The eleven numbers: run the go to market audit yourself, with a value at which each one says stop
By Jānis Plūme, Founder, Outbound Pros · 2026-08-06
Quick answer
A go to market audit you run yourself is eleven numbers pulled in a fixed order, each with a value at which the audit stops and the answer is do not fund this. Deal size, win rate, slip rate, cycle length, meeting held to opportunity rate, show rate, positive reply rate on sends, addressable companies, sending capacity, weeks available, and existing open pipeline. An audit is a disqualification instrument. Pull the eleven, run the arithmetic, and check the disqualifier column before anybody builds a plan.
Outbound Pros sells a go to market audit and I run it. This page teaches the same work without us, because an audit that only exists as a paid engagement is one nobody can check. Outbound Pros runs this for 36 active clients, and a reader who runs the eleven and disqualifies themselves was never going to be a good client anyway.
What is a go to market audit actually for?
A go to market audit is a check on whether a plan is arithmetically possible before anyone is asked to execute it. Its one job is to find the number that makes the plan impossible, as early as possible, and no strategy workshop will do that for you.
Which eleven numbers do you pull, and in what order?
The eleven run from deal economics through funnel conversion to physical ceilings, because the earliest disqualifier is the cheapest to find. Stop at the first row that trips.
| # | Number | Where you get it | The audit stops when | What that disqualifies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Average deal size, segmented | Closed won, 12 months, by segment | Below what a human sales process can carry | Outbound entirely. The most common stop |
| 2 | Opportunity to close win rate | Past opportunities and their outcomes | You do not have one | Modelling itself. Build a sample by hand first |
| 3 | Slip rate | Deals that closed outside their period | You have never measured it | Nothing outright. Coverage stays understated |
| 4 | Sales cycle length | Created to closed won, median | It exceeds the period you are covering | Quarterly coverage. Move to a rolling window |
| 5 | Meeting held to opportunity rate | Held meetings that became opportunities | Held is not recorded separately from booked | The whole downstream model |
| 6 | Show rate | Meetings held divided by booked | It is near 50% | Funding more meetings. Fix the calendar first |
| 7 | Positive reply rate on sends | Positive replies divided by sends, per sequence | You are quoting a ratio as a rate | The volume plan, by two orders of magnitude |
| 8 | Addressable companies | Rebuilt without your buyer type and geography filters | Required touches exceed the market | The channel or the target. Not the effort |
| 9 | Sending or seat capacity | Mailboxes times a safe daily rate, or seats | Required volume cannot be bought in time | The timeline, at minimum |
| 10 | Weeks available | Board date, runway date, or the plan | Shorter than onboarding, warm up and one cycle | Outbound as the answer to this deadline |
| 11 | Existing open pipeline | CRM, with a staleness rule applied | It has not been de-staled | The size of the gap you are solving for |
Why is an audit a disqualification instrument rather than a discovery one?
An audit is a disqualification instrument because its only unique value is the ability to return "do not fund this". One that cannot is a sales call with a spreadsheet attached. The reason is structural: whoever runs the audit usually sells the execution, so a null result costs them the work. We are that party, so our defence is publishing the disqualifier column in enough detail that you can run it against us. Rows 1, 2 and 6 end at conclusions that cost us a client.
Row 7 ends more of my scoping calls than any other. A founder arrives with a plan built on a figure a previous vendor gave them, usually in the high single digits, called a positive reply rate. Almost every time it divides positive replies by replies received, not by emails sent. Same campaign, different fraction, two orders of magnitude apart, so the volume plan underneath is short by roughly a hundred times. Our benchmark for a sequence worth keeping is 0.5% to 1% on sends. Our fleet baseline sits near 0.05% of sends, derived from two published segment multiples rather than read off a dashboard, which is a distinction we make every time the figure appears. Neither is comparable to a ratio, and this site never prints one beside the other except to explain why. The difference between the two fractions gets the full treatment on its own page.
Row 6 is the one I have turned work down over. Where calendar discipline is broken, booked meetings die at roughly a 50% show rate, which halves the return on the channel and is invisible upstream. No copy change survives a booking process nobody owns.
