Buying enterprise software? Decide in hours, not months, with TestBox

Imagine you’re a customer support manager of a growing team. Your team’s needs and processes are becoming increasingly complex, and you know it's time to scale up to a new support platform, but there are so many to choose from. The last thing you have time for is learning all the options with very little chance of getting a hands-on product experience, and eventually ending up on hours of calls and demos with five different vendors. The whole process feels like a blackbox that’s owned by the sales reps rather than you. 

We think decision-makers deserve a better buying experience — a self-serve, customer-led experience.

The software buying process generally happens in three stages: Discovery, Evaluation, and Negotiation. There are already many services tackling Discovery (G2, Capterra, Gartner, PulseQA, etc.), and many focused on Negotiation (Vendr, Tropic, etc.). Still, no one is solving for the most important step of all, the step that will actually lead to choosing the right product — making software Evaluation better for the decision-makers. This is where TestBox comes in.

TestBox allows decision-makers to directly compare software products side-by-side in a live simulated environment. It comes with guided walkthroughs, pre-configured use cases designed by real users, and collaboration tools built in.

What makes choosing new software so frustrating?

Enterprise software has made leaps and bounds over the last decade, with innovations making it easier and easier to use. But the buying experience remains stuck in the dark ages. I know because I’ve experienced it first-hand. It’s painful and frustrating. 

• Typically it takes 3–6 months and 27 excruciating steps (according to Gartner). That’s a crazy amount of time that would be better spent running your teams and delivering for your customers.
• Even then, decision-makers often aren’t positive that they’re making the right choice. When we talked with 75 software buyers, they all told us the same thing — trials are too short and demos are too much of a black box for them to make such a big-ticket purchase decision with confidence.
• Choosing the wrong software is expensive, can make teams less effective, and actually increases employee churn. The CIOs and CTOs we spoke to all strongly agreed that choosing the right software the first time is a strategic imperative they’ve been trying to solve without success for decades. And it’s only getting harder with the increasing speed of digital transformation.

We’ve built TestBox so you never have to sit on another sales call

TestBox is the first and only customer-led approach to buying enterprise software. It gives decision-makers a simple way to compare software options side-by-side with data (powered by OpenAI) that looks and feels like theirs.

It’s insanely easy to use and, dare I say, even enjoyable! Plus, it’s completely free.

Better yet, TestBox can reduce software evaluation from months to just hours. Our initial testers estimate that TestBox eliminates 70% of the time customers usually spend on the buying process.

Plus, it’s vendor-agnostic, so there’s no pressure (or incentive) to choose one product over another. That’s entirely in the hands of the customer and based on their requirements.
‍
Hear from users how TestBox will change software buying

‍

New categories we're expanding to in the near future

TestBox currently features customer support management software. We’ve already partnered with Zendesk, HubSpot, and Freshdesk, and we’re expanding this list of partnerships quickly in the coming months.

Why did we start with customer support? Because we see customer support as a particularly vital area for companies to get right. Also, Peter (TestBox’s CTO) and I were previously Support Heroes ourselves, plus in my personal life, I have seen firsthand the frustration of buying support software.

It’s estimated that 75% of customers are willing to spend more to buy from companies that give them a good customer experience.

Beyond customer support, we’ll be expanding into other types of enterprise software, such as customer relationship management (CRM), marketing technology (MarTech), and IT Support. So watch this space.

Also in the pipeline are two new solutions to help teams build even better products for their customers: TestBox for Sales (for streamlining the direct sales process) and TestBox for Product Insights (to help vendors understand why they are winning or losing customers during the buying process).

We'll be posting content frequently on our blog on topics such as:

• How to make better software decisions faster.
• Best practices for using software that TestBox supports.
• What we see as the future of enterprise software.

Get started today

If you’re in the process of buying customer support management software, try out TestBox. There’s no risk, and it’s completely free for evaluating software. You can test the software for yourself without having to speak to a vendor or set it all up from scratch, saving time, effort, and frustration. And you can be confident that you’re choosing the right software to best meet your organization’s needs.

Shoutout to our investors

We’re thrilled to be announcing our seed round, led by SignalFire and firstminute (UK) (with contributions from Basecamp, Lifeline, Sequoia scouts, and individual angels). Elaine Zelby from SignalFire has joined our board. We’re incredibly grateful for their help so far and excited to continue partnering together.

Software spend today is over $500B a year, and we are only just at the beginning of the digital transformation journey. If you’re a software vendor or investor who is excited to be part of the first customer-led buying platform or a phenomenal Front-End engineer who wants to join our extremely talented and growing team, please reach out to me directly: sam@testbox.com.