TestBox is a tool that lets sales and marketing teams provide their leads and prospects with custom instances of their products. We've heard these instances called sandboxes, proof of concepts, interactive demos, and smart trials, but at TestBox, we call them playgrounds.
A TestBox playground is essentially a supercharged trial of your product. Like a trial, it's fully functional. It always reflects your latest UI and contains your newest features. And every TestBox playground is unique to each lead you send it to, so it never contains any PII.
In addition to including everything a lead could access in a normal trial of your product, TestBox adds additional features that make it easier for leads to see how your product will work for them.
Every TestBox playground contains a quick links menu that buyers can use to quickly navigate to and test your most popular features.
The more feature-rich your software is, the harder it is for buyers to find the features they're looking for when they start a free trial of your product. And when buyers can't find what they're looking for, they assume you don't offer those features, leave, and never come back.
TestBox works with your team to identify the features you want leads to be able to access quickly and easily, then builds links to those features into the TestBox quick links menu.
If your product caters to many different personas, each with a unique set of needs, TestBox also has tools that let you personalize which features leads see in the quick links menu.
Sales reps can use feature personalization to remove distracting features from a playground before sending the playground to a lead.
Marketers can use persona journeys to personalize the features that prospects in different roles and industries see inside of TestBox.
If you know that a set of prospects or a specific lead cares deeply about certain features but doesn't need others, removing the unnecessary features limits distractions during the testing process and keeps buyers focused on what they care about most.
What happens when a lead comes across a feature they're not familiar with in a trial of your product? In a normal trial, they likely just don't bother testing it, which might mean they're missing out on key features that are your biggest competitive differentiators.
In TestBox, guided walkthroughs explain what each feature in your quick links menu does and how buyers can use them. This ensures that your leads fully understand everything your product is capable of doing so they can factor all of your features into their buying decision.
Asking leads to connect to critical company systems — like their support email, CRM, or marketing automation tool — just to test your product is a deal-breaker for many buyers. It's just too risky when they're not yet sure your product is something they're even going to purchase.
TestBox solves this problem by prepopulating every playground with sample data:
This makes it faster and easier for buyers to test your software and reach their "aha!" moments. When they log in to your playground the very first time, it will look and feel as though they've already been using it for months.
If you target customers in different industries that have very distinct data needs, TestBox can also build custom datasets you can use to populate your playgrounds with data.
Since the data that a SaaS customer needs will look a lot different than the data that an e-commerce company needs, these custom datasets can make your playgrounds feel much more useful, personalized, and relevant to your leads.
TestBox adds all of these features on top of your product so your sales and marketing teams can create a better, more informative, more streamlined buying experience for your prospective customers. But the benefits aren't all on the customer side of the transaction. There are plenty of benefits for your company and GTM teams, too.
TestBox customers are solving many different types of issues that plague modern SaaS companies:
Many of the businesses we’ve talked to have shared concerns about the economics of having a sales process for SMB and mid-market leads. While the same amount of support is needed for these smaller companies as enterprise leads, the deal sizes are much smaller, and they make up a much smaller portion of a company's overall annual recurring revenue.
TestBox playgrounds can be a great substitute for or supplement to a more hands-on sales experience for these types of leads. Because TestBox makes it so easy for leads to test drive your product and validate that it's a right fit, they don't need as much personal attention. In many cases, they can move from playground to purchase without ever needing to talk to a sales rep.
In many ways, TestBox is an entire PLG motion in a box. Companies without an existing free trial or self-service motion can purchase TestBox to build one instantly without taking engineering time and resources away from your core product to do so.
In cases where it doesn't make sense or isn't possible to send leads from a playground directly to purchase, TestBox can help your sales team avoid time-wasting calls by qualifying leads for you.
Sending leads into a TestBox playground before scheduling a call with them can help you weed out tire-kickers and poor fits that will never lead to revenue for the business.
Maintaining demo environments and adding custom data to them is a full-time job on its own, and for many companies, it's multiple full-time jobs.
Using TestBox is like having one sales engineer for every account executive. AEs can create custom playgrounds that are pre-configured with sample data in seconds — no engineer required.
You spend a ton of money getting people to your website and convincing them to try your product, but only a small percentage of the people who go to trial end up becoming customers.
Because TestBox fixes many of the issues prospects struggle with during a free trial — finding the features they care about, understanding what different features are for and how to use them, and the hurdle of having to connect to critical company systems — customers who replace their own, empty free trials with TestBox playgrounds see much higher conversions from trial to paid.
Some companies we talk to don't have sales engineers. Instead, their product engineering team has to do the work to maintain and update their demo environments.
This is not only expensive and distracting for the engineering team, but it's also difficult to get sales requests prioritized.
TestBox completely eliminates the need to have demo environments that need to be maintained. AEs can simply create a playground for every lead they're meeting with, use that playground to do a live demo of your product, and then hand the playground off to the lead to test with other stakeholders after the live call.
When multiple AEs demo out of the same environment, it creates a lot of noise, clutter, and nonsense in the environment. As a result, AEs have to spend time before each demo going into the demo environment to clean it up and make sure it's ready for their calls.
With TestBox, every lead gets their own unique playground. All AEs have to do to create a completely clean demo environment is go into either the TestBox app or Salesforce opportunity and create a new playground — it takes only seconds.
You suspect — or know — that there's no consistency in your live demos. Every AE does things a little differently; there are wild differences across your team when it comes to quota attainment, win rates, deal sizes, and sales cycle lengths; and you're having to constantly hire and let go of sales reps.
With TestBox, all of your AEs become A+ reps.
They have clean demo environments that contain industry-specific data and quick links that help guide their demos presentations. After the call, they can see exactly which leads have been testing and what features they tested, so they can follow up with highly timely and personalized communications.
There are three primary ways sales teams can use TestBox:
AEs can create a custom environment for a lead instantly using either the TestBox app or our Salesforce integration.
One or more stakeholders can be added to the playground by the AE, and stakeholders can also add additional team members.
Once stakeholders start testing, the AE can see several detailed analytics:
This helps them further qualify (or disqualify) leads, identify their champions, and follow up with highly personalized communications.
Marketing teams can also use TestBox in many different ways:
Some of TestBox’s customers have even started sending their prospects into TestBox playgrounds instead of their own free trials.
Each prospect that signs up to access your playground is added to HubSpot Marketing Hub (or another marketing automation tool your organization uses), so you can follow up with all of these leads, sending them to your sales team, targeting them with retargeting ads, or enrolling them in automated nurturing sequences.
In addition to our core use cases, TestBox customers have come up with lots of additional, creative ways to use TestBox to increase their trial-to-paid and win rates.
Growth Marketers:
Account Executives:
Event Marketers:
Customer Success:
Account Managers:
Partnerships:
Sales Leaders:
Product Marketers:
Business Development Reps:
Lifecycle Marketers:
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