Sustaining a culture of experimentation in complex B2B sales environments
- sandip amlani
- Jun 2
- 5 min read
Note: This article is taken from my course: CRO for complex B2B sales companies. If you would like the entire 6-part email series from the beginning, you can sign up here.
Over the last six weeks, we’ve explored the key challenges of running a CRO program in complex B2B sales environments. Experimenting in these situations is not easy.
You’re dealing with long sales cycles, limited traffic, multiple decision-makers, and a healthy dose of internal resistance. Even when you start strong, things get harder over time, stakeholder patience runs thin, momentum dips, and suddenly, CRO starts feeling like a luxury instead of a necessity.
Sound familiar? You’re not alone.
CRO isn’t a once-and-done activity. You don’t just "do CRO" once and call it done. A strong program continually evolves, refining both the digital experience and the CRO process itself.
Many companies see early success with testing. There’s often a healthy pipeline of low-hanging fruit at the start. But those easy wins eventually dry up, momentum slows, and the value of CRO gets questioned.
So how do you keep experimentation alive in the long term? Here’s what works:
1. Make experimentation a part of the process
Embed CRO into your product and marketing workflows. Don’t treat it as something the ‘testing team’ looks at once a design is already signed off. Take the ideas left on the cutting room floor and test the ones that still hold potential.
Baked in > bolted on. This is not easy. It needs support from leaders and a focus on change management to make experimentation a core way of working.
Create a strategic testing roadmap. Set high-level quarterly goals, conduct the necessary research, ideate, and prioritise ruthlessly. Use this as a guide, but keep it flexible enough to evolve based on early results.
Make sure every test is built around a clear hypothesis and grounded in insight. Ask: how does this test support a business goal?
2. Leadership buy-in
Without support at the top, CRO struggles to scale. Leadership buy-in isn’t just about permission, it’s about investment and advocacy.
To gain that support, speak the language of leadership. Focus on revenue, LTV, customer acquisition cost, margin, risk mitigation, and other key financial metrics.
Quantify the value of your CRO program: estimate the revenue gained or losses avoided from each test and across the program.
Concentrate on metrics that support your business strategy. Look at pipeline influence, sales velocity, and lead quality, not just conversion rates.
Organise a Goal Tree Mapping workshop to help align CRO activity to key business objectives.
When execs see how CRO helps them hit their own targets, support becomes much easier to secure.
3. Maintain a strong test velocity
Not every test needs to be a high-effort, full-funnel redesign. One effective way to keep momentum is by increasing test speed with small, frequent experiments.
Use research-backed hypotheses to run small tests on copy, imagery, layout, or messaging.
The more you test, the more insights you gain and the more progress you show.
If you’re new to experimentation, small tests help you gain trust for bigger bets later.
A mix of quick wins and deeper strategic tests keeps your CRO program energised. It helps you optimise towards your local maxima and use experimentation to uncover new opportunities.
4. Expand testing beyond the website
In B2B, the website is just one part of the buyer journey. Mature CRO programs test and optimise touchpoints across the funnel.
Experiment with sales emails, proposal templates, demo flows, and lead nurturing sequences.
Also enhance the post-sale experience. There’s potential to improve renewals, onboarding, and support.
You can also test and improve offline interactions, like sales calls, events, or printed materials.
If you only test forms and landing pages, you miss bigger chances to improve customer experience and business results.
5. Democratise experimentation
The more people involved in CRO, the more it becomes part of your culture. But that only happens if experimentation is easy and accessible.
Make it easy for non-marketers, such as sales, customer success, or product teams, to share their test ideas.
Create templates for submitting hypotheses. Also, centralise past test results and research for easy access across the business.
Encourage teams to challenge assumptions using data, and celebrate that behaviour.
Use tools that support this. Visibility, clarity, and documentation are very important. When people in different departments know what is being tested and why, they are more likely to get involved themselves.
6. Create a system for experimentation transparency
A common pitfall is poor visibility between teams. If people don’t know what’s being tested, what’s worked, or what’s failed, it’s difficult to build momentum.
Choose a platform to manage your CRO program that fits your team’s needs.
Some teams benefit from platforms like Effective Experiments. This platform offers clear visibility and governance around testing quality.
Others might choose to create a custom setup in Airtable, Asana, ClickUp, or Notion. This is often the case if they already use these tools for other purposes.
But tools alone won’t get you there. You need the rituals and artifacts that support transparency:
Weekly or monthly updates that circulate results and insights.
A centralised experimentation playbook that documents past tests.
Regular stakeholder syncs to align roadmaps and priorities.
Cross-functional meetings that bring together marketers, PMs, designers, analysts, and leadership
Transparency builds trust. And trust builds scale.
7. Don’t just test to grow — test to learn
A failed test isn’t a failure; it’s a data point. The best experimentation cultures see each test as a chance to improve their understanding.
Go beyond “did it win?” to “why did it perform the way it did?”
Look back at old tests. You may find that something that didn’t work six months ago could resonate now with a different audience or better messaging.
Make learning public. Share what’s working..and what’s not.
A culture of learning transforms CRO from a tactic into a powerful strategic advantage.
8. Empowered product teams
A strong culture of experimentation isn’t just compatible with modern product management—it’s a necessary feature of it.
In Marty Cagan’s book, "The Product Operating Model," he champions empowered product teams. These teams focus on solving problems instead of just shipping features.
When product teams own the problem and its solution, they can experiment effectively. This allows them to validate ideas, minimise risks, and improve outcomes autonomously.
This changes CRO from a support role to a key driver of product strategy and innovation.
Case Study: How Microsoft Built an Experimentation Culture
In the past, Microsoft didn’t always operate with experimentation at the centre of decision-making. That began to change when an engineer at Bing ran a small A/B test on ad headline formatting. The result? A 12% increase in revenue, adding over $100 million annually.
Ronny Kohavi, a leader in Microsoft’s experimentation team, used this win to push for more testing throughout the organisation. It wasn’t easy, many teams resisted, worried about disrupting established workflows.
Things accelerated when Satya Nadella became CEO. Nadella strongly supports data-driven decision-making. He promotes experimentation as the standard approach to work.
Today, testing is baked into multiple departments. It's not just a tool; it’s part of how Microsoft builds, improves, and grows.
Key Takeaways
✅ CRO should be a continuous process, not a short-term initiative
✅ Leadership buy-in requires business case thinking—talk about revenue, margin, LTV etc, not confidence levels, statistical significance or p-values
✅ Test velocity matters—frequent small tests keep the flywheel spinning
✅ Transparency needs both tools and rituals
✅ Empowered teams + experimentation = better decisions
✅ Learning is the goal—every test should generate insight
This wraps up our series for running CRO programs in complex B2B sales environments. I hope you found these insights valuable.
In the meantime, I’d love to know if this series helped you clarify how CRO can drive real business outcomes in complex sales environments. Just drop a reply in the comments!
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