What to test, and in what order
Thirty days is long enough to get a real answer and long enough to waste. Most trials go the same way: the first hour on a feature tour instead of moving one real piece of work through the system. A tour tells you what exists. It does not tell you whether the thing you do every day gets shorter — the only question a trial can actually answer.
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First hour — can your data get in, and out again?
Do this before anything else. A failure here ends the evaluation and costs you an hour rather than a fortnight.
- Import twenty of your own recordsNot the sample data. Twenty real contacts with the mess intact — duplicate company names, missing fields, inconsistent formats. What the system does with imperfect data is what it will do with all of it.
- Export them straight back outCompare the export against what you put in. Fields that quietly disappear on the way out are the fields you lose if you ever leave.
- Import the same file a second timeCheck whether it duplicates, merges or overwrites — and specifically whether it overwrites a flag you set by hand. A consent or opt-out that a spreadsheet upload resets is worthless as a record.
If this stage failsStop. A system you cannot get your data out of is not a candidate, however good the rest looks. This is the most common regret reported about platform choices, and it is knowable in the first hour.
First week — does one real job get shorter?
Pick one thing you do repeatedly and run it end to end inside the system. Not a demonstration — real work, with a real outcome. Count the steps before and after. If the count does not fall, the platform saves you nothing, whatever it can do in principle.
- Build one automation, not fiveThe one that replaces something you currently do by hand every day. Then break it on purpose and see whether the system tells you it broke.
- Send one message of each kind, to yourselfLook at what actually arrives — the sender, the formatting, the unsubscribe line — rather than at what the editor previewed.
- Put a second person inMost platforms feel fine with one user. The friction shows up when two people touch the same record within a minute of each other.
Before it ends — the questions that need an answer in writing
None of these can be settled inside the product. Ask them early enough that the reply arrives before the trial expires, and keep it.
- What a call minute and a message cost, to the countries you actually contact.
- Whether the billed currency matches your accounts, and how tax is handled.
- The notice period, and what happens to your data the day you stop paying.
- Which parts of the product are included in the plan you were shown, and which are billed on top.
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