Stop Cutting GTM. It's Not Just a Revenue Engine. It's Your Growth Network.

Reduce the Risks Instead.

Dear CEOs and CFOs:

For more than two years, I've interviewed a lot of you about B2B GTM. Enough to write a book that will come out later this year.

Far and away, your greatest concerns about GTM revolved around #Risk. Not just downside risk, but the risk that your company will not be well-positioned to capitalize on a positive development. You said that you see GTM as almost completely ungoverned on both sides of the ledger, but particularly the "what does it all mean" bit. Forecasted impacts, causality, that sort of thing.

You expressed your frustration very clearly -- and often very profanely. And that while marketing had become a super-meme of your minds about unproven effectiveness, your concerns about Sales, Product, and Customer Success were not at all far behind.

Cutting to the chase, you expressed big concerns about the viability of your growth engine after more than two years of misses, all amidst marketplace headwinds, massive technology shifts, rapid obsolescence, record churn, and the next shoe to drop.

Yet, all you've done is respond with cost cutting. I get it -- cutting costs to maintain EPS is faster, easier, more predictable than spending more money to try to grow. But while cost-cutting is necessary in tough situations, it's not the same as #efficiency. It's cost cutting.

The Real Issue

Indeed, efficiency isn't even the actual idea we're all really thinking of. The real question is your GTM's effectiveness, and the cost of that effectiveness.

According to the Financial Accountability Standards Board (FASB), the home of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP):

• "efficiency" refers to performing a task with minimal waste of resources, focusing on optimizing processes and utilizing resources effectively
• "cost-effectiveness" means achieving the desired outcome at the lowest possible cost, prioritizing the value of the result compared to the resources spent to achieve it.

Essentially, efficiency is about "doing things with the lowest possible waste" while cost-effectiveness is about "doing the right things at the right cost."

The simple reality is that you and your GTM teams don't really know how effective your go-to-market investments are, and how long you'll have to wait to see payback, and it's impossible to improve the efficiency or cost-effectiveness until you do.

Key "Laws of Gravity" You May Not Have Thought About

As an aside, it's super-important to say clearly that when you expect Q2 marketing spend to accelerate Q2 sales or increase Q2 wins, you are way off the reservation. That's not how it works, and the #CausalAI is very clear about that. An effective GTM effort creates synergies but is not synchronous. Time lag is real, and in B2B it's significant, often months at minimum and quarters at maximum.

In general terms, it's not a bad exercise at all to use ChatGPT etc as a tool to test what you believe and what you say for factual accuracy. Because I guarantee you that your teams, your customers, your partners, your shareholders, they're all starting to run the same analyses on what you say and do. Historically, your position has given you the power to be believed more often than not. AI is taking that away from all of us.

Ultimately, your big question is this: how does everything we pay money for and control in GTM help drive #MoreDeals, #BiggerDeals, and #FasterDeals, net of time lag and all the external factors you don't control but that exert massive headwinds or tailwinds on your company and your customers. Put another way, GTM is a massive growth network, and it doesn't work to look at the piece parts in isolation.

Why This Cuts Much Closer than You Think

Cutting to the chase, experts in fiduciary duty say that in something as big as the effectiveness of your growth engine, you have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders and your stakeholders to find out what's working and what's not, stat.

Here's a few steps to get started:

1. The idea that some people in your GTM teams are responsible for effectiveness and others aren't is a fallacy. They're all into the same boat. You must end the zero-sum functional BS by making that clear.

2. There are some analytical tools that can really help. Counterfactual "what if" scenarios can help you understand what's likely to work in 2025 even if your own data has problems. The synthesis of GenAI and CausalAI means that you can generate an array of these models using synthetic data that's tailored to reflect your company and your situation. It operates like a hurricane tracking chart, helping your bracket what would be necessary to reach different objectives. These models can be spun up in 3 days and they are a powerful way to test and de-risk programs, plans, etc. before spending a dime.

3. When you're ready, you can transition the counterfactual models to live data models from your company, using the "what if" scenarios as templates for live causal calculations when you are ready and able to do so.

4. Start the process by holding every member of your GTM teams accountable for the integrity and completeness of their data. A very common rule of thumb here is that "Good data is a mark of competence. Inadequate data is a mark of incompetence." And that's your company's data; it doesn't belong to your sales teams, your marketing teams, or anyone else. Your teams have a derivative fiduciary duty to work with clean, correct, accurate data. That goes double for your sales teams. If you find them playing games with your data in the CRM, give them one warning and then act decisively. The AI Era demands it.

