What Lies Beneath: Business-wide Testing For Performance Insights
Find out how strategic testing identifies and addresses business challenges and allows effective course correction.
Alex Nazarevich, VP of growth at Unbounce, stresses proactive, strategic approaches for sustaining high business performance. Advocating continual questioning, idea validation, and adaptation to market changes, he urges leaders to prioritize strategic testing for better results
Leaders who want to sustain high performance can’t be afraid to challenge the most foundational aspects of their business. Even though most leaders know how important this is, so many businesses and products are still failing due to a lack of validation or product-market fit. You’ll remain in the dark if you don’t question why you’re succeeding or failing, leaving performance up to chance.
Best-case scenario, you might continue to see surface-level success even if you’ve lost problem-solution or product-market fit. In the worst-case scenario, you won’t know your foundation was cracked until it impacts your bottom line.
First, you need to recognize when the root of your performance problems lurks beneath the surface. Once you’ve identified a deeper issue, testing is the optimal way to reassess your foundation, identify a new, higher-performing approach, and gain critical insights into the future direction of your business.
Leadership in Flux: The Peril of Complacency
Leaders who rely on their experience and what’s worked in the past without fully appreciating how quickly markets are changing put their business’s growth and performance at serious risk.
When someone says you need to keep validating your ideas, you might brush them off because you have an established business or a successful product, and you think validation is just for new ideas. However, the reality is that your business was likely built on assumptions that were hopefully validated at a particular point in time but that don’t necessarily stand true indefinitely.
Failing to recognize that what was effective yesterday may not be effective tomorrow creates blind spots that you can’t afford to have—especially right now. According to Salesforce, 65% of customers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences.
If you can’t identify or recognize the impact of challenging market conditions, a saturated competitive landscape, or a fundamental change in your industry until it hits your bottom line, you’re already too late. That’s why, when times are tough, leaders often shift from proactivity to reactivity with quick decisions and short-term fixes.
Leaders who fall into this trap typically don’t understand when they need to test and challenge the assumptions guiding the most influential decisions within their business.
Balancing Business Foundation: Knowing When to Reassess
If you want to ensure you’re always performing your best, you must be willing to pause and validate the ideas and assumptions that dictate how you package and deliver value to your customers. Although testing always is a good practice when you’re a hands-on marketer testing headlines and calls to action to drive conversion, it isn’t feasible or wise to continuously test foundational aspects of your business.
So, how do you strike the right balance?
The key is to know what types of events should trigger a deeper look into your business’s foundation. Once you’ve assessed the potential problem or threat, you’ll better understand what you need to test.
Here are a few things that signal the need to look beneath the surface:
- You see a consistent decline in performance. For example, if the conversion rate on your website is consistently dropping or plummets but doesn’t recover, your pricing or positioning may no longer be compelling enough.
- Your positioning feels out-of-date based on changes in your industry. For example, perhaps you used to be able to attract customers by simply mentioning that you use AI, but now that it’s more common, you might need to show how you use it and why it should matter to your customers.
- A new competitor emerges, or an existing competitor launches something that impacts your position in your category. For example, if a competitor launches a product or feature that you used to use to differentiate yourself, you may need to A/B test the new positioning to ensure that you can differentiate your solution another way.
- You’re getting regular feedback from potential or existing customers. If your sales team is coming up against the same objections over and over, or your Google or G2 rating has plummeted alongside negative reviews, it might be time to determine whether you still have a problem-solution fit.
As I said, it’s most important to know when to reevaluate your business’s foundation, and then you can identify the problem. Once you know what the primary challenge is, whether it be problem-solution fit or competitive positioning, you’re ready to start defining experiments and determining what you need to test in order to course-correct.
See More: A Simple Guide to A/B Testing for Marketers
Strategic Testing Helps in Leading With Insights
Testing should feel like a strategic tool, not a burden. So, let’s discuss some assumptions and misconceptions about testing. Many leaders know that, fundamentally, testing is important. However, they often lean on testing for the wrong reasons, like when they need to settle a disagreement or quickly boost a low-performing campaign. How often has someone settled a disagreement by saying: let’s test it, and never shared the result? These scenarios make teams less likely to integrate an experimental mindset into their culture because they support short-term thinking rather than long-term results.
It’s also unrealistic to think that you’ll get better results just by running a test. If you don’t know why something is working or aren’t testing regularly enough to understand which factors significantly impact your bottom line, testing won’t feel productive. If you test strategically and often find out that only specific factors actually have a significant impact on your business, they’ll be different for every business and at different points in time.
Knowing what factors truly influence revenue differentiates leaders who react from leaders who respond. Reacting feels more like an impulse. For example, if your sales or marketing teams aren’t hitting their targets, you might react by asking your teams to do more cold calls or run more campaigns, hoping that the volume of activity will offset the problem without actually identifying or addressing what’s led to the drop in performance in the first place.
Responding means seeing the problem and addressing it with insight and intention. If you test regularly, you’ll have a good sense of what impacts your business and what doesn’t, as well as what positioning, messaging, or channels impact performance the most. When something changes in your industry, or your performance suddenly drops, you’ll know where to look first.
Test Before You Invest for Performance Improvement
If you think testing feels risky, it’s the opposite. You’re more likely to introduce risk with the classic quick fix. Every campaign, sales call, and meeting scheduled is an investment in your business. If you’re repeatedly struggling with performance and nothing seems to work, you might be investing in a faulty foundation. Look beneath the surface, reassess your foundation, and test to understand what works and what doesn’t. That way, you can identify the problem first, drive results second and confidently spend time and budget on what’s most impactful.
How can business’s confidently invest in success by testing and understanding what works best, instead of struggling with performance?? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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