What do you do when you cannot produce one of the eleven?
A missing number is a finding, not a blocker, and it is usually a more important finding than the number would have been. If nobody records it, the output is "instrument this", and no version of the plan works without it. If it is missing because you are pre revenue, create deals by hand and measure them, because a model built on estimated inputs produces false precision that gets quoted in a board meeting. If it is missing because it lives in a system nobody has access to, that is an organisational problem and it will break the plan later too.
Row 5 goes missing most often. Even with continuous instrumentation on our side of the engagement, meeting held to opportunity is the rate a new client most often cannot produce. Calendars record bookings automatically. Held meetings depend on a human updating a CRM field, which is the first thing to rot in a busy quarter.
How do you run the arithmetic once you have the eleven?
The arithmetic is six divisions and one multiplication, from revenue backwards to activity, followed by the ceiling checks.
- Revenue target divided by average deal size gives deals needed.
- Deals divided by win rate gives opportunities.
- Opportunities multiplied by deal size, adjusted for slippage, gives required pipeline.
- Opportunities divided by meeting held to opportunity rate gives meetings held.
- Meetings held divided by show rate gives meetings booked.
- Meetings booked divided by positive reply rate on sends gives required outreach volume.
- Check that volume against rows 8, 9 and 10. If it exceeds any, the plan is impossible rather than ambitious.
Step 3 is the one people re-derive badly, and how coverage comes out of win rate and slippage is worked through in full elsewhere on this site rather than repeated here.
Run step 6 twice, conservative and optimistic. If it only closes at the optimistic end, you do not have a plan. The channel mix decision moves that input by a multiple large enough to change the answer, and the segment measurement behind that claim, with its sends, its rate and its baseline multiple, is published by our sibling property multichannelpros.io. The calculator on this site runs the chain and the ceiling checks together if you would rather not build it in a spreadsheet.
What happens when the market ceiling stops the audit?
Row 8 stops more audits than any other ceiling, and it stops them in one division: required company touches per period against the companies that exist. If your model needs more touches than your market holds, the constraint is the market, not the team.
Three responses are legitimate: change the target, change the motion, or widen the market and re-run. The third is available more often than teams assume. Across the accounts we scope inside the group, clients underestimate their addressable market by 10 to 50x. One founder went from 2,000 prospects to 120,000 in about two minutes by adding adjacent buyer types and geographies he had assumed were out of scope. A market sized from a customer list describes who has already found you.
Government registers beat a vendor's default filters here. The US Census Bureau publishes firm counts by industry and size, and Eurostat publishes the equivalent in its structural business statistics. Rebuild the count once with your assumptions removed before you conclude the market is too small.
How long before this plan produces real pipeline?
Two of the components are measured and the range around them is our operating expectation, so here is the arithmetic in the open instead of a number you have to take on trust. Onboarding runs around 21 days: discovery and ICP definition, infrastructure, then sequences and lead lists. Domain warm up runs 4 to 6 weeks before you can send at real volume without wrecking sender reputation. Run those end to end and you get 7 to 9 weeks. They overlap partly, because warm up starts as soon as domains exist rather than waiting for the lists, and how much they overlap depends on how fast the client returns the approval round. We plan on 8 to 12 weeks to first real pipeline and treat first meaningful volume as landing around week 6 to 8, and both of those are our operating expectation rather than a measured distribution. We have not pulled a measured median from kickoff to first booked meeting across recent onboardings, and until we do, this section carries ranges and says so. A plan needing pipeline in six weeks is disqualified by that arithmetic, not by execution quality, which is what row 10 catches.
What happens inside those weeks is under-described. Every client approves the messaging and the lead lists before anything sends, one round, and that gate lands differently by motion. WideNET, our high volume angle testing across the full addressable market, produces lists nobody can review row by row, and clients rarely argue about them. Spearhead, the signal triggered motion on the hottest slice, produces a few hundred named accounts, and clients argue about those in detail. They should. That is the review where a founder tells you a logo is a current customer, a competitor, or an account their co-founder has worked for months. Budget a real week for it, because a rushed approval round is paid back as a burned account.
How does a self run audit compare to a paid one?
