This year at INBOUND, HubSpot launched a ton of new features to make CRM a more customizable, connected, and customer-focused platform. Among these new features are test environments, which allow Enterprise users to experiment and see how different elements of the customer experience work in a secure environment identical to the production environment.
Sounds great, but where to start? It can be intimidating to have complete freedom to test and iterate on different aspects of the user experience, so don’t worry if you don’t know how to get the most out of testing environments. That’s why we present three different use cases, which will help your team get the most out of this new feature right now.
Configure the CRM
Teams working with HubSpot CRM get used to following a certain workflow. No matter how easy to use the software is, a single change to the business pipeline or the fields needed to create a new object can cause even the most efficient team to reduce their productivity, especially if everything is not set up correctly. The sales team may then be sitting around waiting for the technical team to resolve issues, which could cause them to lose new business.
Sandboxes provide the perfect environment for IT colleagues to design new processes for your team without disrupting their marketing and sales activities within HubSpot. Additionally, while development is taking place, you guarantee your team the opportunity to train on the new processes and systems that are being implemented, so that no one is caught by surprise when adopting a workflow or a management system. new lead rotation.
Andrew Thomas, Head of Customer Service at Digital 22 has a lot of experience with testing environments in CRM migrations and configuration. “Test environments allow us to introduce and evaluate various sales pipelines, business stages and automation systems, as well as new configurations for contact records. “It is very convenient to have this feature to keep our clientele informed about how the implementation is going before launching.”
Test integrations
HubSpot offers all the tools you need to create an exceptional experience for your customers. However, for each stage to be as fluid as possible regardless of the team they are interacting with, it is necessary that all your information and data is in one place and that there is a system of recording the customer experience.
This is where integrations come into play. Hundreds of integrations can be easily installed with HubSpot or seamlessly designed using our APIs . However, installing an integration without knowing exactly how transferring data between two systems will affect your team can be risky. HubSpot’s integration with Salesforce is a good example of this. Depending on how you set up the integration, Salesforce may replace information that was already in HubSpot, only certain objects may sync, or the integration may impact functionality across the entire platform.
You can leverage a sandbox environment to see what will happen with your production instance by integrating a tool with HubSpot. You will never again have to worry about the risk of overwriting data, setting up incorrect triggers, or interrupting workflows.
If you’re integrating a tool that already has a sandbox, it’s a good idea to use that instead of your production account to test the integration with HubSpot. This way you will keep your data in all tools while you test.
Develop the ideal website
CMS Hub removes gatekeepers from the web development process, so marketers can easily create pages or edit content while developers focus on designing and perfecting the user experience by leveraging the integrated data set provided by HubSpot’s CRM. . By doing this, they use more than just HTML or CSS: they also work with serverless functions by creating dynamic content that leverages different CRM or HubDB objects, and by referencing data across different systems using our APIs. If this were done in a production environment in HubSpot, it would mean that your marketers would have access to a new module or template before the development team completes programming.
With this feature, the development team can easily evaluate how their code interacts with different parts of HubSpot’s software, ensuring everything is compliant before people on the marketing team start using the new themes. templates or modules to design pages.
Lynton staff extensively use sandboxes to develop CMS resources for their business and customers. Alyssa Wilie, Website Developer at LyntonWeb, says: “Testing new ideas and templates quickly causes portals to become cluttered with content that won’t be used. By having a separate place to test, we can keep our main portal neat and clean, only with the resources that marketing knows have already been tested and are ready to use on the publishing pages.
And what is still to come
The launch of testing environments in INBOUND is only the beginning. Soon, you will be able to synchronize your workflows in the test environments and transfer those changes to the production account. Don’t miss out on these amazing updates.