No one wants to admit the GTM spending problem | MarTech

The newest GTM effectiveness report from Proof Causal.ai and Fiduciari make the numbers hard to ignore. In enterprise B2B go-to-market functions, approximately 53% of GTM spend was ineffective in a basket of approximately 500 publicly traded companies. Among private startups and scaleups that Proof had access to, the inefficiency rate rose above 70% before causal relationships were assessed in GTM. Yet in that ocean of waste there was one notable exception: communications and PR.

While most marketing and sales spend failed to make measurable progress, PR performance stood out with an unusually low inefficiency rate. Only about 12 cents of every PR dollar was ineffective.

That difference is meaningful. It points to a structural flaw in the way GTM is designed and financed today. It implies something more serious than simple inefficiency; most GTM functions may be based on flawed causal assumptions.

Earned legitimacy boosts buyer confidence

The standard internal framework of PR is simplistic: brand awareness, company credibility or building general trust. These sentences are not wrong, but they are incomplete.

In today’s environment, dominated by paid media saturation and proprietary content inflation, PR is also an economic mechanism. It is the main generator of earned legitimacy – now the dominant input into buyer confidence.

Today’s B2B buyers are overwhelmed by paid social media, paid search, ABM advertising, sponsored newsletters, webinar campaigns, thought leadership series, SEO content farms, and AI-generated whitepapers.

The challenge for the buyer is determining what is real. In that context, earned media and analyst validations contribute an estimated 89% of the trust factors that drive purchasing behavior.

Confidence is about what you can really do. Confidence is about who you really are. This is not a branding argument, but a causal reality. Earned content acts as third-party verification in a market flooded with self-asserted claims.

Dig deeper: B2B companies suffer from a poor understanding of GTM

Most GTM operate on the wrong causal model

Most GTM spend assumes that exposure produces results: more campaigns lead to more awareness, which in turn leads to more leads and more sales.

Causal modeling shows a different trajectory: Earned validation creates a trust shift, which increases willingness to engage, accelerates deal velocity, increases deal size, and increases the likelihood of closure.

In other words, PR is not just top of funnel. It is located upstream of the entire funnel. It determines whether the market will allow your pipeline math to work at all.

PR is structurally more effective because it is inherently disciplined. Unlike paid media, PR cannot brutally enforce results with spending. The market determines whether a story has legitimacy.

Unlike private media, PR cannot certify the truth itself. Readers rely on third parties, especially the press and analysts, to validate this.

Unlike most MOps, PR results are binary. The installation either happens or it doesn’t. The analyst briefing will come, or it won’t. The story is believable or not.

This dynamic forces the function into a feedback loop that reflects causality better than correlation.

Dig Deeper: The Future of GTM Starts with Causal Clarity

GTM budgets are allocated backwards

Once you see this, the financial conclusion becomes hard to avoid. If earned content drives nearly 90% of trust formation, and trust formation accelerates the pipeline, then many companies are allocating capital backward. Today’s dominant enterprise spending model looks something like this:

• 60%-70% paid and owned content.
• 20%-30% tools and operations.
• 5%-10% earned influence.

But the causal evidence increasingly suggests that the opposite is rational. GTM spend should prioritize earned media, not because paid and owned media are useless, but because many customers see them as biased amplifiers of the message a company wants to share. They scale what already exists. Earned creates what buyers want to believe.

GTM leaders often position PR as reputation and awareness. When you speak to the financial sector, phrase it in language that matters.

• More deals = impact on turnover.
• Larger deals = margin impact.
• Faster deal speed = impact on cash flow.

PR reduces buyer skepticism and internal approval friction, increases perceived category authority, reduces discount pressure, and compresses decision cycles. It’s not a nice-to-have. It is a working capital lever.

Dig deeper: designing the GTM model for the revenue era of marketing

The real question every GTM leader must answer

If PR is consistently the highest revenue component of GTM spend, why is it treated as an additional function? The answer is uncomfortable: PR produces leverage that most attribution models cannot tap. But that doesn’t make it any less real. It makes it more critical.

The market has already decided what it relies on: earning validation over paid promotion. The most important insight from the past decade in marketing data is not that GTM is inefficient. It’s that one part of GTM that still works.

PR is the exception that exposes the rule. In a world dominated by artificial visibility, earned trust has become the rarest and most valuable currency in the revenue system.