Forrester and G2 Reports Explained

In this short video, Discuss’ Chief Growth Officer, Adam Mertz, highlights three recent industry reports and their implications for choosing a trusted partner for qualitative research. The first report is from Forrester, a globally recognized analyst firm. The report, called The Forrester Wave™, focuses on experience research platforms and Discuss is proud to be one of the seven selected providers analyzed in-depth. Adam explains that Forrester’s evaluation considers various dimensions, including the strength of the current offering and the strength of strategy with Discuss recognized as a strong performer and receiving the highest rating in key categories such as roadmap, market approach, and supporting products and services.

Full Transcript

Hi, my name is Adam Mertz, SVP of product and marketing here at Discuss. I wanted to take just a few minutes to highlight a couple of recent industry reports that have come out, unpack them a little bit, and share how they might impact your decision process in choosing a trusted partner for your qualitative research.

So there are three different reports. One of them is from Forrester, And I’m gonna talk a little bit about who Forrester is and a little bit more about the report. The name of the report is the Forrester Experience Research Platforms Wave.

And so we’ll spend a little bit of time there. And then the other couple of reports are from an organization called G2. And I’ll talk a little bit about who G2 is and so forth. The reason I want to focus here is that we talk with prospective customers and existing customers all the time, and they’re always trying to better understand all these different puzzle pieces and thinking about who their long-term partners are gonna be when it comes to doing and helping support their initiatives around in-depth research of really getting in and understanding their customers.

And there’s a lot of different puzzle pieces that we see being thought about. You could be thinking about innovation. For example, how good is your company innovating? Customer satisfaction and support, how well are we being supported? Or thinking about how easy the product itself is to use and how easy a company is to do business with.

There are questions about business stability. That is always there. Security, how good is the security of the platform?

There’s a lot that just goes into how much I trust the people that are at the company, leading the company, so forth, the expertise that’s at the company, etc. There are all these different things that are part of it. The ROI, of course, is there, what is gonna be the return on the investment based on what we’re spending? And the results that we’re going to see. So there’s a lot of different things.

And I think these reports that have come out from these two organizations are very helpful in giving a better understanding of the puzzle pieces and putting those puzzle pieces together if you will. So let’s talk about Forrester first. So Forrester, first of all, just for those of you who aren’t familiar with Forrester, they are very well known globally. They’re considered one of the top analysts in the world.

The “Forrester Wave” is considered to be one of the most in-depth in most respected vendor landscapes really done anywhere in the world.

This particular wave report is called the experience research platforms wave and is the first report that they’ve done, in our space. So that’s really exciting. We’re very proud to be part of that wave.

You know, actually, we are one of only seven providers that were chosen and that were selected and analyzed in this in-depth fashion.

And, maybe just backing up for a moment. In order to to get that, the analyst, AJ Joplin, who led the report, talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of different organizations large and small when they were selecting vendors. A lot of their determination as to who is included was determined by hearing from the vendor’s customers.

And in addition, Forrester did what they call the Experience Research platforms landscape report. And in that report, they did a more, I would say, high-level overview, and it included thirty-nine different vendors.

So that, along with probably many of their other conversations, led them to narrow it down to have seven vendors, that were in their actual deep dive wave. We were proud to be a strong performer in the wave, and I’ll talk a little bit about what strong performer means and some of the things that they really highlighted where we excel.

And I do want to highlight a couple of things. There are definitely some other good vendors in there. In fact, regarding the three leaders that were mentioned in the report, I do want to highlight a very big difference between Discuss and actually many of the other vendors. Along with many other tech organizations, that from a business stability perspective, we run our business to be a breakeven business. So we’ve had twenty percent growth year over year, so very excited about that. But we do that all with staying within our spending limits versus I think the combined total across those other three leaders that were in the Forrester wave report I think it tallied up to somewhere around three hundred and sixty-ish million dollars that they’ve taken in funding.

And they’re really spending and kinda bleeding a lot of cash each and every quarter. So we have a very different model. We feel that that model is the way to build a strong company for the long haul. And so we’re excited about being able to grow so much year over year, quarter over quarter, and still have that kind of breakeven mentality. So that’s something that’s very different right out of the gate.

