Why does your CAC keep going up while deals don’t?

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) are increasing in almost every B2B category. Industry diagnosis: more competition, more channels, and more noise. Prescribed remedies: better targeting, more content, relevant customer profiles (ICPs), and sharper messaging.

But here’s the question the B2B go-to-market (GTM) profession doesn’t ask: If CAC goes up, what’s the corresponding improvement in deal volume, deal velocity, and deal size? You spend a lot of money to get customers. The deals aren’t too bad, too fast, or too big. Sometimes, that’s not a problem with market conditions. It’s a problem of evidence – and the work doesn’t have an answer because it doesn’t ask the question.

The main reason is that B2B GTM work operates from a deeply embedded thesis that is rarely tested: awareness and knowledge equal purchase intent. Let potential customers know, and they will want.

The truth is, it was always a small vision. Decades of GTM performance decline proved it wrong. Awareness is necessary, but nowhere near enough. Delivery of information does not build confidence. And awareness or confidence is not trust. This work collapsed three different epistemic conditions into one and built its entire approach to synthesis.

Here are those three scenarios – and why confusing them costs pipeline, speed, and deal size. Your CAC is an invoice.

Three factors driving B2B purchases

The three conditions of awareness, confidence, and trust are immutable. And they are not spectrums.

Instead, they create a three-legged stool with a strict causal order: Awareness → Confidence → Trust.

Most GTM frameworks treat these three different conditions as one unified concept called customer readiness, trust, or relationship. That combination is not a semantic puzzle. It is a structural error with measurable consequences. Here’s what each leg says.

Awareness

Awareness is a threshold state. A buyer who hasn’t seen enough and doesn’t understand the problem you’re solving can’t evaluate your solution. This is not just logo awareness. Problem awareness, category awareness, and statistical awareness. Failing at the awareness stage means you’re selling to people who don’t know they need to buy.

Confidence

Confidence is epistemological. The consumer’s internal assessment is whether your claims have a solid foundation, whether logic makes sense, the evidence is credible, or the methodology makes sense.

Confidence forms before entering the room. It can be created or destroyed without any human interaction at all. It is measured against content, evidence, signals and peers, and the perceived power of thought.

Daniel Kahneman’s research on judgment under uncertainty makes it clear that confidence and trust operate on different systems of thought and respond to completely different stimuli. Treating them as a single construct produces an intervention that misses both targets.

Trust

Trust is relative. It needs your people: your account managers, customer service managers, and company executives. It involves the buyer’s ongoing assessment of your company’s knowledge, intentions, and credibility as a partner.

Philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill, whose work on trust is among some of the most rigorous writings, makes the distinction precisely: Trust is extended to the consumer. Honesty is shown by the seller. You can’t do it. You can only create conditions that make sense for the buyer to extend it. Obviously, O’Neill clearly argues that more information does not automatically create those conditions.

Information that cannot be measured, contextualized, or tested does not build confidence. Instead, it creates noise that the consumer must filter through. The GTM function creates that noise on an industrial scale and calls it feeding.

Building trust is where GTM breaks down

Most GTM brands invest heavily in awareness. Then they hand the buyer over to the sale and call it trust-building. Confidence is almost completely ignored, or groups take good content and a strong brand automatically produces it.

It doesn’t work like that. Confidence is a bridge. This is when the consumer decides that your claims need a deeper examination. If that bridge isn’t built before the sales conversation, your account manager spends the first two meetings doing the work that should have happened at the top – rebuilding credibility from scratch, reframing the problem, and justifying the division.

That’s not a marketing problem. It’s a confidence gap that poses as a plumbing problem. The missing confidence gap is directly reflected in deal speed – cycles that drag – and deal size – commitments that shrink because the buyer never fully resolved their doubts.

Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman, whose organizational trust model is often cited in the academic literature, identify competence, benevolence, and integrity as the foundations of trust. Note that skill comes first. Buyers check if you know what you are doing before they are willing to check if they like you.

That is a judgment of confidence, not an honest judgment. If your GTM treats them as the same thing, you’re ranking them in the wrong order, and you’re measuring the wrong things when you’re trying to identify why deals are stalling.

What a lack of confidence in your numbers does

When confidence is absent, deals do not die cleanly. Pull them regularly. Consumers also participate in shopping. They add test sections. They bring in late opponents. They are asking for more clues, more evidence, and more pilots.

All those friction points increase the CAC. Every extended sales cycle adds to CAC. Every deal that closes at a discount because the buyer never fully commits increases the CAC. However, neither improves deal volume, deal speed, or deal size because it does not represent an improvement. Costs of property diagnostics that have not been done.

Judea Pearl’s framework for causal inference is useful here because it will not allow you to hide from the mechanism. Correlational GTM statistics show that trust scores and deal speed vary and recommend increased relationship investment. Causal models force a difficult question: Where does consumer commitment really stop? Was it a stage of awareness – did they not fully understand the stakes? Or did confidence never fully develop because they found the claims insufficiently supported? Or was the trust not fully developed due to a broken relationship with someone at some point?

Those are three different diseases, and they require three different interventions. Combining them into one “trust” structure means you’ll say the wrong solution most of the time, and your CAC will keep going up while deal volume, deal velocity, and deal size stay down.

The case

The GTM industry has spent a decade developing a leg up on growing awareness of technology with objective data, account-based marketing, and signal-based marketing. It has also invested heavily in the trust leg through relationship intelligence, sales training, and executive alignment programs.

However, the GTM industry ignored the confidence leg, taking it for granted or by product.

Confidence doesn’t happen automatically. It’s not just about the product. And it can’t be found in a sales conversation without paying for it on time, discounts, and lost, missing deals that improve deal volume, deal speed, or deal size.

The basic thesis – that making people aware and aware means they will want to buy – has always been a category mistake. Knowledge is not motivation. You don’t want to know.

B2B GTM work has found a classical economic model: a rational agent, with full information, which, when it gets enough information, evolves to the best choice. Psychology has challenged that model since the 1970s. This work found consistent evidence that sometimes more information produces more sales, which is called validation, and continued to build.

CAC keeps going up. Deals did not follow. That didn’t happen automatically.