Borrowed certainty.

I was running a GTM Masterclass a few weeks ago, twenty CEOs on the call, when someone asked the question every founder eventually asks. What’s the best channel right now?

It’s a fair question. Everyone wants to know where to put their time and money, and it feels like there should be an answer sitting out there. One channel that’s working better than the rest, that you can find, copy, and get on with.

There isn’t one.

And here’s why. The question feels different now than it did a few years back, because some channels really have got harder. SEO, email, outbound. They’re all tougher than they used to be. People have less patience for weak targeting or a product that doesn’t quite fit. AI has made it easy for anyone to do the basics, so it’s harder to stand out. GTM just works differently now.

Same channel, opposite results.

So we went around the table.

Charlie’s main channel is cold calling. His ACV is at the lower end, so it can make sense to go after volume. He runs it through an outsourced agency, which is a process prone to failure in general and not something many people would recommend. But it works for him. Four thousand dials a month, ten to twenty qualified demos out of that, closing about a third. Last quarter, £6k of spend, £45k of new revenue, before you count renewals or expansion. Ask Charlie what the best channel is, and he’ll tell you cold calling, and for his business, he’s right.

Alex tried the same channel, and it didn’t take. He used two well-known outbound agencies, more than once, and most of the meetings they booked were with the wrong companies and the wrong people. It improved when he treated the agency like part of his team, gave them the customer context they were missing, and reworked the messaging with them. Even then, it never performed the way it does for Charlie. For Alex, cold calling through an agency wasn’t worth it.

It was the same channel in both cases, and it produced opposite results.

We did the same thing with paid search. One CEO builds most of his pipeline from it. He’d actually walked away from Google Ads years ago because of all the noise and junk leads, but then he went back and ran it properly. Tight targeting, landing pages built to convert, and a deal size big enough to make the spend worth it. Now, most of what comes through fits his ideal customer. Another CEO on the call had spent about £8k a month across three agencies and received almost nothing in return. Same platform, same year, totally different result. It was the same story with events, with LinkedIn, with cold email. For every CEO who trusted a channel, someone else had tried it and walked away.

By the time we’d gone around the room, the pattern was evident. For every channel someone loved, another person had already given up on it. And almost everyone wanted the same thing from me: which channel should we copy? Hardly anyone was asking the more useful question: whether they’re actually running the channels they’ve already picked the right way.

That’s what I call borrowed certainty.

It’s the confidence that a channel works, but it’s based on someone else’s results, not your own.

You watch a company you respect win with cold calling, or paid, or events, and you treat their success as proof it will work for you, too. But their success sits on their context: their deal size, their buyer, the way they sell, and the team running it. When you copy the channel, none of that comes with it. You take on the confidence and leave behind the reasons for it, and the reasons were the part that mattered.

Cargo cult GTM.

Richard Feynman had a name for a version of this in another field. He called it cargo cult science. After the second world war, islanders in the South Pacific had watched planes land with supplies, so they built their own runways, lit fires along the edges, and set a man in a wooden hut with bamboo carved to look like headphones and antennas. They copied the form exactly. Everything looked right. But no planes landed, because the runway was never the thing that brought them.

Copying a channel is the same. You can copy everything you can see (the agency, the sequences, the ad budget, the playbook) and still get nothing. The part that made it work for someone else was never the part you could see.

Charlie made cold calling work. Alex couldn’t, even with the same channel and the same kind of agency. What made the difference was everything around the channel, not the channel itself.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, because it usually comes from someone credible. A founder who scaled on content tells you outbound is dead. Someone who built on outbound says events are a waste of money. A partner who grew through referrals tells you paid is just a tax on companies that don’t get brand. They’re all telling the truth about their own business. The mistake is thinking any of it is the truth about you.

What the companies that get this right do.

The companies that get this right stop shopping for channels. They do four things instead.

1. Commit to one or two channels. Pick the ones that actually fit how you sell, and run them properly, for long enough to get a real answer. For an enterprise, it could be a couple of years before you see revenue. Too often, the focus is on “How can we win the quarter?” rather than “How will we win the market?”

2. Build your picture of the ideal customer from your own data. Who renewed, who expanded, who churned.

3. Check the channel against how your buyer actually buys. I had someone targeting chief compliance officers with LinkedIn Ads. They don’t click on ads. You also need to think about the category. Established categories have budget lines, and people are searching for those vendors. If you are creating a new category, then people need to know the option exists first. Almost nobody was searching for LLMs five years ago.

4. Ask your customers. Ask your prospects about the process they went through to buy the last few things. It’s the best thing you can do.

Boards do it too.

I spend a lot of time on the investor side of the table, and boards fall into the same habit. When marketing comes up, the conversation jumps straight to the channel. Are we on the right ones? Should we drop that one? What is everyone else doing? It feels like progress, but it usually isn’t. The channel is rarely the thing that actually broke. A board that keeps changing channels is often just borrowing certainty at a higher level and paying for the search for a perfect channel that will never exist.

At the board level, when a channel stalls, the instinct is to grab a new one. Resist it. First work out why the one you’ve got isn’t delivering, in this company, with this buyer, with this team. Copying someone else’s channel tells you nothing. Executing well in the channels you’ve already picked is the whole game. So drop ‘wrong channel, what next?’ and ask these instead:

• Is it poor execution? The channel is fine. It’s just not being run hard enough or well enough to work.

• Is it a lack of focus? Budget and attention are spread so thin across too many channels that none of them ever gets a fair shot.

• Is it out of sync with the sales motion? The channel brings in the wrong buyers for the way the company actually closes.

• Is the channel getting easier, staying the same or getting harder? From a CAC perspective, some of your channels may not be viable in a year’s time.

If you get that diagnosis wrong, you’ll just keep swapping channels while the real problem sits there, untouched. Every time you switch, you reset the clock and pay for the same search all over again. I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count.

Most of the time, the channel wasn’t the problem. Borrowed certainty was.

This Week’s Tangible Prompt

Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT once per portfolio company. Fill in the brackets honestly, and don’t let management fill them in for you.

“I want you to run a GTM Channel Diagnosis on this company. Here’s what it sells, who it sells to, the average deal size, how deals actually get closed, and the one or two channels it’s leaning on right now, with whatever numbers I have on spend and results: [five or six sentences]. First, tell me whether the channel choice is theirs or borrowed: is this channel running because their own data pointed to it, or because it’s working for a company they admire, yes or no, and why. Then, for each channel that isn’t delivering, tell me which of four things is most to blame, with one sentence of reasoning each: poor execution (the channel is fine, it’s being run badly), lack of focus (budget and attention spread too thin to give anything a fair shot), inconsistency to the sales motion (the channel brings in buyers who don’t buy the way this company sells), or channel trajectory (the channel is getting harder, and on current CAC it may not be viable in a year’s time). Then tell me whether the channel has had enough volume and time to produce a reliable signal, or whether it’s still too small a test to draw conclusions.”

Cheers,

Edwin & Josh

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