Yet another CFO put it bluntly in a recent conversation with Mark Stouse, CEO at Proof Causal Advisory.
His go-to-market effort wasn’t paying for itself. Not even close. He wasn’t calling his team incompetent. He was just saying the math had stopped working, and everyone in the room knew it.
That’s not one bad quarter. That’s what happens when a GTM system spends years optimizing for signals instead of readiness.
Yes, that’s one more CFO. And it’s becoming more and more common.
Mark and I got into this in our latest Causal GTM Leader chat.
Here’s the recap.
Demand isn’t something a vendor “generates”. It’s intrinsic to the buyer, and it shifts because of things happening in their world: their boss, their risk tolerance, whether they trust vendors generally right now. None of that shows up on a dashboard unless you build it in deliberately. Most GTM teams don’t.
So when Mark and I talk about signals, we’re not talking about bad data. We’re talking about a category error.
A signal is deterministic in the sense that the recorded event happened or it didn’t. Readiness is probabilistic: you’re never certain, only more or less confident. Treating the first as proof of the second is where GTM teams keep losing the thread.
“Buyer Signals” is an attempt at determinism.
GTM teams default to signals because signals feel safer, not because they don’t know better.
We mistake precision of understanding for utility of understanding.
A precise number is comfortable. It looks like proof. But precision about the wrong thing isn’t insight, it’s just a number you can point to in a meeting. And there’s a career incentive underneath it, too: coming up with a new metric feels safer than sitting with the uncertainty that readiness actually involves.
Even a real signal can arrive too late to explain anything.
You launch a campaign right on the first day of the quarter. You are not going to drive any additional deal flow with that campaign within that quarter. It’s not happening... usually it’s three or four quarters later that it starts to really culminate.
This is a common trap many CFOs, like the one from the opening, fall into: months of spend went out on the assumption this quarter’s activity would show up in this quarter’s numbers. By the time the mismatch became visible, the money had already been spent.
Brand carries the longest lag of anything in the GTM toolkit because brand takes time to earn confidence and trust, which is a big part of why it fell out of favor for so long. It’s hard to keep defending spend whose payoff you can’t see for a year. But without it, your GTM has little air cover when future buyers are ready to talk.
One shift that teams underestimate is the stronger role Finance now plays in B2B purchases.
A huge change on the buying side is the role that Finance plays as a policeman. That was not the case pre-COVID.
The functional buyer may still want what you sell without having the authority to approve it.
Budget scrutiny, tighter approval chains, more people with a say before a deal closes — the effect is to slow decisions down and give the functional buyer more time and more reasons to second-guess the purchase.
An account that looks “engaged” by every signal your team tracks can still stall for months once it hits Finance, and no dashboard built around buyer-side activity will show you why.
If a signal only tells you where to look, what would actually tell you a decision moved?
Something closer to a real shift in how the buyer thinks or feels — proof that something moved because of you, not just alongside you. That’s a much higher bar than “they opened the email” or “they visited the pricing page.” It’s also the bar that most GTM systems still don’t meet.
When spend keeps climbing and pipeline keeps shrinking, most GTM teams can point to plenty of activity: campaigns launched, sequences sent, dashboards updated. What they usually can’t point to is evidence any of it moved a buyer’s actual decision. That gap creates the illusion of control: activity looks like progress, whether or not anything is actually moving.
Signals aren’t useless. They tell you where to investigate. The problem begins when teams treat them as proof of readiness.
Pick one account your team currently calls “engaged.”
Ask these two questions and document the answers:
If you can’t answer the first one, you have activity, not proof.
Nobody in your company should understand your customers and your market better than your GTM team does.
There should not be anyone, ANYONE, in your company who is more of an expert about your audience and your customers and the marketplace than you.
Most GTM leaders can’t honestly make that claim, because most of what passes for customer listening is really just sellers gathering enough to close the deal in front of them.
Knowing your market well enough to understand what those signals can and cannot tell you is how you fix the problem.
Missed the session? Watch it here.
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