G2 vs. Gartner vs. building your own win/loss process

G2 and Gartner Peer Insights are useful for a first-pass vendor shortlist, but neither can tell you why your company specifically is losing deals to a specific competitor, since their reviews are aggregated across every buyer in the category. That gap only gets filled by your own win/loss process: pulling the actual reasons from your own CRM, deal by deal.

When teams start evaluating competitive intelligence tools, two names come up almost immediately as research starting points: G2's competitive intelligence category page, and Gartner Peer Insights. Both are genuinely useful, and both answer a narrower question than most people think they do.

What are G2 and Gartner Peer Insights actually good for?

G2 and Gartner Peer Insights both aggregate verified customer reviews of software vendors, organized by category, with filters for company size, industry, and use case. That's genuinely useful for a first pass: which vendors exist in this category, how do buyers similar to you rate them, what do people complain about after they've actually used the product for a while, not just after a demo.

What neither can tell you is why your company, specifically, is losing deals to a specific competitor. Reviews are aggregated across every buyer of that CI tool, not filtered to your market, your ICP, or your actual competitive set. They're a vendor-evaluation input, not a substitute for knowing your own win/loss picture.

What gap can only your own win/loss process fill?

That gap is exactly what a real win/loss process is for: pulling the actual reasons from your own CRM, deal by deal, and finding the patterns in them. The tricky part isn't collecting those reasons, most CRMs already have a dropdown for it, it's making sense of hundreds of entries without either drowning in raw data or over-interpreting a handful of them. We wrote about the specific approach we landed on in why we stopped showing raw win/loss dumps: group by what reps actually selected, rank wins and losses independently, and only surface the patterns that show up often enough to be real.

So should you use review platforms or your own win/loss data?

Use G2 or Gartner Peer Insights to shortlist vendors worth a closer look. Use your own win/loss data to actually understand your market. Treating the first as a substitute for the second is how teams end up picking a highly-rated tool that never answers the one question that actually mattered to them.