Practical, operator-grade thinking on GTM due diligence, pricing and commercial value creation for private equity — from the senior experts who deliver it.
The fundamentals of go-to-market have not changed. The execution of them has transformed. Which means the scarce skill is no longer building things, it is knowing what is worth building.
Commercial diligence is not always the right spend. Five situations where a GTM due diligence will not earn its fee, and what to do instead.
Most value creation plans are directionally right and operationally useless. How to convert one into sequenced workstreams a management team will actually run.
A practical guide for management teams: what a commercial diligence actually involves, what the reviewers are looking for, how to prepare, and how to get something useful out of it.
Markets shift, buyers change, and yesterday's proposition drifts quietly out of fit. How to tell proposition drift from a sales execution problem, before you spend a year fixing the wrong thing.
Churn discovered after completion is a valuation error, not an operational one. The signals were almost always visible in the data room, and here is where to look.
How to test whether a pipeline means anything, spot a manufactured forecast, and read stage definitions that were written to flatter the number.
Across roughly 100 commercial assessments in five years, the constraint has most often sat in proposition and fit, not in sales. Management usually believed the opposite.
The data request list we use for commercial diligence, with the diagnostic value of each item, what its absence tells you, and the order to ask in.
A QoE tests whether the numbers are real. A GTM due diligence tests whether they can be repeated. They answer different questions, and running one does not cover the other.
Quality of revenue is not one metric. It is what the whole commercial engine produces, and a company can show clean revenue today with none of the machinery to repeat it next year.
GTM due diligence (GTM DD) assesses whether a target's commercial engine can deliver the investment case — go-to-market, pricing, sales and RevOps. How it differs from commercial DD, what it covers, and what you get.
Commercial DD looks outward at the market. Sales DD looks inward at the sales function. GTM DD covers the whole revenue engine. Which one answers your question, and when you need more than one.
Twenty-three topics across five groups: what each covers, what good looks like, the failure mode we see most often, and how the assessment turns into a plan.
What separates a VCP a management team will run from one that sits on a shelf: sequencing by dependency, owners inside the business, and saying what stops.
What AI actually changes in a commercial engine, what it does not, what it means for diligence, and how to tell a real capability from a slide.
Five areas, the questions that matter in each, the red flags and what they actually signal, and how to turn a checklist into a prioritised plan.
Pricing moves EBITDA faster than any other commercial lever and is the least used. Where the value actually sits, why model and packaging beat rate rises, and how to move without breaking anything.
A commercial VDD chapter has to survive a buyer's own diligence. What buyers are actually underwriting, how to evidence the journey, and when to start.
Sales due diligence tests whether a company can actually sell: pipeline, methodology, conversion, team and RevOps. What it covers, what it delivers, and where its scope ends.
How to sequence commercial improvement across a five-year hold: what belongs in year one, what needs runway, and the cadence that stops a plan drifting.
