Why GTM keeps selling to the least profitable people

Every B2B GTM team loves to imagine itself as a band of evangelists — out in the market spreading belief, creating demand and converting the skeptical. It’s a romantic vision: heroic sales and marketing teams “making believers” out of the unconvinced.

But the data — and the causal logic — don’t support the romance. Evangelism is the least profitable and least scalable form of growth. It’s where GTM teams burn the most cash, consume the most energy and achieve the least sustainable outcomes.

In causal terms, evangelism is a form of synthetic demand creation: it tries to will a relationship into existence where no causal readiness exists. That’s not growth — it’s friction.

The high cost of convincing

Evangelistic GTM feels like expansion, but it’s really compensation for lack of clarity. You’re not expanding the market; you’re paying for your own uncertainty about where value truly lives.

Customers who don’t believe they have a problem — or don’t believe your solution fits it — represent the lowest causal density in the market. They require massive educational spend, long sales cycles and expensive post-sale validation to keep them onboard.

These “convert and babysit” customers generate negative marginal return, even when they appear to close. You win the deal, but lose the margin, credibility and optionality that could have been invested in causally aligned customers.

It’s the fiduciary equivalent of spending investor capital to buy applause.

Dig deeper: How and why awareness, confidence and trust drive GTM outcomes

The alignment advantage

The most profitable customers already believe in the problem. They’re actively searching for a solution but struggling to quantify causal fit.

These are the alignment buyers — the ones who sit in the high-gradient zone of the causal S-curve. When GTM teams engage them, the dynamic flips: instead of persuasion, the motion becomes clarification.

You’re no longer trying to implant belief. Instead, you’re helping customers see what’s already true in sharper focus.

That’s the essence of causal GTM: moving from manufacturing belief to amplifying alignment.

When Proof Analytics runs causal audits across B2B organizations, the same pattern emerges:

• Evangelism-heavy GTMs show 2x–3x longer time-to-value and 40%–70% higher acquisition costs per revenue dollar.
• Alignment-based GTMs compress lag, concentrate proof, and generate network effects that compound.

In other words: belief isn’t created — it’s detected.

Dig deeper: Your GTM spend isn’t just an expense — it’s an asset

The ego trap of conversion

Convincing someone who didn’t want you feels like victory. It satisfies the ego of GTM: “We changed their mind!” But convincing is not the same as converting, and it’s certainly not the same as creating enterprise value.

Convincing is an ego metric. It measures effort, not effect.

The more a GTM team relies on evangelism to prove its worth, the more it internalizes a subconscious insecurity about its own causal clarity. It’s the corporate equivalent of shouting louder because you’re not sure you’re being heard.

This ego trap keeps GTM organizations trapped in what economists would call a negative expected value loop: the harder you push, the worse your returns get. The team looks busy; the system is dying.

Clarification is the new evangelism

The modern buyer doesn’t need evangelists — they need interpreters.

They’re overwhelmed with data, signals and claims. The new GTM advantage lies in clarifying causal reality: showing how a specific capability actually moves the outcome needle inside their context.

That’s not about persuasion, it’s about proof.

And proof, by definition, doesn’t require belief to be true.

When a GTM organization commits to causal alignment, it stops selling to create demand and starts structuring demand to create efficiency. The focus shifts from noise to signal, from awareness to auditability.

Sales stops being theater. Marketing stops being magic. Both become functions of fiduciary-grade reasoning.

The causal reframe

Seen through a causal lens, the real hierarchy of GTM value looks like this:

Causal GTM focuses energy on Levels 2 and 3.

Not because Level 1 buyers “don’t matter,” but because they represent a future optionality, not a current investment thesis. You engage them through open education and thought leadership — not pipeline targets. That distinction is where fiduciary discipline meets operational intelligence.

The fiduciary mandate

Under the Delaware 2023 fiduciary precedent, officers are obligated to exercise informed oversight of corporate spend — especially in high-cost, low-proof domains like GTM.

Evangelism, as currently practiced, would fail that test.

When you can model where causality actually exists in your market — who’s already aligned, where lag creates risk and which investments drive real signal — it becomes irresponsible not to operate that way.

Evangelism isn’t just inefficient. It’s unaccountable.

And in the AI era, unaccountability is no longer defensible.

From convincing to compounding

The companies that will dominate the next decade aren’t the ones that convert the most skeptics. They’re the ones that compound belief by operating inside existing causal readiness and amplifying it through proof loops.

They’re not out there “spreading the gospel.”

They’re mapping the system.

The age of market evangelism is over.

The age of market alignment has begun.

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