Before an investor writes a cheque, they run diligence on your go-to-market. They pull the CRM, look at where revenue actually came from, work out what it cost, check whether it repeats, and compare all of that with the story in the deck. Most founders only get that level of scrutiny once, from outside, at the moment it matters most.
A GTM audit is the same exercise run on purpose, before the money is spent instead of after. It is the first thing we do with every post-seed B2B SaaS team we work with, and I have come to think it is the most useful two weeks in the whole engagement. This post covers what it looks at, what it tends to find, and how to run a rough version yourself in a day.
What a GTM audit is
A GTM audit is a structured review of how a company reaches, wins and keeps customers, checked against the evidence in its own systems rather than its pitch. It covers seven areas: the ideal customer profile, positioning and messaging, the acquisition motion, the funnel and its conversion rates, the sales handoff, the measurement layer, and the budget. What comes out is a short ranked list of the constraints costing the most pipeline.
The word investor-style is doing work in that sentence. A marketing audit asks whether the marketing is good. An investor asks whether the growth is real, efficient and likely to repeat. Those are different questions, and the second one is what decides whether spending more is a good idea.
Why run it before spending a euro
Spend amplifies what is already there. Put budget behind a clear offer, a sharp ICP and a funnel that converts, and it compounds. Put the same budget behind a vague offer and a leaking funnel, and you have paid to learn what an afternoon in the CRM would have told you.
The audit also ends arguments, which founders underrate until they have lived through one. Most post-seed teams run on theories about why growth is slow. The leads are bad. The ads are wrong. Sales is not following up. The product needs one more feature. An audit replaces the theories with a ranked list backed by data from the company’s own systems, and the meeting changes from a debate to a decision.
The seven things we look at
1. The ICP you say you target versus the customers you actually have
We put the written ideal customer profile next to the ten customers that retained best, expanded most and closed fastest. The gap is usually large. The written one is aspirational. The real one, the one you can see in closed-won and churn data, is narrower and more useful, and it often shares a trigger nobody has written down.
2. Positioning and messaging
We read the homepage, the pitch deck, the last ten sales emails and three call recordings, and check whether they describe the same company. Often they do not. When each surface says something slightly different, the buyer has to reconcile it themselves, and buyers do that slowly or not at all.
3. The acquisition motion
Which channels are running, at what level of effort, and which of them produced the opportunities in the last two quarters. The finding I see most: five channels at partial effort, no readable signal from any of them, and a go-to-market strategy that exists as a document and not as a thing anyone runs.
4. The funnel
Conversion by stage, sales cycle by segment, where deals stall. This is where reported pipeline gets tested against pipeline that closes. A funnel that is fat at the top and thin at proposal is almost always a qualification problem dressed up as a volume problem.
5. The handoff
We fill in the demo form ourselves and time how long a human takes to reply. Then we trace how a lead moves from form to CRM to sequence to rep. Something in that chain is broken at most companies we look at, and it is the cheapest fix on the whole list. I have seen demo requests sit for four days at a company spending €20,000 a month to generate them.
6. Measurement
Do the numbers exist, does anyone trust them, and do marketing and sales use the same definition of a qualified lead. Without that shared definition every other finding gets contested. Our guide to B2B SaaS marketing metrics covers what belongs on the dashboard.
7. Budget and efficiency
Where the money goes, what it produces, and cost per qualified opportunity by channel. Retention gets checked here too, because efficient acquisition means very little if customers leave after a year. For an external reference point on what good retention looks like by stage, SaaS Capital publishes survey benchmarks every year.
What it usually finds
After enough of these the findings start to rhyme. The most common one, by a distance, is that marketing and sales have never agreed what a qualified lead is, so every pipeline conversation is an argument about the numbers rather than a decision about them. Close behind: the real ICP is narrower than the stated one, and the marketing is aimed at the wider, worse-fitting version.
Then the handoff. Demo requests waiting a day or more while the company pays to generate intent and lets it cool. Then channels judged at the wrong time: paid switched off after six weeks, content running for a year with no measurement of pipeline at all. And underneath a lot of it, the founder still closing every deal that matters, which works right up until diligence notices that it does not scale.
Last one, one afternoon, three findings. Marketing and sales had never agreed what a qualified lead was, so a bulk import was sitting in “leads”. Form demo requests had been zero for two months while sales closed deals nobody could trace. Ads had been paused for over two months and the decision was written down nowhere. The next item on the board was “reactivate LinkedIn Ads”. We moved it below “turn on the lead-source workflow”.
What the output looks like
Not a 40 page report. Nobody reads those twice. The output that changes behaviour is one page: the three constraints costing the most pipeline, ranked, with the evidence for each and the fix, cheapest first. The point is a decision about next quarter, not a catalogue of everything that could be better.
How to run a rough version yourself
You can get most of the way there in a day.
- Pull your ten best customers by retention and expansion and write down what they have in common. Compare it with your stated ICP.
- Read your homepage, your deck and your last three sales emails in one sitting. Note every place they disagree.
- List every channel running and, for each one, the opportunities it sourced in the last two quarters. Opportunities, not leads.
- Submit your own demo form and time how long until a human replies.
- Ask marketing and sales, separately, to define a qualified lead. Compare the answers.
- Work out cost per qualified opportunity by channel and rank the channels by it.
What that will not give you is the ranking. Deciding which of six problems is costing the most pipeline is pattern recognition, and it comes from having seen the same problems across many companies. That is where outside help earns its fee, if it earns it at all.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a GTM audit and a marketing audit?
A marketing audit reviews marketing activity: channels, content, campaigns. A GTM audit reviews the whole path to revenue, including positioning, the sales handoff, funnel conversion, measurement and budget efficiency, and judges it the way an investor would.
How long does a GTM audit take?
A thorough one takes two to three weeks, most of it spent in the CRM, on call recordings and talking to sales. The self-run version above takes a day and catches the biggest problems.
When should a startup run one?
Before any significant increase in marketing spend, before hiring a marketing leader, and about a year before a planned raise. Each of those is expensive to get wrong and cheap to inform.
What does a GTM audit cost?
Depends on depth and on who runs it. The better question is what it saves: an audit that redirects one quarter of misallocated spend pays for itself several times over. We run a free version as the starting point of every engagement.
Run the diagnostic before the spend
If you are about to put budget, headcount or a raise behind your go-to-market, find out where it leaks first. Book a free growth audit and we will run the investor-style diagnostic on your motion and give you the one page that says what to fix first.