Authentic Customer Voices Episode 2: From Reviews to Revenue - Rethinking GTM with Authenticity, Advocacy, and AI

Overview

In this episode, Sydney Sloan, CMO at G2, shares her perspective on how authentic customer voice is reshaping modern go-to-market strategy. Drawing on her experience leading teams at some of B2B’s most iconic brands, Sydney discusses the shift from traditional SEO to AI-powered discovery, the power of peer reviews, and the evolving role of customer feedback in brand building. She also reflects on how customer voice fuels category creation, campaign strategy, and trust at scale—offering thoughtful lessons for anyone building customer-led programs today.

Full Transcript

[Podcast Intro – Host]

Welcome to Authentic Customer Voices, the podcast exploring how today's most thoughtful marketers and go-to-market leaders are scaling advocacy, trust, and peer connections in a bold new way.

I'm thrilled to welcome today's guest, Sydney Sloan, the Chief Marketing Officer at G2. Sydney is a four-time CMO who’s led some of the most well-known brands in B2B, including SalesLoft, Ada, and Adobe. Now at G2, she's helping define the future of buyer behavior, from AI adoption to how trust is built at scale.

Sydney, thank you so much for joining us today. I'd love to start by grounding in your perspective. You’ve worked across brand, product, and customer marketing, so I’d love to understand how you define authentic customer voice today, and maybe how that meaning has evolved over the years.

[Sydney Sloan]

What I love about marketing is that you get to champion the customer from the very first impression all the way through the journey and their lifetime with your company. We get to partner across the organization to ensure that the customer experience is consistent, on-brand, and driven by feedback.

The best thing marketers can do is really embrace the customer and their personas and make sure they’re served. Authenticity is part of an evolution. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we moved toward account-based marketing, buying groups, and personas, but somewhere along the way, I wonder if we forgot about the user.

How do we ensure we delight and exceed expectations for every single user? What if our goal was to make every user an advocate for the value they receive? What would that take, and what would you ask them to do?

Customer voice is at the core of brand building. It always has been, but now, with large language models (LLMs) indexing conversations from Reddit, G2, or Wikipedia, authenticity is literally what shapes perception. Those voices are powerful. They’re real. And they’re happening in public.

[Host]

Absolutely. At G2, you really do have a front-row seat to this shift in software buying behavior. From your perspective, what’s one key behavior change that marketers and sellers need to pay attention to, especially in light of the G2 Buyer Behavior Report?

[Sydney Sloan]

The big shift we saw was in organic traffic. Suddenly, SEO and PPC weren’t working like they used to. That’s because, as of our 2024 report, 79 percent of buyers are using chatbots or LLMs for research, discovery, and shortlisting.

That’s a massive change, and what’s drastic is how fast it happened. Buyers just disappeared from Google. They’re getting answers from other formats now. Everyone’s trying to figure it out.

At G2, we’ve had to shift too. Our business was built on search. Now we need our data to show up in those answer engines. So, authentic reviews and where they’re captured matter more than ever. Brands need to make it easy, weave it into strategy, and think intentionally about how that voice gets indexed.

[Host]

And you've led some powerful category-defining efforts at SalesLoft and at Alfresco, where voice of customer shaped the narrative. How did that play out?

[Sydney Sloan]

At SalesLoft, SDR platforms were emerging. There wasn’t a defined category yet. I interviewed at Outreach, Clari, and SalesLoft, and I asked the Forrester analyst: “Is this going to be a category?” She said yes. It took Forrester three years to create the Wave. It took G2 three months.

That’s the power of customer voice. Categories don’t form unless there are enough happy customers leaving reviews. You see it in real time. It’s organic.

At Alfresco, we were disrupting a 25-year-old category. The founder had built Documentum and was now disrupting his own creation. We brought analysts on the road with us to hear directly from customers. It wasn’t just about buyer influence, it was about analyst influence, shaped by real voices.

[Host]

One theme you’ve spoken to is balancing automation and authenticity. How can teams embrace AI without losing the trust that comes from real customer stories?

[Sydney Sloan]

There’s a lot of innovation right now. We partner with Deeto, and we’re seeing how transcripts can be converted into meaningful follow-ups, emails, task lists, or even identify happy customers and suggest reviews or case studies.

The key is to connect those systems. From conversation to advocacy platform to review site. That’s your always-on strategy.

There’s also what I call the easy button, embedding review requests into your product, just like in B2C. “Do you like this app?” to “Leave a review.” Some top G2 performers do this really well.

[Host]

And for content and campaigns, especially in an AI-first world, how do you think about using customer proof at scale?

[Sydney Sloan]

A year ago, I would’ve said put customer quotes in your campaigns. That’s still true. But now, we can do more. We feed real voice data into our persona profiles. That trains LLMs on what customers actually care about.

We’re even starting to power agents with this data, small language models trained on customer voice. Not just your own recordings or first-party data, but industry-wide input. That gives you a broader, category-level perspective.

[Host]

Let’s connect this to brand building. If traditional SEO is being overtaken by AI and peer reviews, what should marketers do differently?

[Sydney Sloan]

You can’t buy your way into pipeline like you used to. PPC is breaking.

So first, back to brand strategy. Trust takes time. You have to be consistent and clear about what you stand for, and voice of customer reflects that better than anything.

Second, influencer strategy. B2B micro-influencers, people your buyers trust, matter. Whether they’re on podcasts, reviewing tools, or posting on LinkedIn.

You need to understand where your buyers live, newsletters, communities, events, and participate. It’s about returning to fundamentals and doing them in a new context.

[Host]

Final question. For those building customer-centric programs from scratch, what’s the one piece of advice that’s held true for you?

[Sydney Sloan]

Talk to your customers.

My foundation came from events, working booths, hosting our first customer conferences. You connect with happy customers, help showcase their stories, build them up. At Jive, we joked that if you spoke on main stage, you’d be working there the next year. It was often true.

Your job is to identify those advocates, amplify their voice, and raise their profile. That’s the foundation. And community is part of that, open dialogue, even when it’s not about your product. Help people connect with each other.

In all this disruption, we’re learning new things but also returning to the fundamentals.

[Host]

Sydney, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate the time.