5. Work towards delivering an actuarial understanding of the probabilities of GTM success or failure, and invest accordingly on a risk adjusted basis.

The rivalry between Marketing and Sales has been compared to nasty religious feuds like we've seen in different parts of the world. It's time to call a halt. There's only one viable approach to a real and durable solution: invest incrementally alongside real reform in how your GTM's effectiveness is understood, governed, and optimized. Put a deadline on it.

Fiduciary Responsibility is Real. And It's Becoming More and More Real

After decades of very limited application, Fiduciary Responsibility is a principle whose time has come. It's time to invoke the fiduciary duty of your CMO, CRO, CCO, and CPO that the Delaware Chancery Court said they had in McDonald's Corporation Stockholder Derivative Litigation in 2023, a precedent increasingly cited by activist shareholders.

In the McDonald's litigation, activist shareholders filed a derivative lawsuit against the company's Chief People Officer, alleging that he had breached his fiduciary duties by ignoring red flags related to sexual harrassment inside the company. The court upheld this motion, allowing the case against the Chief People Officer to proceed even as it dismissed similar claims against McDonald's directors. Subsequently, claims against corporate officers for breach of fiduciary duty have begin to proliferate in about 40 of the 50 states.

More recently, we've seen Chief Marketing Officers pursued by shareholders for inadequate governance over how money is spend and what value can be confirmed. We've seen Chief Revenue Officers sued by shareholders for inadequate action in the face of failing performance. It's notable that people are not being sued for failing, but rather for failing to take appropriate action to change the game in the face of marketplace realities.

Move Now

It's still January 2025. Decide that you're done being frustrated about GTM. You're the boss. You have positional power. And you own part of the dysfunction. So, wade into the issue first-hand. Make a commitment that the problem will look very very different by December, and that by this time next year, it won't be the problem everyone has experienced for so long.

5 Steps to Transform GTM

1. End Functional Silos: Align marketing, sales, product, and customer success under a shared accountability framework. Anyone not onboard with the way you want to keep score needs to go. But know that if you choose a system of keeping score that makes no sense or is not fully supported, you will lose every person of talent and have a very hard time replacing them.
2. Leverage AI for Risk Reduction: Use counterfactual and causal models to test strategies and simulate outcomes.?
3. Demand Data Integrity: Enforce rigorous data standards. Clean, accurate data is non-negotiable in the AI era.
4. Focus on Risk-Adjusted Investments: Build models to calculate the probability of success for GTM initiatives.
5. Foster Accountability: Set clear expectations for every GTM leader and enforce them with transparency.Take the time to learn from people not in your company who are known for clarity of understanding and decisive attitudes who will help you see GTM as a business function to be led. Ask a lot of questions. Make everyone clear that this is not about how they do their job, but how the company understands the relative effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, materiality, efficiency, and sustainability of GTM investment and activity.

AI is Transforming Accountability

AI is bringing unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability. There's not a person alive today that's truly ready for what that means. The forcing function on this is perhaps 2-3 years maximum. After that, it will be obvious when a plan is likely to fail because AI will be able to assess it. It will be obvious when you and I are wrong about something because everyone listening will instantly fact-check us using AI. And it will be obvious if we sat around and accepted the "same ole same ole" instead of changing the game for the benefit of all of our stakeholders. That's the duty.

Footnotes and Supporting Sources

1. Time Lags in GTM: Gartner, "The B2B Buying Journey Is Lengthening," 2023; McKinsey, "The State of B2B Sales in 2023."
2. Causal AI Applications in GTM: ProofAnalytics.ai, "Causal AI for Go-to-Market Effectiveness," 2024.
3. Generative AI for Scenario Planning: Forbes, "How Generative AI is Changing Business Strategy," 2023.
4. Fiduciary Duty and GTM: Delaware Chancery Court, McDonald's Corporation Stockholder Derivative Litigation, 2023; Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, "Emerging Trends in Fiduciary Duty for Corporate Officers," 2024.
5. Counterfactual Models in Practice: MIT Sloan Review, "The Strategic Value of Counterfactual Analysis," 2022.
6. CEO / CFO Perspectives on GTM: as-yet unpublished interviews with F2000 executives by Mark Stouse