The Pre-Series A
GTM Audit Checklist

Ready looks like: Every lead, contact, and deal lives in one CRM with consistent stages and required fields. No shadow spreadsheets, no deals living in a rep's inbox. You can pull an accurate pipeline in under a minute.

If the CRM is a mess, every dollar of ad spend flows into a system that can't tell you what it produced. You'll be flying blind at exactly the moment volume goes up.

Ready looks like: Every meaningful touchpoint — form fills, content downloads, ad clicks, events — maps to a CRM contact and deal. You can say which channels created pipeline, not just clicks.

Without attribution you can't tell a working channel from a lucky month. You'll double down on the wrong spend and starve the channel that was actually working.

Ready looks like: You can describe your ideal customer with enough precision — segment, size, trigger, buyer role — to brief a media buyer or SDR on day one. Your last handful of best-fit wins share obvious, nameable traits.

A fuzzy ICP means broad targeting, low relevance, and high CAC. Paid amplifies precision; if there's no precision to amplify, you're just paying to reach the wrong people faster.

Ready looks like: You have a positioning statement and value props that prospects repeat back to you. Cold outreach and landing pages use the same language, and it's language your buyers actually use — validated, not guessed.

If the message doesn't land organically, paid traffic won't fix it — it just puts a weak message in front of more people at a price. Message-market fit precedes media spend.

Ready looks like: A prospect can understand what they get, what it costs, and why it's worth it without a 30-minute call. Your offer converts in real conversations at a rate you'd be comfortable scaling.

A confusing offer kills conversion after the click. You'll pay for the traffic and lose it at the moment of decision — the most expensive place to leak.

Ready looks like: You have dedicated landing pages that match your ICP and offer, with a single clear action and a conversion rate you've actually measured — not your homepage doing double duty.

Sending paid traffic to a generic or unmeasured page wastes the click. Every point of landing-page conversion you're missing multiplies your effective CAC.

Ready looks like: Discovery questions, qualification criteria, objection responses, and the demo narrative are written down — not living only in the founder's head. A new hire could run a credible first call from the doc.

If the motion isn't documented, more leads just overwhelm a process only one person can run. You can't scale a conversation that lives in your head.

Ready looks like: Every new lead hits a defined sequence — cadence, channels, and timing — that runs whether or not someone remembers. Speed-to-lead is measured and fast.

Most paid leads are lost to slow or inconsistent follow-up, not bad targeting. You'll pay premium prices for leads and let them go cold in the inbox.

Ready looks like: Marketing and sales agree on what a qualified lead is (MQL/SQL), how it's routed, and what happens next. Leads don't fall through the gap between the two teams.

A broken handoff means paid leads pile up unworked while both teams blame each other. Volume exposes the seam — and widens it.

Ready looks like: A recurring weekly review of pipeline, conversion, and spend against a small set of leading indicators — with someone accountable for acting on what it shows.

Without a weekly rhythm, a spend problem takes a full quarter to surface. By the time the dashboard tells you, the runway is already gone.