A self run audit trades depth of data for speed and independence, and for most companies it is enough to reach a fund or do not fund decision.
| Self run, this method | Vendor run GTM audit | Strategy consulting | No audit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time to an answer | An afternoon | Days to weeks | Weeks to months | None |
| Can it return "do not fund this" | Yes, by design | Only if it publishes disqualifiers | Rarely, the scope is strategy | No |
| Main risk | Your inputs are flattering | Whoever runs it sells the execution | Findings nobody can act on | A lost quarter |
If you are weighing named providers rather than categories, comparing providers honestly belongs after the eleven clear, not before.
What this audit does not cover, and who should skip it
The audit covers arithmetic and stops there. It tells you whether a plan is possible, not whether it is a good idea.
Deliverability, domain setup, copywriting and list build are execution and belong to the parent agency. Cadence and spacing belong to multichannelpros.io. LinkedIn ceilings belong to linkedpros.io and feed row 9. Whether AI assistants can find and quote what you publish belongs to inboundpros.io. We do not run cold calling, so if calling is central to your motion, row 9 needs a capacity line you will have to add yourself.
Three groups should skip this. Pre revenue companies have no win rate and no deal size, so every output carries false precision. B2C, e-commerce and low ACV self serve sit outside the assumption that a human closes a considered purchase. Teams that will not instrument cannot produce rows 5, 6 and 7 honestly. There are no pricing figures on this site either, because a cost quoted before deal size, market and cycle length are known is anchoring rather than information.
Frequently asked questions
What should a go to market audit include?
Eleven numbers in a fixed order, each with a value at which the audit stops: deal size, win rate, slip rate, cycle length, meeting held to opportunity rate, show rate, positive reply rate on sends, addressable companies, capacity, weeks available and existing pipeline. An audit that never names the values at which it stops cannot return a no.
Can I run a GTM audit without a CRM?
Partly. Deal size, addressable companies, capacity and weeks available come from a spreadsheet, a business register and your own infrastructure. The rates and existing pipeline need deal history, and if they are missing the output is to instrument first, which is a finding rather than a failure.
How often should we re-run this?
Once a quarter, and after any change to deal size, segment or channel mix. In our own book churn runs 3 to 5% monthly, so the segment mix behind a blended average is materially different two quarters later even when nothing looks like it changed.
What is the difference between this and the audit Outbound Pros sells?
Scope and inputs. This method uses numbers you already have and returns a fund or do not fund decision. The paid version adds market data, a rebuilt company count, a segmented list and a volume plan, and comes back with campaigns rather than a spreadsheet. The disqualifier column is the same in both.
How long before outbound produces real pipeline?
Onboarding runs around 21 days and domain warm up runs 4 to 6 weeks, which is 7 to 9 weeks end to end before the two are overlapped. We plan on 8 to 12 weeks to first real pipeline and treat first meaningful volume as landing around week 6 to 8, and both of those are our operating expectation rather than a measured distribution. A deadline shorter than that disqualifies outbound as the answer to it, which is row 10 in the table.
We are entering a new market with no history. Which numbers do we borrow?
Deal size, cycle length, win rate and addressable companies get re-estimated, not inherited, and the win rate is the trap. A team entering a new geography carries across a rate earned on warm reputation and references that do not travel. It sits at step 2, so the error multiplies downstream. We have no measured win rate delta between a home market and a new one to hand you, so this is a principle rather than a figure: run the plan at a deliberately reduced win rate and see whether it still closes.
Run the eleven against your own numbers
The calculator runs the chain from revenue backwards to required sends at both rates, with the ceiling checks applied. Free, no signup, nothing stored.
Same arithmetic as this page, with the market, capacity and calendar ceilings checked at the end.
If all eleven clear and you would rather hand the work to an operator, that is the done for you version at Outbound Pros, which comes back with segments and a volume plan instead of a spreadsheet. If a number stopped the audit, fix that number rather than hiring anybody. The rules that take over once a campaign is live are a separate question, and they are published with their denominators.
AllboundPros is part of the Outbound Pros group, operated by Jānis Plūme. We recommend Outbound Pros on this site and we own it.
Last updated: 2026-08-06
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