A training consultant I spoke with turned one day of their live workshop into an online course.
They hired a company to sell it. Paid them £9,000 up front. Paid someone else to build the course.
All in, about £25,000.
Zero sales.
Almost nobody who clicked the ad went on to watch the free video. Was it the price? The audience? The video? Here's what they told me:
"I felt the price point was too high but again we don't really know because we didn't get that far."
£25,000 and they still don't know what went wrong.
The new offer in the drawer
This comes up a lot on my calls with established B2B firms. They have a solid core business and a new thing they want to launch.
- A firm that runs the back office for construction companies has two new services its clients keep asking for. The catch: "for us to launch this thing, our existing clients can't scale up to the point where we can justify doing it. We're going to have to bring on some people."
- An operations consultant is running a group bootcamp for the first time, after only ever selling big single-client engagements.
- An executive coach wants to launch a peer group: "I haven't got a proven product yet and I haven't got case studies and testimonials because I haven't got a first cohort."
Same problem every time.
You don't know if the market wants it until you sell it. You can't sell it until you build it. And building it costs real money, or real hires.
So most firms do one of two things. They build it anyway and hope, like that course. Or they leave it in the drawer.
Ads let you ask the market before you build
Claude Hopkins figured this out a hundred years ago:
Almost any questions can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test campaign.
His version meant mailing ads to a handful of towns and waiting. Ours takes a few days and a credit card.
This is a big part of what my agency does. We run ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google for B2B firms, and before anyone spends real money, we use small ads to find out what the market actually wants.
You don't need the course recorded or the new hire. You need a clear description of the offer, a single web page that explains it, and a few hundred dollars paid to Facebook to show your ads.
The exec coach above described the fear perfectly:
"It becomes game theory, doesn't it? You know, it's how many times you want to spend 1,500 before you realize that it either needs changing or it's working."
That's the right question. Done in the right order, the first answer costs a fraction of that.
Test it in three stages
Stage 1: Test the problem. Before you write a word about your offer, find out which version of the problem your buyers actually recognize. Write five or six short ads, each describing the problem a different way, and run them cheap.
Say you're an operations consultant launching a bootcamp for manufacturers. You might test "you've got more orders than your floor can ship" against "every problem on the floor still ends up on your desk." Same offer, two different doors into it.
You're not selling anything yet. You're watching which description makes the right people stop and click. The winners become the language for everything after.
Stage 2: Test the offer. People who click the winning ad land on one simple web page. It says who the offer is for, what they get, what it costs or what the first step is, and asks for their name and email if they want to hear more.
Then count. Out of every 100 people who land on that page, how many fill it out? If it's 20 or more, we call that an unlock. That's a strong sign the market wants what you described, in the words you described it.
Under that, something's off. Often the page is describing your offer in your words instead of theirs. Fix that first before you decide the offer is dead.
Stage 3: Test the conversation. The form books a call. On the call you sell the real thing, or a pilot of it.
This is where most B2B offers get proven. The training consultant's buyers almost never commit to a full year up front. They buy a pilot day, and if it goes well, they book more. That pilot is your test unit. If people will pay for the pilot, build the program. If they won't, you just saved yourself a hire.
Only after stage 3 do you record the course or hire the staff.
What a test can't tell you
Most B2B buyers aren't in the market on any given day, so a test measures whether people recognize the problem and want a conversation. It doesn't promise a flood of signed contracts in week one.
And it only works if you read it honestly. The exec coach saw this one coming too:
"You can have a really good funnel and then find out that the market... just doesn't respond in any shape or form. And you've got a funnel that's built and then you get in your head and you say, well, actually funnels doesn't work for my industry."
(A funnel is just the whole path someone takes: ad, page, a few questions, a time on your calendar.)
That's what happens when you build the whole thing first. A bad result feels like a verdict on advertising itself.
When you test small, a bad result is information about one version of the offer. You change the version and run it again.
If you sell something cheaper and want the same argument for that, I wrote it here. Same principle. A real yes shows up early and cheap.
What an offer test looks like from your side of the desk
If you've never run an ad, here's what it looks like when we do this with you.
You give us the raw material. A paragraph on what the new offer is, and the recordings or notes from a few recent sales calls. Your buyers have already told you what their problem sounds like. We go and find their exact words.
We write a handful of short ads. Each one describes the problem a different way, in your buyers' words. We run them for a few days on a small budget, shown to people who look like your best clients. You don't have to do anything.
We tell you which version won, and why it matters. That's real information on its own, even before anyone buys. It tells you which problem to lead with in every conversation from then on.
We build one page around the winner. Plain language: who it's for, what they get, what happens next. Then we count how many people who land on it fill it out, against that 20% bar.
If it clears the bar, the people who filled it out can book a time with you. They answer a few quick questions first, so you only talk to people who fit. Then you find out the last thing a test can tell you: whether it sells on a call.
If it doesn't clear the bar, you find out for a few hundred dollars instead of a new hire or a finished course. And you know which part to change.
Everything runs from an ad account in your company's name, paid with your own card. Whatever you decide, the results stay with you.
If you've got a new service sitting in a drawer because you can't justify building it yet, book a strategy call with me. Bring the one-paragraph description. I'll tell you how I'd test it and roughly what that would cost, before you hire anybody.