Why Experimentation Beats Sales Strategy

When most search entrepreneurs buy a business, they ask the same question almost immediately: “What’s our sales strategy?” It sounds like the right question. It feels disciplined, responsible, and adult. But it often sends the business in the wrong direction. Because the moment you commit to a sales strategy, you also commit to ignoring everything else that might work better. Growth after acquisition doesn’t come from certainty. It comes from learning faster than the previous owner (and your competitors). Every business already has multiple ways customers find it. Some people call because they know the brand. Others discover it through Google. Some come from referrals, partners, trade shows, or local advertising. Each of these is a channel. And inside each channel are dozens of small decisions that influence results. What I see too often is this: an owner chooses one channel, invests heavily, and lets the test run for a long time. Months go by. Tens of thousands of dollars are spent. And at the end, the only thing that’s been learned is whether that single bet paid off. The real risk isn’t failure. The risk is learning too slowly. IMHO, a better approach is to experiment quickly, cheaply, and sometimes in parallel. This allows you to identify where real momentum exists before committing serious resources. Early on, you’re not trying to build a machine. You’re just trying to find leverage. Here are some examples of fast, low-cost experiments across channels: ☎️ Inbound & existing demand - Call people who already contacted the business but never converted - Listen to how they describe their problem and why they didn’t buy 📫 Email - Re-engage old leads with simple, human messages - Test different offers or reasons to re-start the conversation 📞 Outbound - Call a small, well-defined slice of the market - Test positioning, not volume ⌨️ Search - Run very small Google Ads tests to see what converts - Do a basic SEO pass to understand inbound intent 🤝 Referrals & partners - Ask customers directly when their satisfaction is highest - Test a structured referral ask instead of an ad-hoc one 💰 Sales team execution - Test different sales scripts with the same reps - Test different offers with the same script to isolate what actually drives “yes” None of this requires big budgets, but all of it produces signal. The point isn’t to do everything forever. The point is to do enough, cheaply enough, to see what deserves deeper investment. Before testing, it helps to step back and build a simple market map. Ask these questions: 1) Which channels does revenue come from today? 2) How much more demand exists in each channel? 3) How crowded is that channel? The gap between current performance and available opportunity gives you a heuristic for where to lean in next. I’ve seen this play out clearly. We saw one company focus almost entirely on outbound sales. It worked just enough to justify continuing, but their industry was heavily driven by inbound demand, and the website had never been meaningfully optimized. When they finally ran a basic SEO pass, high-intent leads began arriving almost immediately. Outbound wasn’t wrong, but SEO was definitely right. So here's the mindset shift I'm advocating for... When you buy a business, you don’t yet know what will grow it. Thus, any early belief that there’s one thing to execute well is limiting. A better belief is this: there are many things worth testing, and your job is to learn quickly which ones matter most. Even small nuances can be the difference between traction and stagnation. Strategy isn’t something you declare on day one. It’s something you earn through experimentation. And the best operators don’t chase certainty. They build systems that allow the truth to reveal itself. Happy testing! - T