.

Eric Gilpin:
Yeah, I mean, well, I see that in AI today too. It’s like buzzwords. It just gets everyone into this scarcity mindset versus this abundance type thinking. So you have the audience. It’s like, yes, I want to figure out how to get leverage in 10x. And then you got another half that’s like, ooh, robots are coming for my jobs. And I think it’s all language and it’s the context versus the content. And like, we could all do a better job of just linking the old to the new and just, you know, reminding everyone that the fundamental concept’s the same.

Eric Gilpin:
The delivery model just continues to evolve and we’ll all be better for it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. All right. Linking the old and the new. You didn’t come into G2 as president. You have been in this role now for about six months. What was the goal of bringing you into this president of go to market role? It’s the first time the company’s had it. What’s the big bet that you’re placing on it?

Eric Gilpin:
Yeah, that’s a great question, Josh. And I remember go to Enable our CEO and co founder, when I approached him with this idea, because I had excitement but fears. And one of my potential fears was, are we going to be able to get the CMO caliber and the expertise that we want potentially with this org structure? I also had a story of like, well, the marketing teams feel like we’re just coming in and quotifying, you know, everything that they’re, they’re trying to do. And so we wanted to be really kind of thoughtful of like, what was, what was, what were we trying to solve and the jobs to be done in this, in this new structure? We also had this interesting predicament that if we, if we could solve it for ourselves, we potentially solve it for our customers. Because G2 is a sales and marketing alignment tool, um, meaning we operate both with CMOs and the CROs, you know, in organizations. And so it, it is kind of an experiment. But I would say there’s like three things that we’re, you know, trying to, to nail with this. And the first one is this idea of like zero daylight around who we’re chasing.

Eric Gilpin:
And so for context, even before I was in this role, you know, my first 90 days at G2, I, you know, spent time with 100 customers, 100 employees, internally partners basically asking the same questions. And one of them is this idea of who you’re chasing. And I got a lot of like competitive type answers. I’m like, no, you don’t chase your competitors, you chase your customers. Like one of the most important segments for us to win and why. And depending on who I spoke with, I got a different answer. You know, marketing had a point of view. Our enterprise team had a point of view, our SMB team had a point of view, our international teams had a point of view.

Eric Gilpin:
And depending on you ask, their point of view is the most important. And I remember meeting with one of our BDR leaders early on and I said, look, what is the most important segment for G2 to win and why? And she had said enterprise. I go, great, why is that? Like, why is that true? And she had good ideas around, you know, spend retention, you know, average deal size, unit economics, like all your typical things. And I said, okay, let’s just assume that’s true. I don’t know if it is. I’m new. Well, let’s assume that that’s true. You have all of your BDRs focused on that, like, you know, subset.

Eric Gilpin:
Oh no, I’ve only got one of those on Enterprise. I’ve got 10 on S&P and 15 over here. And so the idea of like, who we’re chasing, like we’re in this freemium model, like it’s, it’s free to list. On G2, there’s 210,000 companies that are listed across 2,000 different categories. And based on our traffic, like not every category is equal and we don’t have a team large enough to chase 210,000 prospects. And so like my, my vision was, is like, how do we make the world smaller and smaller and smaller so that we can focus on effectiveness, on efficiency. And so that from like marketing all the way, you know, through like renewing growth cycles, like we’re, we have zero daylight on this idea of who we’re chasing. And I actually think org design and goal alignment is like one of the, you know, the first ways to do that.

Eric Gilpin:
Um, and so that was like, kind of our first hypothesis is like, can we go faster, you know, by going together and reducing some of the silos and nuances and making sure that we had a hundred percent aligned goals.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And, and zero daylight is like, it’s like a brick wall or something. They, like between the mortar, there’s no daylight. Everything is just aligned and congealed together.

