This week's edition is a little different.

I've been writing for weeks about where revenue actually gets stuck. The gap between a healthy-looking pipeline and revenue that won't move.

It's the exact problem behind the research MarketingHQ is running with Eric Gruber at Personal ABM.

So this week I'm handing the main story to Eric. His argument is the sharpest version I've seen of why more pipeline isn't the answer, and it's the thinking behind the study we're asking you to be part of.

Read it, then take the survey. Your responses shape what we publish, and you'll see the findings first.

- Rob

Over the last few years, I've watched the same pattern emerge across B2B organizations. Teams are generating engagement. Building pipeline. Getting meetings. And yet accounts still go dark. Deals stall. Opportunities never turn into closed-won revenue in the CRM. Which leads to a slow loss of faith from leadership, including the CEO, CRO, and CFO.

The GTM dashboard looks healthy. Pipeline full of MQLs and MQAs, account engagement rising, attribution charts looking orderly. It creates the illusion that the GTM is improving.

Believing the illusion, marketing and enablement leaders post their influenced-pipeline numbers on LinkedIn. You'll see a team talk about $90M+ in influenced pipeline and $11M in new business. Impressive on the surface. But look closer and $89M is stuck in the pipeline. The team closed 10% of what it built. That's not a healthy funnel. That's pipeline leakage and sales-cycle delay hiding behind a big number.

The harsh reality is that GTM effectiveness and efficiency are in steep decline. Proof's Causal AI and Fiduciari's GTM Effectiveness Report found that GTM performance collapsed even as AI reached ubiquity and GTM teams grew more sophisticated than ever. In 2018, before COVID, B2B GTM effectiveness stood at 78%. By 2025 it had fallen to 47%, and it continues to fall. The line never reverses. It only steepens.

At the same time, productivity is evaporating and CAC is exploding. And CAC here means more than acquisition spend. It's the marketing cost to generate pipeline, the sales and marketing cost to process and convert it, the time cost of a lengthening cycle, the opportunity cost of no-decision outcomes, and the shrinking yield of smaller deals.

When sales cycles double, GTM costs get applied over twice the time, so CAC rises. When buyers hesitate, win rates collapse and deals produce no outcome, so CAC rises again. When buyers shrink deal sizes, yields fall and payback lengthens. Yet teams keep investing in the front end while the market returns revenue too slowly, and in many cases not at all, because the revenue is stuck in the pipeline.

The same study shows exactly where it's getting stuck:

"No decision" outcomes now range from 73% to 78%. Four out of five deals produce zero return, which hammers revenue, margin, and cash flow at once.

Deal velocity has slowed by up to 50%. Throughput cut in half in many cases.

Year-one deal sizes are down by up to 60%, before you even count the cuts to years two, three, and beyond.

Pipelines are artificially inflated. MQLs and MQAs rise and pipeline value climbs, while stage progression slows, win rates decline, and ACV falls.

Engagement goes up. Deal creation goes down.

GRR and NRR are declining. Teams are winning fewer deals and, in many cases, retaining and expanding less, which erodes CLV and long-term growth.

Pavilion and Ebsta's State of GTM found the same shape. Lead volume jumped and MQL-to-SQL rose 36%. Then everything collapsed in the post-pipeline and post-sale stages, with year-over-year declines across the board.

All of this points to one conclusion. More leads and more pipeline just create waste if you don't have a GTM system designed to land and expand key accounts.

That means integrating your brand, demand, land, and expand motions. Focusing on the accounts that will predictably become customers and grow with you. And responding to the struggling moments that sit at the center of every deal, the moments that need to be listened to, understood, reframed in the context of the buyer's situation, and resolved.

It requires a system where marketing shapes the selling, the retention, the expansion, and the internal buying conversations, both across the buying group and inside each individual buyer's head. Marketing should be helping shape how the problem is understood internally, how trade-offs get weighed, and how consensus gets built across stakeholders. Not just enabling the decision, but helping orchestrate it.

How you go to market, engage buying groups, and shape those conversations is the missing link between enterprise value and growth. Design a system built to land and expand key accounts, and you get a predictable, compounding revenue engine. Build your GTM as a traditional function where marketing only owns awareness, pipeline, and sales support, and marketing becomes a cost center that eats budget without producing business results.

Part of the problem is that everyone keeps optimizing the top of the funnel, because that's the part marketing controls and where the boundaries were drawn for it. To change the outcome, marketing has to operate as a driver of growth across the whole system, not just a promotion-and-pipeline function. A commercial function, not a communications one.

It all starts with knowing where the GTM issues actually lie and what's keeping revenue stuck.

That's why Personal ABM and MarketingHQ joined forces on this research project, to understand why revenue isn't moving through the system. We're using the data to report on the state of GTM, and the findings will help you see where and why pipeline leakage and sales-cycle delay are happening, and why account progression deserves more of your attention than raw pipeline.

Take the survey below. It takes about 10 minutes, your responses are confidential, and participants get first access to the findings.

About the author: Eric Gruber is CEO of Personal ABM and author of the upcoming book "Land and Expand: The Operating System for Creating Greater Account-Based Revenue Growth." He helps sales and marketing teams unstick the revenue in their pipelines and win larger deals.

You'll fit right in at MarketingHQ.

The conversations happening inside the community right now aren't about generating more leads. They're about building a GTM system where marketing, sales, and CS actually move revenue together instead of just filling the top of the funnel.

Join the conversation and learn what's working for others: MarketingHQ community. Inside the community, you’ll also get:

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Find many more roles on our MarketingHQ Job Board

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