The year-end GTM audit for B2B SaaS: 15 checks before you plan 2027

Every November we end up in the same conversation with B2B SaaS founders. They show us next year’s ARR target, and the target quietly assumes this year worked.

Usually it did not. Somewhere between a lead arriving and a renewal landing, revenue went missing, and nobody went looking for it because everyone was busy hitting their own number. Marketing hit MQLs. Sales hit demo volume. Customer success hit CSAT. ARR stayed flat.

By leak I mean something specific. A lead you paid for that nobody called back. A deal that reached proposal and went quiet. A customer who signed in March, stopped logging in by June, and still counts in your ARR today. None of it appears as a line in your P&L.

So here is a GTM audit to run before you write the number. Fifteen checks: five on leads, five on sales, five on retention.

They are grouped that way because, in B2B SaaS, the symptom and the cause are almost never in the same place. A retention problem looks like a lead problem: you keep needing new logos just to stand still. A targeting problem looks like a close-rate problem: your reps are running demos for people who were never going to buy. Fix the thing that looks broken, and the number does not move.

The useful signal is not how many checks you fail. It is which section they fall in. Four failures inside retention is a diagnosis. Four failures spread evenly across leads, sales and retention usually means you cannot see your own numbers, which is a different and more urgent problem.

Leads: are you paying to attract people who never buy?

1. Do your recent closed-won customers look like your recent leads?

Pull your last ten closed-won accounts and your last fifty leads. Compare them on size, industry and role.

If they do not match, your targeting has drifted and you are paying to attract people who will not buy. This is the single most common leak we find, and more spend makes it worse rather than better.

Ten minutes. Needs your CRM.

2. What happens in the first 48 hours after a lead arrives?

Not what the process says. What actually happened to the last twenty.

Response speed does more for conversion than most campaigns do, and it costs nothing to fix.

Across 939 B2B SaaS companies, the average first response to an inbound lead is 47 hours. Leads contacted inside five minutes close at 32%. After 24 hours, 12%.

Same leads. Nearly three times the close rate, for being quicker.

If you cannot tell from your CRM how long the last twenty waited, that is itself the finding.

3. How many channels are you running, and how many are working?

List them. Then write the number of customers each produced this year.

Four channels at a quarter of the effort each gives you four things that almost worked, and no way to tell which one deserved more.

Most channels need a stretch of consistent effort before they produce anything. Split your attention four ways and none of them get there. Pick two, give them everything, and by March you will at least know whether they work.

4. Do you have a baseline for how you look in AI search?

If a buyer asks a model for options in your category, are you named?

Most companies have never checked, which means they cannot tell whether anything they do about it works. 81% of B2B buyers now use an LLM somewhere in their buying journey, though only 17 to 21% say those tools influenced the decision. Worth knowing where you stand before the second number moves.

Twenty minutes. Ten buyer-style prompts, written down.

5. Are your money pages actually reachable?

Run a link check across your site. Look specifically at the pages a buyer lands on before they contact you.

We found three dead internal links on a single post this year, on a page that was supposed to send people somewhere. It had been broken for months.

#TCCRecommends: if your failures sit in checks 1 to 3, start with the signals that separate a real buyer from activity.

Sales: where do your deals actually die?

6. Is your sales process written down?

Not the CRM stage names. The criteria: what has to be true before a deal moves from one stage to the next, and who decides.

If your reps still need you in the room before a deal progresses, the process lives in your head and nobody else can run it.

7. Where do deals stall, and is it always the same place?

Pull every deal that went quiet this year and note the stage it died in.

If they all die at the same stage, that is a process problem, and process problems are fixable. If they die everywhere, you are probably selling to the wrong people.

8. How many people are you talking to inside each account?

Count the contacts on your last ten open deals.

B2B SaaS purchases involve six to ten people. If your deals have one or two contacts, you are relying on a champion to sell internally on your behalf, using material they do not have. That is the problem we covered in selling to six people and talking to one.

9. Does every demo end with the next step booked?

Check the last twenty demos. Did each one end with a specific date in a calendar, or with “I’ll follow up next week”?

“I’ll follow up next week” means nobody owns the next move, so usually nobody makes it. A good demo buys you a few days of interest, and only a date in a calendar survives them. The other reasons are in why good demos do not close.

10. Do you know why you lose deals?

Not “price” or “timing”, which are what people say rather than what happened. Pick five lost deals from this year and see whether anyone recorded a real reason.

If nothing was recorded, you have been making positioning and pricing decisions on guesswork all year.

#TCCRecommends: if most of your failures are in this section, the fix usually starts with writing the process down. We set out how to build one from your own won and lost deals in the sales playbook post.

Retention: how much ARR is leaving quietly?

11. What is your first-90-day churn rate?

Most first-year churn lands in the first 90 days, and the largest single share falls inside month one. All of it happens before a renewal conversation ever takes place.

If that number is high, the leak is in onboarding and activation, not in the product and not in customer success. It is also partly a sales problem, because it is decided by who you sold to.

#TCCRecommends: How to Improve Customer Onboarding in SaaS?

12. Which accounts have gone quiet?

Pull login or usage data for your customer base and sort by the last 60 days.

Customers decide to leave long before they tell you, and the first sign is silence rather than a complaint.

13. Is your net revenue retention getting better or worse?

Not one blended number. Group your customers by the quarter they signed up, then work out net revenue retention for each of the last four groups separately.

Those groups are what people mean by cohorts, and they matter because customers who signed in January behave differently from customers who signed in October. Blend them and you see an average. Separate them and you see a direction. If retention falls from one group to the next, something has changed in who you are signing, and a single number will never show you that.

14. Who is responsible for your existing customers?

Name them. If the answer is “everyone” or “the founder”, nobody does.

This matters more as you grow. Accounts churn quietly when no single person is accountable for noticing.

15. Can you see every renewal date for the next two quarters?

If pulling that list takes more than five minutes, you are not managing renewals. You are reacting to them.

#TCCRecommends: retention failures are the expensive ones because they compound. Start with what actually drives renewals.

What do your failed checks tell you to fix?

Count your failures by section.

Mostly leads. You have a targeting or channel problem. Adding budget before fixing it makes the leak bigger.

Mostly sales. You have a process problem, and it is almost certainly that criteria are undocumented. This is the cheapest of the three to fix and usually the fastest to show results.

Mostly retention. This is the expensive one, because it compounds. It also disguises itself as a lead problem, since you keep needing new customers just to stand still.

Spread evenly across all three. Usually not three problems. Usually one data problem: you cannot answer the questions because the information is not being captured. Fix that first, then run this again in a quarter.

If you could not answer five or more of these, the finding is not that your engine is broken. It is that you cannot see it. That is a different and more urgent problem.

Why audit all three parts together?

Most year-end checklists are split by team. Marketing’s list, sales’ list, customer success’ list.

That split hides the one thing you need to see: the problem is rarely where the symptom is. A sloppy sales process can show up as churn eighteen months later, long after anyone would think to connect the two.

Leads, sales and retention are one engine. When one part leaks, the whole thing stalls, and the symptom rarely appears where the cause is. We set out how the three connect in our guide to GTM strategy for SaaS.

Run the checks in all three sections even if you are confident about one of them. The confident section is where we usually find it.

Common questions