But just getting into that wave report in a little bit more detail, they really look at a couple of different dimensions. The first dimension is the strength of your current offering.

And within that, they’re looking at how well the platform manages participants to create studies, execute the studies, help to analyze those studies, manage the data, collaborate, everything around the current offering in the platform, the features, and the functionality.

And then that’s that first dimension. The second dimension is really around the strength of strategy, so they’re looking at your roadmap, your market approach, the supporting products and services, the partner ecosystem, your innovation, and the direction that you’re going, and they look at all this. They have an extensive questionnaire that every provider completes. And then in addition, there’s a several-hour live demos and roadmap overview and talking about the business itself in the direction, and that’s coupled with multiple customer interviews that they do. So it’s a very, very, very extensive process that they go in using their expertise and kind of digging deep.

And so they look at all these different categories. In fact, I think there’s a total of something like twenty-five evaluation areas within each of those two dimensions overall, and they’re going down, and ultimately they’re giving a rating and so forth. And that’s where all those ratings together is where you end up having your dot on their wave. So we’re excited they highlighted a couple of things.

We were mentioned for having a really strong strategy. In fact, we were not only named as a strong performer, but we receive the highest possible rating for our roadmap, for our market approach, and for supporting products and services within the strategy category. And I think that kind of highlights, at least in our opinion, the fresh and innovative vision that we’re bringing to the research space.

If you don’t follow Discuss every day. You might not have seen it. We launched what we call Genie. It’s a generative AI-based summary tool that takes hours and hours of in-depth interviews or focus group interviews and helps to summarize insights in just an instant.

And so we’re excited about not only, our roadmap that Forrester felt was really ahead of the pack, if you will, but we are executing against that roadmap. In fact, we’re the first mover in this space on generative AI. And a lot more to come on that front. We have some great new additional new features coming out in just short order.

But it’s really exciting to see Forrester do that deep-dive analysis. And at the end of the day, come back and say, you’re a strong performer.

And then similar, but yet different are the G2 grid reports.

So where Forrester has an analyst that’s running the analysis and talking with customers and as a subject matter expert, ultimately putting together all those deep dive analyses.

What G2 is doing is considered a crowdsourced report. So it is taking all of the reviews from users of all of these different platforms, and what people say is what drives where you land.

Two grid reports come out and they do this every quarter. In the latest summer grid report for what’s called consumer video feedback, we were considered a leader in that consumer video feedback grid report, and the other grid report that just came out in the past month is the user research grid, and we’re a leader in that grid as well.

And, again, that’s driven all by users. That’s people that are using our platform, and they’re saying, In fact, we had the industry-leading scores around likelihood to recommend the ease of doing business with the quality of our support, the ease of setup, the ease of use, So a lot of customer satisfaction driven sort of analysis that G2 gets from customers that are providing their perspectives.

Our MPS rating, for example, was eighty-four in the consumer video feedback grid. We are so thrilled to be supporting our customers and it really shows across Discuss. And that really comes through in those reports. The entire team here is excited about what we’re seeing from customers because we know that customers matter most and making sure that we are solving the challenges when it comes to market research.

And qualitative market research is a hard thing to scale, and we’re helping our customers scale that every day. And in parallel with that, getting that industry recognition from those deep subject matter experts at Forrester who are doing those deep dives who are looking under the hood, looking at our platform, and looking at at at all the others and saying, yeah, you’re a strong performer. You’ve got a great roadmap. Your innovation is right on and is ahead of the pack.

And so it’s exciting to see that the industry reports all come out pretty close together, highlighting that Discuss is on a great trajectory. So with that, hopefully, that overview is helpful.

As you look at both those reports and assess us, and look at all the different vendors that are there in the providers when it comes to doing qualitative research. We think that we’ve built a great platform and we love to go into more depth and detail for you and show that platform. Thanks for taking a few minutes and listening to the overview.

And hopefully, you’ll be talking with either me or one of my colleagues here on the sales side sometime soon to go into much more depth about how we might be able to help you with your next qualitative research project. Thanks.