A friend of mine once said, “Great cars still require great drivers,” and every racing fan knows why. You see, in most racing series, the cars on the track are exactly the same. What wins races, then, is the person behind the wheel and the strategies made on pit road.

And in the world of website testing, this analogy couldn’t be more appropriate. Despite a tool’s capabilities, one of the primary drivers of success is the person or team responsible for using it. Several key factors influence this, and are great ways to understand the value of a full-service offering:

• Resources: You should strive to test as much as possible. The more tests you can run, the more insights you’ll learn, which means more revenue opportunities for your company. But a culture of continuous testing requires resources. No, I’m not talking about IT resources to code and deploy tests. (Your tool should offer true, one-tag implementation with no test-specific code required.) I’m talking about the resources to develop a strong testing strategy, the ability to execute against it, and the capacity to generate meaningful reports and analysis that drive continuous improvement. If you lack the resources to do this, even the best testing solution can be shelfware.

• Testing Experience: Having resources and having skilled resources are two different things. Full-service teams manage testing programs for a living, and so bring a depth and breadth of experience about what’s worked (and equally important, what hasn’t worked) for companies just like yours. This means they can hit the ground running with successful, high ROI campaigns, and ensure you have a great story to tell when the boss asks about how things are going.

• Familiarity with the Platform: A full-service team’s familiarity with the testing solution means that the time from conception to deployment for tests is minimal. No time is wasted learning how to target certain segments or execute complex actions.