CRM innovation and creativity are essential for staying ahead of the competition and meeting customer needs. But how do you ensure that your new ideas and solutions are effective, feasible, and desirable before launching them? Here are some tips to test and validate your CRM innovation and creativity solutions.
The first step is to clearly define what you want to achieve with your CRM innovation and creativity solutions and how you will measure their success. For example, do you want to increase customer retention, satisfaction, loyalty, referrals, or revenue? How will you track and quantify these outcomes? Having specific and realistic goals and metrics will help you focus your testing and validation efforts and evaluate your results.
The next step is to identify who your CRM innovation and creativity solutions are for and how they will benefit them. You need to understand your target users and segments, their needs, preferences, pain points, behaviors, and expectations. You can use various methods to gather user insights, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, personas, journey maps, or analytics. These insights will help you design your solutions with the user in mind and tailor them to different segments.
Know your ICP and test it. How? By creating each and every possible piece of information into the CRM, research, and load. Make key elements such as follow-up notifications automated. Dashboards and workflows are a must element that a CRM brings and will provide massive comparison information to work with. Bottom-line, just do the work and apply it.
The third step is to choose the most suitable testing and validation methods for your CRM innovation and creativity solutions. Depending on the stage of development, complexity, resources, and feedback needed, you could opt for prototyping, usability testing, A/B testing, beta testing, or pilot testing. Prototyping involves creating a simplified or partial version of your solution to get early feedback and improve the design. Usability testing evaluates how easy and intuitive your solution is to use by observing users performing tasks. A/B testing compares two or more versions of your solution to see which one performs better. Beta testing releases your solution to a limited group of users for a real-world test of functionality, reliability, and performance. Pilot testing implements your solution in a small-scale or controlled environment to test its feasibility, scalability, and impact.
Being a super critical cog in your CRM machine, testing and validation(this step) should be handled with care and expertise. I tend to "beta-test/AB test/pilot test" everything with my own account/email first and then double check if something needs to go live. Always send test emails and surveys before sharing them in a live workflow. For workflows in HubSpot or any other CRM for that matter, the biggest oversight is checking the impact of the solution on other things. For example, you are ready to switch an email drip workflow on , but have you considered that the recipients might also be receiving some other emails from other workflows? Thus, are your proposed automation actions impacting other automations in your system?
The fourth step is to collect and analyze data from your testing and validation methods. You need to use both quantitative and qualitative data to get a comprehensive picture of how your CRM innovation and creativity solutions are performing. Quantitative data can include metrics such as conversion rates, retention rates, satisfaction scores, revenue, or costs. Qualitative data can include feedback such as comments, ratings, reviews, suggestions, or complaints. You need to use appropriate tools and techniques to collect, store, organize, visualize, and interpret your data.
The final step is to learn from your data and iterate your CRM innovation and creativity solutions accordingly. You need to identify what works well and what needs improvement, what are the strengths and weaknesses of your solution, what are the opportunities and threats for your solution, and what are the best practices and lessons learned from your testing and validation process. You need to use your findings to make informed decisions and changes to your solution, and test and validate them again until you reach your desired outcomes.