“Test your ideas in the field, not in your head.” This is the mantra salespeople—and by extension, potential business owners—must tattoo on their minds. You don’t have a monopoly on ideas. Customers reward the sales person they connect with first, not the one who later laments, “That was my idea, he stole it from me.” By then, no one is listening—and truth be told, no one cares. That includes the employer who applauds the salesperson that “stole” your pitch, tested it, and turned it into a runaway success.
What does it mean to test an idea?
So yes, test your ideas with customers. Don’t bury them under endless slide polishing, pitch refining, proposal adjusting, and concept brainstorming. Execution, not perfection, wins the day.
For reasons personality type, fear of rejection or failure, or safety in comfort zone, some salespeople never get out of the lab. The perfectionist feels “This slide is not quite right yet; let me shift this bullet point and change that font size.” They’re convinced that the next tweak will finally make the presentation bulletproof, not realizing it’s a crutch. And those wallowing in a comfort zone ‘work hard’ in making it even more comfortable. “Let me add a puffy cushion here, and a Turkish carpet there.” It looks like work, it feels like work, but it’s avoidance dressed as productivity.
Read: Don’t berate yourself –it takes practise to bake your pitch to perfection
The foregoing manifests itself in statements like, “I think we should…” or, “I’m trying out this new idea….” Sounds commendable. Until you realize that the attempts are made to the mirror in the name of rehearsing, refining the proposal for the umpteenth time, and though rarely, to the team during weekly sales team meetings role plays.
It’s true that adequate preparation is the cure for most sales mistakes. What is also true is that all the preparation is for nought if it is not tested in the messy, unpredictable, and valuable arena of actual customer interaction. It’s much like the parent who lectures her teenager daily about the challenges of adulthood but never allows him to leave the house. The knowledge is there, the preparation is there—but the growth never happens.
How to test your idea
The same is true in sales. Testing your idea in the field is like letting the teenager out of the house. It’s risky. It’s unpredictable. But it is the only way to get feedback. And feedback is the lifeblood of improvement. “Go back to that slide. Tell me more about it.” That feedback is priceless. It tells you what captured attention, what resonated, and what deserves more focus next time. In your next presentation, you emphasize that slide more deliberately. After a few more rounds, you may realize that the customer’s real interest lies not in what you thought was the “main” message, but in something you had buried halfway through. You adjust, you refine, you evolve—based on real conversations, not imagined ones.
This kind of improvement would have been impossible if you had stayed behind the laptop, tinkering endlessly with fonts and colours. No customer cares whether slide 16 is Arial or Calibri. They care whether you understand their problem, their language, and their priorities.
Test your ideas in small steps to build validation
Feedback doesn’t just refine your presentation—it deepens engagement. As you go back into the field again and again, you start adopting the language of your prospects. Instead of saying “useful pests,” you begin talking about “beneficial insects.” Instead of “volume knob,” you refer to a “variable resistor.” These industry-specific phrases show prospects that you understand their world. They begin to say things like, “You really get what we do.” That is gold in sales, because connection precedes conversion.
As your presentations evolve, so does your confidence. No longer are you speaking at prospects—you’re speaking with them. You’re echoing their thoughts, their pain points, their aspirations. And when prospects feel understood, sales follow naturally.
Why is testing your ideas important?
Contrast this with the salesperson still hiding in preparation mode. There he is asking ChatGPT for the ninth time, “Can you edit the grammar in this proposal before I send it to the customer?” The proposal is already clear. The grammar has already been fixed. But perfection has become a shield. To borrow from the Bible, he has a light—but he covers it.
To be clear, I am not advocating recklessness. This is not a license to “wing it” or to throw unpolished ideas at customers carelessly. Preparation matters. A sloppy presentation will undermine credibility. But here’s the point: preparation will never be perfect. Waiting for perfection is like waiting for a train at an abandoned station—it’s not coming.
Reasons to test ideas
Deadlines exist for a reason. They force us to ship, to test, to expose our work to the real world. So set your deadline and act on it. Growth lives outside the comfort zone.
The real test of an idea isn’t in the polish of the slide deck. It isn’t in how many times your colleagues nod approvingly during a role play. It isn’t in whether ChatGPT has refined your grammar to Oxford standards. The real test is in the marketplace. Will customers respond? Will they challenge? Will they buy?
The field is the only laboratory that matters. That’s where ideas either grow wings or fall flat. That’s where feedback turns into insight, where insight turns into connection, and where connection turns into sales.
Why it is important to test your change ideas
So, if you’re sitting on an idea right now—whether it’s a product pitch, a sales approach, or even a new business venture—stop rehearsing it endlessly in your head. Get it out there. Show it to a customer. Let them poke holes in it. Let them misunderstand it. And let them challenge you. That discomfort is the path to growth.
Because in sales, as in life, progress belongs not to the one who prepared the most, but to the one who dared to test.
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