Over the last few years, I noticed a pattern emerge across B2B organizations. Teams are generating engagement. Teams are creating pipelines. Teams are getting meetings. Yet accounts are still going dark. Deals stall, and opportunities don’t turn into deals and closed-won revenue in the CRM, which leads to a loss of faith with leadership, including the CEO, CRO, and CFO.
Our internal GTM dashboards may look healthy with pipelines full of MQLs/MQAs, increased account engagement, and attribution charts looking somewhat orderly, but it’s giving the illusion that the GTM is improving. Believing the illusion, sales enablement and marketing leaders talk about their pipeline-influenced numbers on LinkedIn. Below is a bullet point from a sales enablement leader’s profile. While you may be wowed by the numbers, I see that $89M is revenue is stuck in the pipeline – the team only closed 10% of the pipeline. There’s pipeline leakage and sales cycle delay.
The truth of the matter and the harsh reality is that effectiveness and GTM efficiency is on a steep decline. Proof Casual.ai /Fiduciari’s GTM Effectiveness Report showed that GTM Performance deteriorated and collapsed even as AI reached ubiquity, and GTM teams became more sophisticated than ever. The report showed that in 2018, before COVID, B2B GTM effectiveness stood at 78%. By 2025, it had fallen to 47 percent – and it continues to fall. The line never reverses; it only steepens.
At the same time, sales/marketing productivity is evaporating, and CAC is exploding (marketing costs to generate pipeline; sales/marketing costs to process and convert pipeline; the time cost of a lengthening cycle; the opportunity cost of no-decision outcomes; and the revenue yield of smaller deals). When sales cycles double, and buyers slow down, sales slow down, and customer acquisition costs rise as GTM costs are applied over a time period that is 2X as long. When buyers hesitate, win rates collapse due to a lack of decisions, and sales produce no outcomes; CAC rises sharply. The GTM costs are outweighed by a tiny fraction of the positive outcomes that GTM teams achieve. When buyers shrink deal sizes (ACV), sales yields shrink, and CAC payback lengthens. Yet, GTM teams focus on the pipeline and invest in the front end, while the market returns revenue too slowly, and in many cases, not at all, as revenue gets stuck in the pipeline.
Proof Casual.ai and Fiduciari’s study shows that revenue is getting stuck in the new and existing account pipelines.
- “No decision” outcomes now range from 73% to 78%. Four out of 5 deals produce zero returns. This is killing revenue, margins, and cash flow all at once.
- Deal velocity has slowed up to 50% – Throughput has been cut in half in many cases,
- Year 1 deal sizes are down by up to 60%, and this doesn’t include the cuts to years 2, 3, 4, and so on. Yields are collapsing.
- Pipelines are artificially inflated. MQLs (or MQAs if you’re doing ABM) are rising, and pipeline values are increasing while stage progression slows, win rates decline, and ACV falls.
- Engagement increases; meanwhile, deal creation drops.
- GRR/NRR revenue is declining – Not only are the teams winning fewer deals, but in many cases, gross revenue retention rates and expansion revenue win rates are falling, impacting CLV and long-term revenue growth.
This was also seen in Pavilion’s and Ebsta’s State of GTM, where lead volume jumped and MQL to SQL rose by 32%. Then, as you see in the image, things collapsed in the post-pipeline and post-sale stages, with YoY declines.
These Studies Show That Pipeline Impact is Minimal Compared to How Revenue Moves (Or In Many Cases Doesn’t Move) Through the System
How you go-to-market, engage buying groups, shape selling/internal buying conversations, and orchestrate decision-making is the missing link between enterprise value and growth. If you design a system that’s built to land and expand key enterprise accounts, you can create a predictable, compounding revenue engine. But if you build your GTM like a traditional sales and marketing function, where marketing is responsible only for account awareness, building a pipeline, and sales support, then marketing becomes a cost center and a tax on the business that eats budget without producing business results.
More leads and more pipeline just create waste if your GTM is not designed to:
- Focus your branding, messaging, and content on being relevant to the accounts that will predictably become your customers and grow with you.
- Create demand and build a pipeline with accounts that will land and expand with you because they align with you, face a situation where you are relevant and the competition is irrelevant, have proven that they are ready for success with your solution, and have an active strategic priority where you can play a strong, differentiated role. This will make your demand gen efforts more precise and help you avoid acquisition waste that’s in your pipelines today.
- Respond to the struggling moments that sit at the center of every deal – moments that need to be listened to, understood, catered to, and resolved.
- Reframe buyer thoughts and ideas in the context of their situation.
- Teach for differentiation and show that competitors and the status quo are irrelevant given the account’s specific situation.
- Build a buying vision based on current and future needs.
- Shape the internal buying conversation to unite diverse members of the buying group around the buying vision you create. We need to actively shape how the problem is framed internally, how trade-offs are understood, and how consensus is built across stakeholders
- Not just enable decision-making but orchestrate it across teams and buying groups.
- Show buyers what will happen if they buy, how you will minimize risk of failure, disruption, and spiraling costs based on their situation, how you’ve minimized it in the past with a company whose situation matches theirs, and how the relationship will evolve.
- Demonstrate the cost of inaction and the specific impacts across the business.
- Support specific selling, retention, and expansion conversations with specific buyers in specific accounts.
- Embed your solution across target accounts so you are a must-have vs. a nice-to-have.
- Help buyers choose and answer the decision-making questions that buyers have.vs. just educate them..
- Provide more relevance as buyers progress in their journey. While you may start by being relevant at the industry and persona levels, you need to become relevant at the account, situational, decision-maker, and conversational levels. You need to match buyers where they are in their journey – and where their minds are at. When technology has reduced differential margins, you must make it clear the difference you will bring to a person, a team, and an organization. It needs to be grounded in truth, but it needs to put the client at the heart of the story.
- Drive stage progression and unstick the revenue that’s in the new and existing account pipeline to avoid leakage and sales cycle delay vs. just investing in an inflated pipeline that goes nowhere.
- Land deals change buying behavior, increase margin growth, and expand key accounts.
It’s time we built a system designed to drive stronger short- and long-term revenue growth.
Step 1: Start measuring the revenue that’s stuck in the pipeline. You can use the formula below…
Step 2: Read how marketing leaders can have a greater impact on revenue growth by fixing the mid-funnel and last-mile account experience.
Click here to read the article – embed link to https://www.personalabm.com/fixing-the-mid-funnel-and-last-mile/
Step 3: Instead of focusing on playbooks – build your “land and expand” operating system. As we write the book, “Land and Expand: The Operating System for Creating Greater Account-Based Revenue Growth”, we are sharing our insights on Substack.
Click here to join the land and expand community on Substack – embed link to: https://landandexpandos.substack.com/