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Trust Is the New CAC

I spent four days in the Montana wilderness with 65 go-to-market leaders and nobody asked what anyone did for a living. That silence is the most expensive thing in go-to-market right now.

3.5-minute read below. Hit reply and let me know what you are seeing on your side.

I spent four days in the Montana wilderness with 65 go-to-market leaders, and nobody asked what I did for a living. I did not say the words Revenue Reimagined once outside of our session. No pitches, no name tags, no badge scans.

Dale went on a hike with one of the sponsors, and they talked about music the entire way. He found out what the guy actually sold two days later, at lunch, by accident. His response was immediate: "We have a client problem you can solve; let's talk. That conversation cost nothing and started with Pink Floyd.

Leads got cheap. Belief got expensive. Your CAC model prices the first one and treats the second one as free.

THE LINE ITEM NOBODY BUDGETS

Every seller has the same machine now. Research in seconds, a message that reads like it took twenty minutes, sequences that update themselves off signals. The cost of producing a first touch that looks credible dropped to near zero. Buyers adjusted faster than sellers did. They stopped reading. Reply rates drop, and the answer from most teams is more volume, which makes the next quarter worse.

I have led outbound teams that hit every activity number and produced pipeline that died in stage two. The lead was cheap. The trust was never bought. You can see it in the deals: the champion who goes quiet after the demo, the second meeting that gets rescheduled twice and then disappears, the eval that stalls the moment a real budget conversation starts. That is not a volume problem. That is a credibility problem showing up 60 days late.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN NOBODY PITCHES

Arcadia is 65 people, tents, an application process, and a director-level floor. Jason Yarborough built it with his wife and co-founder Sam. He turns people away. He wants next year smaller, not bigger, because at 65 he cannot get deep with everyone. His words: five too many.

I do not pay to attend conferences. People pay me to speak at them. We were invited to speak at this one, and we asked to pay our way anyway. Three days with almost no cell service, one full day of programming with nothing to do with go-to-market, and I had a one-on-one conversation with nearly every person there. Not one of them asked what I do. I would pay more for that room at 50 people than I paid for it at 65.

WHERE TRUST SHOWS UP IN YOUR NUMBERS

Trust is not a feeling. It leaves a trail in systems you already own. Here is where I go looking for it:

• Repeat rate on your own events. Jason asked who was there for a second and third time, and the hands stayed up. People go to Dreamforce because they have to. Nobody has to fly to Montana.

• Closed-won by source, with referrals pulled out from sequences. If a human vouched for you, that is trust somebody else already paid for.

• Meetings booked without a calendar link. A buyer who replies to a personal email is a different asset than one who clicks a booking page.

• Second calls that come out of a first call where you asked for nothing. If your team cannot run one of those, they have only ever sold urgency.

• Sales and partner meetings that happened with no lead attached. Count them across the last 90 days.

None of that shows up in cost per lead. All of it shows up in whether the quarter closes.

THE PARTNER TEAM YOU TURNED INTO A BDR DESK

Jason spent years watching partnerships get treated as an afterthought. His question to the companies he works with is blunt: how often does your sales team meet with your partner team? The answer he usually gets is when a lead comes in. At that point, you have a glorified BDR with a better title, and he says it out loud.

Partner-sourced trust is the cheapest trust available to you. Somebody your buyer already believes is telling them you are worth the meeting. Most teams run that as a lead-gen channel and then wonder why it produces lead-gen results. Arcadia means harmony. Jason picked the name because he wanted sales, marketing, and partnerships running as one motion, and he says the orgs where he pulled that off saw 300% and 500% growth.

ON THE AIR

This week Dale and I recorded from a field in Montana with Jason Yarborough, who built the Arcadia leadership experience with his wife and co-founder Sam. Sixty-five GTM leaders, tents, an application process, and one full day of programming that has nothing to do with go-to-market. Three years in, he wants it smaller.

Some key themes that came up:

• Why year one was all go-to-market sessions and year three is roughly 80% people content

• Why Jason wants the room smaller instead of bigger, and how he vets who gets in

• Why partnerships still is not a native GTM function, and what happens when sales only meets the partner team when a lead lands

• Where AI actually helps a partner program when you are a team of one

• Imposter syndrome reframed as self-sabotage, and the trick his coach gave him for it

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