Eric Gilpin:
That’s right. Otherwise you end up with the traditional funnel of where marketing’s, you know, gold on MQLs. Then they yell at the BDRs for not falling out on time. And then obviously the BDRs are yelling at marketing because the leads are weak and they’re like, no, you’re weak. And then the AES are unhappy, you know, with that funnel. And it’s like, look, if we’re all aligned on this idea of who we’re chasing and that how we’re going to chase them, meaning that the motions need to be unique, you know, based on kind of that customer value proposition, then you kind of, you just reduce the, the noise. And so that when you have pipeline meetings, when you have mbrs, when you have board meetings, there’s common language, common framework, common accountability. What have you done?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
This is super interesting. What have you done to get to this place? And I’m sure you’re still on that journey to some extent. You, I assume there was an off site of sorts, there was some kind of post it board session, there was some kind of operational cadence that changed. Can you walk us through some of these things that you went through over the past six months to get to this zero daylight?

Eric Gilpin:
Yeah, so I think the, so we announced that, you know, we’re kind of putting these teams together last November. And at the same time I’m in a, I’m in a search for a new cmo and, and I think that like being very transparent and kind of vulnerable in, in my own fears in this role. But my also, you know, what I think, you know, would be successful and like where we would fail was really important to make sure that like the partner that I, that I hired kind of believed what I believed or at least, you know, believed in kind of that shared mission. And so that was like step number one. You know, I think from there it was doing an off site where we had all of the revenue leaders and all of the marketing leaders and we focused on this more of like, hey, we’re more alike than different. And like the goal is to increase the velocity and throughput of our teams and to, you know what, increase credit for like all of the hard work that we’re doing. And in the absence of like absolute clarity, like everyone assumes the worst. And so if anything like this should increase velocity on the teams.

Eric Gilpin:
And then we kind of broke it down in like if you think about a sales methodology or sales process, it should all map to buyer journey. Meaning if you’re not in service of however those buyers are making decisions like you’re going to be in conflict with your customer. And so we just basically did a whole like, you know, design thinking post it note from awareness to conversion and what all those funnels look like. And then what we realized is there was a lot of opportunities to go together and there was a lot of like, breakage that we had in our own model that wasn’t in service of that, of that buyer journey. And so I think by like getting everyone aligned around the problem statement of like, the customer should be the only one that gets credit here. And if they win, we win. It really kind of brought the silos down. Of course there’s going to be nuances in between the brand teams and the content teams and BDR teams and the pro serve teams.

Eric Gilpin:
But at the end of the day, like, if we’re all chasing the same customers and we know that our success is firmly tied to theirs, start there. If you get that right, your odds of getting it right as a team go up significantly.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
My story, were there any outputs that have changed any marketing messaging, slogans, anything concrete in that sense?

Eric Gilpin:
I think so. I mean, we, you know, G2, to your point, earlier on, like what we do, like we’ve been known as the review site. You know, we, we grew up kind of on this like SEO story of we became your second website. And so we were really good at SEO. So you didn’t have to. You didn’t have to. And I think with the rise of AEO and LLMs, like, you know, dollars follow eyeballs and those eyeballs are moving, which means we needed a narrative shift. G2 reviews weren’t important just for your grid.

Eric Gilpin:
G2 reviews are important for like being visible and found in these answer engines. And so I think that off site, I think we all kind of came to the conclusion that we didn’t have a really good feedback loop of like, what was working in market versus, like what we were doing to get back to message maps to both our product marketing teams and demand gen teams. And so we rolled out a kickoff in February this year. Kind of a whole new narrative that I would say built upon what we had, but adding this new kind of AEO visibility piece around being found, that would be a great outcome of these teams being even closer together.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Join me at Pulse this May in Las Vegas. I’d love to meet our listeners. Come say hi. And your daiquiri in that tall fluorescent cup is on me. Seriously. Use code unchurned for a special rate@gainsightpulse.com let’s step back and tell us a little bit about how your org is designed specifically on the post sales side since a lot of our listeners come from that world.

