The latest GTM Effectiveness Report from Proof Causal.ai and Fiduciari makes the numbers difficult to ignore. Across enterprise B2B go-to-market functions, roughly 53% of GTM spend was ineffective across a basket of approximately 500 public companies. Among private startups and scaleups to which Proof had access, the inefficiency rate climbed above 70% before causal relationships in GTM were assessed. Yet, inside that ocean of waste, there was one notable exception: communications and PR.
While most marketing and sales spending failed to create measurable lift, 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 how GTM is designed and funded today. It implies something more serious than simple inefficiency — most GTM functions may be built on flawed causal assumptions.
Earned legitimacy drives buyer confidence
The standard internal framing of PR is simplistic: brand awareness, company credibility or general trust-building. Those phrases aren’t wrong, but they are incomplete.
In today’s environment, dominated by paid media saturation and owned content inflation, PR is also an economic mechanism. It’s the primary generator of earned legitimacy — now the dominant input into buyer confidence.
Today’s B2B buyers are overwhelmed, surrounded by paid social, paid search, ABM ads, sponsored newsletters, webinar campaigns, thought leadership series, SEO content farms and AI-generated white papers.
The buyer’s challenge is determining what’s real. In that context, earned media and analyst validation contribute an estimated 89% of the confidence and trust factors that shape purchasing behavior.
The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.
Confidence is about what you can really do. Trust is about who you really are. This isn’t a branding argument, but a causal reality. Earned content functions as third-party verification in a market flooded with self-asserted claims.
Dig deeper: B2B firms suffer from poor GTM understanding
Most GTM operates on the wrong causal model
Most GTM spend assumes exposure produces outcomes: more campaigns lead to more awareness, which leads to more leads and more revenue.
Causal modeling shows a different pathway: earned validation drives a confidence shift, which increases willingness to engage, accelerates deal velocity, expands deal size and improves close probability.
In other words, PR isn’t simply top of funnel. It’s 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’s inherently disciplined. Unlike paid media, PR can’t brute-force outcomes with spend. The market decides whether a story has legitimacy.
Unlike owned media, PR can’t self-certify truth. Readers rely on third parties, notably press and analysts, to validate it.
Unlike most MOps, PR results are binary. The placement happens or it doesn’t. The analyst briefing lands or it doesn’t. The narrative is credible or it isn’t.
This dynamic forces the function into a feedback loop that more closely reflects causality than correlation.
Dig deeper: The future of GTM starts with causal clarity
GTM budgets are allocated backward
Once you see this, the financial conclusion becomes difficult to avoid. If earned content is driving nearly 90% of trust formation, and trust formation accelerates pipeline, then many companies are allocating capital backward. The dominant enterprise spend model today looks something like:
- 60%-70% paid and owned content.
- 20%-30% tools and operations.
- 5%-10% earned influence.
But the causal evidence increasingly suggests the opposite is rational. GTM spend should prioritize earned media, not because paid and owned are useless, but because many customers see them as biased amplifiers of the message a company wants shared. They scale what already exists. Earned creates what buyers are willing to believe.
GTM leaders frequently position PR as reputation and awareness. When speaking to finance, frame it using language that matters.
- More deals = revenue impact.
- Bigger deals = margin impact.
- Faster deal velocity = cash flow impact.
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’s a working capital lever.
Dig deeper: Designing the GTM model for marketing’s revenue era
The real question every GTM leader must answer
If PR is consistently the highest-yield component of GTM spend, why is it treated like an accessory function? The answer is uncomfortable: PR produces leverage that most attribution models can’t capture. But that doesn’t make it less real. It makes it more critical.
The market has already decided what it trusts: earned validation over paid promotion. The most important insight of the past decade of marketing data isn’t 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.
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