The missing variable: a Go-To-Market emits before it converts

A Go-To-Market plan is judged on a single column: what it brings in. The segments chosen, the prices charged, the channels opened, the pitch deployed — every trade-off is assessed on its expected return, then tracked against four or five indicators. Conversion rate, cost of acquisition, cycle length, discount rate. This column is legitimate.

It is alone. That is where the problem lies.

Every Go-To-Market decision produces two effects, and only one is assessed. The first is mechanical: the decision converts, or it does not. The second is informational: the decision says something. It is read. And how it is read has nothing to do with the intent of whoever took it.

1998, Quimper

In the late 1990s, Armor-Lux is a Breton knitwear company caught in the wave of offshoring that was hollowing out the French textile industry. Jean-Guy Le Floc'h and Michel Guéguen take a decision: to move into workwear. The reasoning is industrial, and it is sound — the institutional segment is identified as less exposed to Asian competition, and it keeps threatened workshops busy. The first contracts are signed in 1998, notably with Brit Air, a regional airline since gone.

The decision produces what it was asked to produce. Workwear today accounts for roughly 40% of a turnover of around 120 million euros, with some 600 employees. Column filled, return demonstrated.

It produced something else, which appeared in no decision file. It told the market what Armor-Lux was. Not a heritage brand living off the Breton striped shirt: an industrial player capable of holding a public contract over several years — the volumes, the logistics, the technical demands, a signature. That sentence, no one wrote. It was read.

But it was not read straight away. It took until 2004 — six years — for La Poste to entrust Armor-Lux with outfitting its staff. Six years between the emission and its first major consequence. An executive waiting for a return signal within twelve months would have concluded, in 1999, that the decision had produced nothing.

This point is not a consulting-firm thesis

It has a Nobel Prize, and it is fifty-six years old.

In October 2001, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences honours George Akerlof, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz for their work on markets with asymmetric information — those markets, meaning very nearly all of them, in which one party knows what the other does not. The founding result is Akerlof's, published in 1970 on the used-car market. When the seller knows more than the buyer about the quality of a good, it may be that only low-quality goods end up being traded. The buyer does not wait to see clearly: he infers. From what he observes — that is, from everything except quality.

An SME or mid-market executive lives in this configuration permanently. Their prospect can verify neither the robustness of the product, nor the reliability of delivery times, nor the competence of after-sales support, nor the strength of the balance sheet. Nothing that matters is observable at the moment of decision. They have only one thing: the company's Go-To-Market decisions. These are, literally, the only data available about everything that is not.

The step this cahier takes

Akerlof and Spence describe the deliberate signal: the costly action by which the better-informed player makes itself credible to the less-informed one — the dividend paid out, the degree financed. This cahier deals with something else: involuntary emission. The move from one to the other is not given by the works cited. It follows from Akerlof's result alone, and it is owned here.

For what the used-car market shows is harder than a signalling mechanism. It is that the buyer deprived of information does not suspend judgement: he concludes, and he concludes the worst. Silence is not a fallback position. It is the most expensive position on the market.

A Go-To-Market plan does not choose whether it emits. It chooses whether it knows what it is emitting.

What the blind spot costs

An unmeasured effect is not an absent effect. It is an unarbitrated effect. And an unarbitrated effect is one you simply endure.

Concretely: the committee that grants a 15% discount to unblock a deal is trading fifteen points of margin against a signed contract. That is a trade-off — assessed, defensible, sometimes right. What is not assessed is the second term: what that discount has just taught the market about the value of the product, and what it will cost the next deal. That term is not absent from the balance sheet. It is absent from the decision.

Making the second effect visible does not make decisions better. It makes the trade-off possible. That is all this cahier promises, and it is considerable: an executive never asks to be decided for. They ask to decide knowing what they are deciding on.

What I add, and on what basis

Everything above has been established since 1970 and is verifiable by anyone.

What follows is not. I ran RepTrak France from 2016 to 2020 — the French arm of a company whose business is measuring reputation. I spent the following years in the executive committees of French SMEs and mid-market companies. I never met a single committee that measured what its Go-To-Market emits. Not one that had brought it onto the dashboard. Yet almost all of them held the data that would have revealed it — cycle length, discount rate granted, qualification rate, reasons for loss — and read it exclusively as indicators of sales performance.

This statement has no study behind it. It is the observation of a practitioner who was in the room. The reader will verify it faster in their own committee than in any publication.

The instrument

It is precisely this gap that GTM NEXUS 360® was built to instrument: an economic result settled on one side, a practice that has never taken it on board on the other.

The model rests on a simple conviction: Go-To-Market, brand and reputation are not three subjects, but three phases of a single cycle. A legible Go-To-Market builds the brand; a strong brand feeds reputation; a solid reputation re-primes the Go-To-Market, lowering the cost of entry into the next market. These three levers are what the market understands, retains, then acts on — and the model measures their maturity along a single sequence: objectify, measure, compare. What the company believes it emits. What it emits. What the market gives back. Three magnitudes, two gaps — and it is in the gaps that the decision lies.

A point of method, because it underpins the credibility of the whole: these magnitudes are not measured by questioning the company about itself. What it emits and what the market gives back are observed outside — from what anyone can see of it without asking. A company is not scored on what it declares. It is read on what the market perceives.

The Go-To-Market literature — abundant, mature, largely imported from software — has built a complete apparatus on the first effect. The second has been waiting for fifty-six years. This cahier claims to discover nothing. It applies.

Three decisions

Not all emit at the same volume. Three dominate, and the next three chapters take them one by one. Price (chapter 4): the most read, the most immediate, and the only one that can be shown not to change the perception of the product — but the product as it is experienced. Segment (chapter 5): not the one you address, the one you refuse; a renunciation is a statement. Channel (chapter 6): where you are seen determines what is understood.

In 1998, the question did not arise in these terms — the instruments did not exist. Today they do, and that is what makes the blind spot costly: it is no longer endured, it is chosen.

A company does not decide what its market understands of it. It decides only whether it wants to know.