Eric Gilpin:
Yeah, totally. So I like to say we run Hunter Hunter here at G2. And so we have your typical BDR and AES that are focused on new business acquisition but we also have an account management and CS team here at G2. And so you know, as a new customer is acquired, the AE is doing a handoff to the post sale team which includes both those roles. But we just still focus on role specialization and I’ll describe how it works here. G2. And so understanding that more than 50% of our growth still comes from expansion. If I look at our gross booking targets this year, almost 60% of them will be from current customers.

Eric Gilpin:
We knew that we needed to have strong kind of quota retention as well as quota expectations in those motions. And so we keep an account manager that is gold on expansion baseline of what they did and then has a kind of net new expansion growth total on top CS for us. I would liken it more to like

Josh Schachter [Host]:
product expansion is product line expansion effectively.

Eric Gilpin:
So we actually would have kind of two different white space models we monetize by product on G2. And so I know Gainsight is a platform but you might have three or four individual products that you unbundle. And so we would, we would charge per product. But then even per product you’re going to have buyer intent signals for that product, you’re going to have content for that product, you’re going to have review management for that product. And so we go deep on how many listings and then we go horizontal on the actual SKUs. And so like I’ll take a, an extreme example. You know we’ve got SAP with maybe 210 products listed on G2 and they have maybe 35 of them that are under subscription. And so you know, even though they’re a very large partner, we still have a ton of white space and upside to continue to be able to grow that relationship.

Eric Gilpin:
And ideally our best customers are growing every year as we prove out a motion for one of their product lines and as their needs change, we can, we can run the same plan again. And so for us, account management owns that kind of like customer maturity map, that account plan and then CS is all around how do we drive product adoption? Where you think about G2, we’re a data company but the data is only valuable if you can orchestrate it into a workflow. And so we’re constantly doing third party integrations like companies Like Gainsight or ABM platforms or CRNS or orchestration platforms so that you can use those buyer intent signals which does require, I would say a more technical product based success aptitude to be able to partner with our account management teams.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What are some of the highest value activities that your CS team are engaged with their customers?

Eric Gilpin:
So I would say that like we’ve kind of mapped all of our aha moments to our flywheel like where customers win the you know, at first and a lot of it’s setting up their review like platform. And so it’s not just a like send a review campaign out like once a quarter. Like you really need to kind of map your customer journey and then figure out where can you integrate it in your CS platform and your customer experience platform and your product MPS platform and your own, you know, kind of marketing automation, you know, kind of platforms. And so that requires, you know, both. Even though we’re API driven, we need to be thoughtful in designing that out, you know, for the customer. And so reviews would be one. If you drive reviews, you’re going to drive not only rankings on G2, but you’re going to drive AEO citations. And so we focus there for our buyer intent customers, which is probably half of our customer base.

Eric Gilpin:
It’s not about the buyer intent on G2. I got to get it set up in Salesforce on HubSpot and Zoho. Then I got to get it set up in demand base $0.06 or Zoom info. Then I got to get it set up and all of your success platforms like Gainsight and so that work takes time and you know, working both with the marketing ops and the rev ops team to be able to deploy those because if you don’t, you’re not going to see value or success on G2. And so we try to front load a lot of those onboardings with our success team to make sure that we get Alto strom finish or strong start.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, I wonder if it’s something that agentic can help with.

Eric Gilpin:
Are you guys man, I hope so because like onboarding is ripe for innovation and as a buyer, you know, we have way too many tools and onboarding, it’s just tough.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah. A lot of companies are feeling that strain. It.

Eric Gilpin:
It is. You would think that like, you know, I’m big into Claude cowork right now because this is automating a workflow and I look at you know, SaaS tools is just automating workflows and so my guess is, is that we should be able to increase throughput for all of our tools, either by, you know, doing more McP models with LLMs or just being more, I would say McP ish and workflow oriented in your UI.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What are you guys doing on the longer tail side of the conversation? I know you said you’re, you’ve kind of doubled down on the highest value accounts in some ways, but what is the motion for adoption and retention and expansion at the more digital scale stage?

