GTM effectiveness collapsed in 2018, and hasn't recovered
B2B buyers changed the game while GTM kept playing by old rules.
In his recent series on the GTM collapse, Mark Stouse identifies 2018 as the inflection point when go-to-market effectiveness began its slide from 78% to today's 47%. I lived through this shift, watching a SaaS GTM team run the Predictable Revenue playbook into a wall they couldn't see.
At the time, I couldn't articulate what was happening. Now, the mechanics are clear.
2018 wasn't a single event. It was the year several structural shifts reached critical mass simultaneously, fundamentally altering the physics of B2B buying while GTM teams continued operating as if nothing had changed.
Buyer saturation and immune response. By 2018, B2B buyers had endured roughly a decade of aggressive outbound SDR motions (Predictable Revenue was published in 2011).
The playbook had been copied so widely that buyers developed institutional antibodies. Procurement gatekeeping hardened, screening intensified, and "no decision" became a rational default when overwhelmed by identical pitches.
The signal-to-noise ratio collapsed, and buyers retreated into dark research channels where vendors had no visibility.
Capital regime transition. Interest rates remained near-zero through 2015, began inching up in 2016–2017, and the Fed accelerated hikes in 2018. Four increases that year alone, ending at 2.25–2.50%.
Cheap capital had subsidized both vendor expansion (bloated GTM teams, aggressive discounting) and buyer experimentation (willingness to trial). As capital costs rose, CFOs tightened approval thresholds, elongating cycles and shrinking deal sizes.
Buyers who could previously "test and learn" now required ironclad business cases. The GTM machine was built for a capital environment that evaporated.
Martech plateau and complexity tax. The Martech landscape exploded from ~150 tools in 2011 to ~7,000 by 2018. But around 2018, integration debt, data quality erosion, and tool sprawl began degrading performance faster than new capabilities improved it.
GTM teams spent more time managing technology than engaging buyers.
Automation that was supposed to create leverage instead created noise, and the deterministic models encoded in those tools were now operating on garbage data in a non-deterministic environment.
The committee-ization of B2B buying. Gartner's research around 2017–2019 documented the shift from 3–4 stakeholders to 6–10+ in typical B2B decisions. This wasn't just more people, it was a structural change in decision-making physics.
Consensus-based buying under economic uncertainty defaults to paralysis. The linear sales process (champion → economic buyer → close) broke when eight people with conflicting priorities and no individual authority had to agree.
The executive implication: Most GTM leaders experienced 2018–2020 as unexplained performance degradation: pipelines stayed full, activity metrics looked healthy, but revenue stalled.
The problem wasn't execution. It was that the marketplace had fundamentally changed while GTM continued optimizing for a world that no longer existed.
Sequoia's famous "Adapting to Endure" memo didn't arrive until May 2022, but the capital constraint buyers were responding to—the constraint that killed deal velocity and inflated CAC—began four years earlier.
If you're still running GTM on pre-2018 assumptions, you're not behind. You're operating in a different universe than your buyers.