Boards and C-suites are becoming more aware of this fact: Past is not prologue.
It’s also something I have covered with Mark Stouse, CEO of Proof Causal Advisory, on many occasions, and it was the key pillar in our last Causal CMO conversation.
Most board conversations about go-to-market still treat historical data as a guide to future probability. That model no longer works. And according to Mark’s 5-part GTM Effectiveness Report, the numbers show it: B2B GTM effectiveness fell from 78% in 2018 to 47% in 2025.
The gap between what boards are asking and what they actually need to know is getting expensive.
In this recap, Mark explains why and how to prepare.
Here’s something boards consistently get wrong.
“There’s been a default idea in boards and C-suites that if go-to-market is failing in some way, it’s their fault. As opposed to saying, ‘Huh, I wonder what’s going on out there in the marketplace that’s causing go-to-market to catch it first?’ Think of it as a virus. It’s go-to-market that’s gonna catch it before the rest of the business catches it. Go-to-market is sort of a canary in the coal mine.”
The data right now backs that up. CAC is climbing. Deal volume is down. Average deal size is down. Deal velocity is slowing. And around 73% of B2B tech deals are closing without a decision being made.
That’s a 13% increase in three years over research from The Jolt Effect.
A CFO Mark spoke to recently put it bluntly: “By that standard, my go-to-market effort is bankrupt.”
Mark’s response:
“That’s actually a really powerful way of putting it. If all you have is exploding costs and no countervailing exploding revenue, it’s only a matter of time you’re going to be out of business.”
The payback period on CAC becomes incalculable when deals die in indecision. Mark and I already covered the mechanics. You can check it out here.
Not to beat a dead horse, but the resistance to the reality of time lag is still an ongoing GTM debate. I’m not kidding.
People are motivated by risk. In volatile markets, awareness, confidence, and trust (aka ACT), the three pillars of brand and reputation, matter more, not less.
The 95:5 rule from LinkedIn’s B2B Institute and Ehrenberg-Bass research puts a number on it: most of your future buyers are out of market right now. Brand is how you reach them before the window opens. Which is also why cutting it feels safe. Until it isn’t.
For example, early in COVID, AirBnB’s CEO publicly cut nearly all marketing. There was no immediate revenue impact. But reality hit hard 12 months later.
“You’re gonna have that experience for approximately the next year. And then you’re going to suddenly come out from under the overhang of all that accumulated marketing, and all of a sudden your revenue is going to fall like a rock.”
Boards keep missing the same pattern.
CMOs get replaced just as the investment they made starts to compound. The next leader rides the wave, credits their own work, and then watches demand fall off a cliff (again!) when the accumulated effect runs out.
Two questions follow from this:
Skip those and you’ll misread momentum and punish the wrong people.
This is one of the first questions boards should be asking.
“CAC is usually a reflection of marketing costs of customer acquisition. But it is so much more than that. It’s almost like a mini P&L. You’ve got sales CAC, product CAC, customer success CAC. Anything that you do anywhere in your business that touches a customer in a way that makes them either want to buy or not buy, is CAC.”
Most companies don’t have that full picture. Without it, the return calculation is wrong.
And the problem compounds. CAC isn’t just a cost. It’s a loan of shareholder (or ownership) capital. When deal volume shrinks, deal values drop, and velocity slows, the GTM Debt accumulating inside the company grows while the ability to repay it deteriorates. Most boards have never seen that number laid out plainly.
The follow-on question isn’t just “what is CAC?” It’s: what is CAC buying us, how long is the payback period, and how much of that spend is dying in no-decision outcomes?
“Increasingly, if boards are not asking these questions and demanding the right answers, they’re in breach of their fiduciary duty if they’re talking about a Delaware corporation. If otherwise, based on new regulations around decision governance, that’s a lack of decision governance, which really is almost an identical idea to fiduciary duty. They’re increasingly going to be scrutinized very uncomfortably.”
The legal foundation is real. In January 2023, the Delaware Chancery Court ruled in the McDonald’s case that fiduciary duty of oversight extends to all corporate officers, not just the board and CEO. If an officer can’t outline a system by which their part of the business is managed on a risk-adjusted basis, they’re exposed.
The same pressure is moving through SEC priorities and decision governance expectations. Mark wrote an excellent piece about this here: The Key GTM Governance Questions.
If you don’t have a system to evaluate decisions and spend on a risk-adjusted basis, you are liable.
Every C-suite and GTM team should be prepared to answer these questions if and when they come up:
Most teams can’t answer them cleanly. That is the point.
For a full list of governance questions, Mark has assembled 12 of them here: The key GTM governance questions every company must move to address in 2026.
“What is the reality right now? What is the reality, and what is the reality likely to be if we model it a year from now, two years from now, three years from now?”
If your board isn’t asking that question, someone else will ask it for them.
Missed the session? Watch it here.
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Cheers!
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