Eric Gilpin:
I would say we’re leaning really hard into both self serve and AI automation. If you think about the 210,000 products that are listed on G2, like 150,000 are small companies. And in fact the marketplace has grown like weeds because it’s, you know, the barrier to entry for entrepreneurs is so low anyone could build an app these days with AI. And so almost 25,000 of those products have been listed in the last 12 months. Just as like AI, you know, category creation is accelerating. And so we needed to make G2 really easy to use both our free tool because we allow you to drive reviews even before you sign up on a paid plan. But then once you get into paid plans, like how do we build more outcome based experiences, kind of reduce the noise and attacks of our ui so it’s easier to use in a self service place, but then use AI to do nudges around, you know, a great use case would be Josh review. Recency really matters.

Eric Gilpin:
And last year you generated a hundred reviews as a part of your program, but you haven’t generated any in like the last 90 days. And you run at risk of like falling down on grid because buyers care about recency just as much as they do around quality. That’s a great AI use case where you just build a review agent to constantly nudge your customers and if anything take action, you know, on your behalf. So building, building with like the idea of they might not ever talk to Somebody Live at G2, which is a really fun problem space for like product to, to mess around in.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Oh totally. Yeah. They’re having a heyday right now. Amongst all the uncertainty of what it means for product as well as a group. How are you guys using G2 as a retention engine for yourselves?

Eric Gilpin:
Well, so we like our vision and we’re not great at it always is. We need to be customer zero, meaning we need to be experts on our own platform if we’re going to build the trust advisor kind of status with our own customers. Customers. And I would say that like one of the best ways is we kind of flipped buyer intent into what I Call Churn Intent. And so think of it as like the same pool but different tool. And so just as we can educate our customers on who’s in market to purchase their software, we can also educate someone who’s in market to potentially churn from their software. And so that same signal when they’re doing compare pages against you versus your competitor when they’re looking at your pricing page versus your competitor when they’re buying maybe other things in your category that could, you know, maybe represent leakage to you in the future. Using those signals internally way in advance kind of allows us to get ahead of Churn because Churn isn’t let.

Eric Gilpin:
There’s like in my opinion, retention is a life cycle. And like they didn’t churn like 90 days before the renewal. They churned like three days after they bought it. And you need to figure out how to aggregate all of these signals in addition to your, like I would say product health scores to be able to pay attention to it. And so using our own turn signal, like the to Slack integration, like if you own an account at G2, we will ping you every day if your customer is shopping on someone else and we’ll tell you who they’re looking at so that you can figure out like how to prioritize that obviously in your, in your own time on how you’re managing customer engagement. But that classic example that we teach obviously all of our customers to do too. Yeah, I mean, I mean I remember we kind of fell into it. You lose a six figure deal and then you actually go back and look and they were actually telling us nine months in advance that they weren’t happy.

Eric Gilpin:
We just weren’t even using our own tool to like extract it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah, all the signals. Yeah, that’s, that’s powerful stuff for sure. We talked a little bit about AI, but tell the audience here about the value of AEO and how you guys, I want to leave on this note how you’re thinking about AEO and the impact that it’s having on your business right now.

Eric Gilpin:
Yeah, I would say that like to your point of like timing can really help or hurt you if like, if you get your like ducks in a row like early on. And I think this was another great example. Similar to, you know, Covid was obviously terrible, but we didn’t waste it because we were ready. I think this AEO thing we’re maximizing here at G2 because we were ready. And so for context and you know, November of 22nd, when GP3GPT3 was released, we had a decision that we needed to make understanding that like data is the new oil or has been, would we make our data available or not? And so did we allow LLMs to scratch scrape all of our public data or not? And I would say that, you know, that were you, were you at the

Josh Schachter [Host]:
company at that point?

