According to Users, Membrain Outperforms Our Biggest Competitor on (Almost) Every Score

I’m very proud of what we’ve built at Membrain. We set out to build a platform that would genuinely help companies engaging in complex sales become more effective, and we succeeded. We believe that for our best-fit customers, we are a better choice than others, including our biggest competitor, Salesforce.

And, apparently, our customers agree.

Around the same time our company launched, another disruptive technology company did the same. It was called G2 Crowd (now just G2), and started as a platform to collect user reviews of SaaS solutions. They aimed to “disrupt the traditional analyst model.”

This resonated with us. They promised to “build trust by showcasing the authentic voice of millions of software buyers.” This was a challenge to the mainstream “pay to play” model used by traditional research firms. So, we bought in. I wrote for their site, we promoted them, we pay to be listed, and our customers reviewed us.

Outperforming Salesforce On Almost Every Measure

Now, more than ten years later, the proof is in the pudding:

G2 only allows reviews from actual users of the technology. For that reason, naturally, we have far fewer reviews than a juggernaut like Salesforce. But the reviews we do have, blow them out of the water.

Ease of use: We outperform by a full point. We pride ourselves in providing the most effective functionality in the easiest to use format. There are no extra bells and whistles, no pointless pop-ups, and the interface is customizable to enable companies to make it work the way they need it to work, without expensive custom coding.

Meets requirements: Our performance is just a notch higher than Salesforce on this one, but that’s enough for us. We built our product for the sales industry based on genuine need, not just what we wanted to sell. Our sales teams only sell to customers we can genuinely help. Of course we meet requirements.

Quality of support: A full 1.2 points higher than Salesforce. This doesn’t surprise me at all. We have trained, live people available to our customers at all times. No pointless and aggravating escalation through unhelpful channels. Our customer service agents are highly trained, highly effective, and highly compassionate humans who always work for the benefit of our customers.

I appreciate every single customer who takes the time to review us on G2 and elsewhere.

Likelihood to recommend: We love this. Our customers are significantly more likely to recommend us than Salesforce. That speaks for itself.

Ease of doing business with: Again, no surprise here, not to us. 1.3 points higher than Salesforce. That’s because we genuinely care about our customers. We built our teams, our infrastructure, and our platform to serve, not to generate profits for outside stakeholders. If we’re not making it easy to work with us, we’re not fulfilling our mission.

Ease of admin: Seven point eight for Salesforce, 9.1 for Membrain. Big spread there. Again, we created a product that is designed to be fully customizable by the customer in the ways that are most important to them. That makes admin easier, end of story.

Ease of setup: Again, it’s a blowout. We’re just easier to work with, on every score.

Overall impression: Nine point five, compared to 8.2. That’s a 1.3 point spread in our favor. Nothing makes us happier than knowing how happy our customers are.

Here’s Where We Did NOT Outperform Salesforce

Spoiler alert: the answer is size. Size is the one area where we don’t outperform Salesforce. We are smaller, and that is that. We always have been, and we never aimed to be a giant. We aimed to be GOOD.
Unfortunately, the story doesn’t quite end there. Because it turns out that being smaller has some implications for how our score is treated on G2. What I didn’t show you in the image above, is G2’s summary of our “Overall Satisfaction Score.” Based on the information above, how would you anticipate Membrain comparing to Salesforce overall, according to G2?

Here’s their actual “Overall Satisfaction Score:”

Hold on. We outperformed Salesforce on every score, but the “overall satisfaction score” shows them at nearly perfect at 99.18 and us at 68.08. How is this possible?

I reached out to G2 to try to understand. They responded that the discrepancy may be due to differences in review volumes and recency. In other words, differences in company size (and marketing budget.).

“Larger companies,” their email reads, “often have more reviews, including recent ones, which might contribute to a higher satisfaction score due to the increased statistical significance.”

To an extent, this makes sense to me. I wouldn’t want someone’s half-baked homegrown software with five reviews from mom, dad, and cousins posted six years ago, to outperform a legitimate and growing company with relevant and meaningful reviews from actual paying customers. More reviews and more recent ones should, for this reason, contribute to a more “robust” score. But if the point is to provide a platform where the voices of real users matter, I question whether the weighting of their algorithm reflects their stated intention.

Regardless, I am very proud of what we’ve accomplished at Membrain. I appreciate every single customer who takes the time to review us on G2 and elsewhere. While I’d certainly like to see our bottom line score on review platforms align with actual user reviews, I am still thrilled that our customers love our product and rate us highly.

What do you think? Does the scoring make sense to you? How would you rate Membrain compared to Salesforce?