Beyond Spreadsheets: The Discipline of GTM Due Diligence
SBI Wayforge™ in the First 100 Days
SBI Wayforge™ provides the quantitative insight and benchmarking that strengthens 100-day execution. The platform helps sponsors and management validate assumptions, establish operational baselines, and track the KPIs that matter most. With a unified data foundation, leadership teams gain clarity on where value will be created and how to focus early efforts to achieve the annual plan.
Explore SBI Wayforge™I've reviewed hundreds of deals over my career. The ones that succeed share a common trait: they were built on truth, not optimism. The ones that fail? They were validated by spreadsheets that reflected hope, not reality.
GTM due diligence (GTM Diligence) isn't about confirming what you want to believe. It's about discovering what's actually true-even when that truth is uncomfortable. Especially when it's uncomfortable.
The Spreadsheet Illusion
Every investment memo comes with beautiful financial models. Revenue grows at steady rates. Margins expand predictably. Synergies materialize on schedule. The spreadsheet math always works.
But spreadsheets are just assumptions dressed up as precision. They'll tell you whatever story you want to hear. They'll justify any price if you adjust the inputs just right.
The real question isn't whether the math works-it's whether the assumptions behind the math reflect reality. And that's where disciplined commercial assessment comes in.
What Disciplined Assessment Looks Like
Real GTM due diligence starts with skepticism, not validation. It asks hard questions:
- Customer concentration: Are top customers actually sticky, or are they just comfortable? What would it take for them to leave?
- Win rates: Management says they win 40% of deals. But is that 40% of qualified opportunities, or 40% of everything in the pipeline including tire-kickers?
- Competitive positioning: The company claims they're differentiated. Do customers agree? Would they pay more for that differentiation?
- Growth drivers: Revenue is up 30%. Is that from new customers, expansion, price increases, or just market tailwinds? Which of those are sustainable?
The Critical Principle
"Your job isn't to make the deal work on paper. Your job is to understand whether it will work in reality-and to quantify the gap between the two."
The Truth-Finding Process
Finding truth requires going beyond what management tells you. It means:
Customer Validation
Talk to customers-not the reference accounts management provides, but a representative sample. Ask them why they buy, what they'd change, and who else they considered. Their answers will tell you more than any management presentation.
Competitive Reality Check
Map the competitive landscape from the customer's perspective, not from management's view. Who else competes for these deals? What are their strengths? Where is this company actually vulnerable?
Market Dynamics Analysis
Understand the market forces at play. Is growth coming from market expansion or share gain? Are pricing dynamics favorable or deteriorating? What secular trends are helping or hurting?
GTM Capability Assessment
Evaluate whether the GTM engine can deliver the plan. Is the sales force productive? Are marketing programs generating quality pipeline? Can the organization scale to hit targets?
When Truth Challenges the Thesis
The hardest part of GTM Diligence is delivering findings that challenge the investment thesis. Nobody wants to hear that the customer concentration is worse than disclosed, or that the competitive position is weaker than claimed.
But that's exactly when GTM Diligence adds the most value. Not by killing deals-though sometimes that's the right answer-but by forcing honest conversations about risk, valuation, and post-close priorities.
The best investors welcome this. They know that truth discovered in diligence is far less expensive than truth discovered after closing. They'd rather walk away from a bad deal than own a company that doesn't meet the thesis.
Building Value Through Understanding
Great GTM Diligence doesn't just identify risks-it reveals opportunities. When you truly understand the business, you can see paths to value that management hasn't considered:
- Customer segments that are underserved and represent whitespace opportunity
- Pricing power that exists but isn't being captured
- Sales productivity levers that could accelerate growth
- Market positioning adjustments that would strengthen competitive advantage
This is where disciplined assessment becomes value creation planning. The same rigor that uncovers risks also identifies the specific, actionable initiatives that will drive returns.
The Discipline That Wins
Successful investing requires discipline in many forms-financial discipline, operational discipline, governance discipline. But it starts with commercial discipline: the willingness to seek truth, even when it's uncomfortable.
Because at the end of the day, spreadsheets don't buy companies-people do. And the people who win are the ones who base their decisions on reality, not hope.
The best deals aren't found in spreadsheets. They're validated through disciplined commercial assessment that reveals what's actually true.