Eric Gilpin:
I was not. I joined in September of 23. And so this, this goes to the, you know, previous leadership team. You know, many are still here, but, but they, they had subscribed to like two beliefs because the founders are like serial entrepreneurs. One is like future versus business model, future always wins. And then the other one around this idea of dollars will follow eyeballs. And so if buyer behavior is going to change and the new front door of the Internet is going to be LLMs, if we want to be relevant as an organization, we have to make sure G2 and our data, which is essentially your customer data, is relevant to where those buyers are shopping. And so we, we allow or we made the commitment that we’ll be open for business, meaning they’ll be able to train on our data.

Eric Gilpin:
Fast forward to, you know, August of this past year where ADO like really lit up and you’ll notice that G2 is a top 10 Citated website. And it’s because we’ve been allowing the models to not only train back then, but train on us daily. In fact, we’ll ship that data in the format that they want because it allows us to drive citation traffic, it allows us to drive brand influence, you know, for our customers. There were people in our space that voted against that. Meaning, like, that’s our competitive moat and today they’re paying the price for that. And so if you think about it like, if, if you’re not like allowing LLMs to scrape your site, even if you’re a, a B2B software company, and if 55% of all buyers, which is up from 25% of buyers the previous year, are starting there, you’re just invisible. And right now they love reviews. It’s conversational intelligence.

Eric Gilpin:
It’s vetted, they know it’s moderated. Meaning, like we actually did the moderation and, and you know, verified that it was a trusted review. And right now they love reviews. And so we used to tell everybody, drive reviews because it helps you on G2. Drive reviews because it helps you everywhere.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah. Can you measure it as, as distinctly as before?

Eric Gilpin:
Yeah. So the citation traffic takes a while to build. And meaning like, they don’t always turn into like direct clicks. Like we’re always in this like zero click, you know, kind of environment. But it’s starting to, especially if you’re focused on your own audience strategies at the same time, the more that you can understand the pop queries of like, where your citations are, like showing up, the more I would say your AEO teams are learning and testing new things. Like, we have a big push for listicles and like best of mentions because right now they’re being ranked, ranked really high in the AEO piece. We wouldn’t know that if we weren’t necessarily tracking our own kind of AEO performance. And so one of the hasn’t.

Eric Gilpin:
It hasn’t like surpassed like direct traffic by any means. We still have challenges there, but it’s allowing us to like build our overall traffic. Like G2 is up 31% year over year. I had no customer that has total traffic up 31% year over year. And so similar to sales and marketing Org design, if we can solve AEO for G2, it’s also a really cool place to help our customers, you know, kind of solve it at the same time.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Totally.

Eric Gilpin:
But we’ve got, it’s our number one OKR is you know, build, you know, buyer engagement. And we know that’s through not only direct traffic trends, you know, we’re doing paid search like everybody else. We’re doing a ton in AEO and, and obviously focus on our own audience at the same time.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Good stuff, Eric. Sounds like you guys are doing all the right things. Sounds like a lot of work going on. A lot of change going on, but a lot of change for the better. Congratulations on that. Big bet that paid off. I know you weren’t there at the time, but it sounds like it paid off in major ways. And I’m sure there were, there were counter points and tension to that decision to allow.

Eric Gilpin:
I remember and I’m telling like when I said the future versus business model, future always wins. I firmly believe that nostalgia and denial kill businesses. And so if you go back to like 2000 and it was probably like 2010, this was post recession, I was sitting in a room and we were doing war games about like, what would be the next thing that you basically beat the Internet job boards. And I’m sitting at a table where someone goes, who in their right mind is going to take their resume and put it on the Internet for everyone to see. Last time I checked, 1.1 billion people have done that on LinkedIn. And so like, if you’re not constantly like challenging your own status quo, like, you will get caught. And so I I. I’m.

Eric Gilpin:
I’m excited and proud that. That, you know, G2 had already made that decision because I think we’re in the position we are because they did.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Well, I’m proud for you. Thanks so much for joining the show and looking forward to great things for you guys for the rest of the year.

Eric Gilpin:
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Josh.