Glossary entry
Control group
A held-out segment of a target list that receives no outreach — used as a baseline to measure whether your outbound campaign is actually driving incremental pipeline. The single most under-used technique in B2B sales measurement: without a control group, 'campaign generated 40 meetings' is meaningless because you don't know how many you'd have gotten anyway. Even a 5-10% control group provides enough signal to validate (or invalidate) the campaign's lift.
01Definition
TLDR
A held-out segment of a target list that receives no outreach — used as a baseline to measure whether your outbound campaign is actually driving incremental pipeline. The single most under-used technique in B2B sales measurement: without a control group, 'campaign generated 40 meetings' is meaningless because you don't know how many you'd have gotten anyway. Even a 5-10% control group provides enough signal to validate (or invalidate) the campaign's lift.
02Why it matters
The discipline that separates real attribution from theater. Most marketing-team 'incrementality' claims would collapse if a control group existed.
03Example
Worked example
Campaign sends to 5,000 accounts; holdout 500. Sent group: 80 meetings. Holdout: 8 meetings. Incremental: 72 meetings.
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