Last week, Mark Stouse and I wrapped a preview for a new 4-Part Causal CMO LinkedIn Live series running from January to March. The message is clear and urgent. The rules have already changed. Budgets will follow. So if you’re still defending GTM spend with correlation charts while deals continue to stall, 2026 is going to hurt.
Starting in January, Mark and I will cover what GTM teams need to unlearn and relearn in 2026.
Here’s the schedule:
Details for Episode 1 will be posted on LinkedIn in early January.
Now on to the recap.
Mark’s recent 5-Part Go-to-Market Effectiveness Report triggered over 4,200 DMs in two weeks. And his Causal AI Advisory firm, Proof Causal AI, has been inundated with an influx of inbound activity. Most are not coming from CMOs. And that is troubling.
“Between 80 and 85% of our inbounds are from Finance teams. The attention from Finance leaders and CEOs was off the charts. CMOs were in the minority.”
That tells you all you need to know about where GTM accountability is headed. Leadership no longer cares about MQLs and busy dashboards.
They care about:
Part of this shift is legal and governance.
Delaware oversight expectations and AI disclosure scrutiny have raised the bar on how leaders justify spend and data quality.
“This is going to be the storyline of 2026 and for sure 2027. In 2027, a lot of this is going to be far more visible and unpleasant.”
Deeper dive: We’ve already covered the Delaware Ruling, and Mark wrote a great piece on the B2B Governance Revolution.
Mark used the Gartner hype cycle lens to frame what's coming in 2026. When aspiration meets operating reality, you hit the trough of disillusionment.
“Reality is not open for discussion. It just is what it is.”
This echos something former GE CEO Jack Welch said over 30 years ago:
In GTM, that reality shows up as longer cycles, smaller deals, and more deals ending with no decision.
If your playbook still “works,” but outcomes don’t, there’s your Reality Gap.
Mark’s published work and recent coverage point to a long decline since 2018. In one of his recent MarTech articles, he cites effectiveness falling from 78% (2018) to 47% (2025) across 478 B2B companies.
And no, GTM teams didn’t suddenly get dumb.
“One out of every two dollars in go-to-market is waste today. Why? Because go-to-market teams have been ignoring externalities… the 70 to 80 percent of what causes anything to happen, which is the stuff we don’t control.”
While external forces got stronger and changed faster, most GTM teams kept optimizing internal metrics that do not predict revenue.
Founders and leaders should care about this more than anything else.
You can lose to a competitor and still learn something. But if you lose to indecision, you get nothing but sunk cost.
Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna, authors of The JOLT Effect, published a solid proof point: in a study of more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations, 40% to 60% of deals ended in “no decision.”
And as Mark explains, the financial impact is sobering:
“If it’s taking your sales teams a lot longer to close smaller deals, and a lot of the deals are closing without any decision, then you have no offset revenue for CAC.”
So when GTM leaders defend spend with correlation, Finance hears: “We can’t explain why buyers aren’t deciding.”
After we went off air, Mark dropped the best nugget of the whole conversation:
“There has been a culture, a narrative control, that has been built for decades. And they are deeply concerned about any system that is beyond their control. And the whole thing becomes completely unsustainable.”
That explains a lot:
Causality does the opposite. It forces reality into the room. Including the parts you do not control.
And that’s terrifying for teams who’ve built careers on controlling the story.
Mark’s Tip: You can’t graft new reality onto old systems. You have to unlearn first.
Have a wonderful holiday. See you in January.
Missed the preview session? Watch it here
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Cheers!
This article is AC-A and published on LinkedIn. Join the conversation!
