I’m going to say it. A/B testing is a huge waste of time for B2B marketers

I’m going to say it. A/B testing is a huge waste of time for B2B marketers.

For years I accepted this was just a part of marketing, but most marketers are simply stuck.

I know this because I was stuck for years.

Fighting a never-ending struggle and watching as the marketing team focuses attention on all the wrong problems.

When we hit the ceiling everyone was obsessed over our ads, landing pages, headlines, creative, etc.

Any change had to be justified with an A/B test so people felt “confident” in what we were doing.

This way you *feel* like you’re continually learning and getting better.

But there’s several reasons A/B tests don’t work: 👇

1. They assume that you already have the right growth lever and you just need to *tweak* it to make it better. Most companies don’t want to admit they have yet to find a meaningful growth lever to begin with.
2. They’re performed poorly and almost always for the wrong reasons. Most of the time they create outliers that get you stuck trying to do it again and again.
3. Metrics are now misleading. Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn are not trying to get you the most clicks—which means most the metrics marketers use like CTR, bounce rate, etc are worthless and often times misleading.
4. Improving performance of your marketing by 2% – 5% is not going to help you reach a revenue goal that’s moving at 30% – 100% a year. You’re running at efficiency when you still need to uncover growth.

If you’re working to find your next growth lever get out of the A/B testing and do this:

Focus on large macro optimizations—test wide and explore broadly different messaging combinations. Not headline tweaks but completely different stories and narratives, user flow, and audiences.

The changes should be so big you’ll you’ll notice big improvements—sales will have different conversations, pipeline will increase dramatically, average deal size will be 2x.

There is the huge difference between teams that get stuck doing marketing activities versus growth activities.

Far too many teams think they have a growth lever they’re trying to exploit through A/B testing when they would be better served exploring to find a new growth lever.