A marketer pulls up the dashboard. Every number is green. Leads are up, MQLs are up, the funnel looks healthy. Across the table, the CFO has already stopped believing a word of it.
I’ve been that marketer. I’ve pulled up the green dashboard and said, “Look, we’re doing our jobs, what else do you want?” The numbers were green. But the deals weren’t closing. And I’d quietly decided that second part wasn’t my problem.
That’s the room Mark Stouse and I got into on the latest Causal GTM Leader. And it was thorny on purpose: why we keep defending a system that’s lying to us, and what it costs to keep doing it. Mark warned everyone up front it wouldn’t make them happy.
There’s a line that fits the mood, one Joe Klaas wrote in his 1990 recovery handbook The Twelve Steps to Happiness and Gloria Steinem later made famous:
The truth will set you free. But first it’ll piss you off.
B2B go-to-market has spent years defending what stopped working. This is about the other half.
The CFOs and CEOs Mark talks to every day are past patience. They’ve stopped believing. They look at rising CAC and flat results, and they’ve reached a verdict. This is the reality gap catching up: the system was never going to convert its way out, no matter how many MQLs it produced. And once someone reaches a verdict, no dashboard reopens the case.
That changes what your defence actually does. You think you’re protecting your position. From where they sit, you’re confirming their read. It’s a kind of process theater, and the audience stopped clapping a while ago.
Every time you stand up and try to defend it, you’re only driving your own personal brand down.
It gets even thornier. In the past, some leaders would look the other way, let you leave quietly, maybe put in a good word for the next role. Mark says that protection is disappearing. A lot of leaders feel they were sold a fairy tale, a bill of goods that cost them credibility with their own investors, and they’re not inclined to protect the people they blame for it.
None of this is really about marketers. People do it in every function. Put twenty years into a belief and it’s brutally hard to admit it stopped being true, even when the world clearly moved on.
Pompeii is a good example. The Romans had no understanding of volcanology. So when Vesuvius blew they explained it this way: a god at his forge, hammering away. Completely wrong. But it’s all they had.
There’s an old saying among scientists that before it’s science, it’s magic.
We do the same thing. We hate saying “I don’t know,” so we make shit up and say it with confidence. Some of us get very good at it. That’s the human version of an AI hallucination, and a green dashboard is a convincing one.
This part is especially hard and it’s the one most likely to sting. It’s not fun saying it. But it’s true.
If you’re a director or a senior manager sitting under a CRO or CMO who isn’t visibly succeeding, and everyone can see they’re not, you have a decision to make. Their reputation attaches to yours whether you like it or not. Go interview somewhere else, say the name when they ask who you reported to, and watch the face. If it drops, that’s your brand damage now, not theirs.
That’s the truth doing its pissing-off work. This lands on everyone from one year out of school to the corner office, the CMO included. Pretending otherwise is just another green dashboard.
If you have a choice between a great job and a great manager, you should pick the great manager.
Mark’s career path is a good example here. He didn’t start out as the causal-modelling guy. He became a marketer partly to dodge math. Then, at HP, CEO Mark Hurd stood him up against a wall (pissed off), and a few days later handed him six months to build a system that could actually show what marketing contributed. It was not fun. In hindsight, it was the biggest favor anyone ever did him.
There is nothing more liberating in this world than curing a knowledge deficit.
Your dashboard stops at the edge of marketing, maybe the start of sales. Everything past that, you’re guessing. And there’s an honest word for the guessing.
You can surmise that you impacted this or that, but you don’t know it for sure. If the honest answer is “surmise,” that isn’t a failure. It’s the door.
The wall of reality doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t learn your lessons, my lessons, or grade on effort. You can keep walking into it, or you can pay attention and find where the doors are.
That truth comes out of a recovery handbook, and the shape fits. Step one is admitting there’s a problem. Step two is admitting you can’t fix it alone. Anger comes first. Freedom shows up only once you stop defending the thing that’s failing you.
Realize that you exist in a much larger system.
Take the metric you defend most, and write one honest sentence: do I know this drives revenue, or am I surmising? Keep it where you’ll see it before your next board update.
Then ask someone in finance what they trust in your reporting, what they don't, and why. Don't defend it. Just listen.
Missed the session? Watch it here.
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This article is AC-A (“Authenticity Commons, Assisted”): AI helped produce it, with me in the lead. Here’s what that means.
Achim’s Razor is also published as a LinkedIn newsletter.
