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Go-to-Market Health Check: How to Run One (and What It Reveals)

A go-to-market health check is a structured read of whether each part of your go-to-market is working, and where revenue is leaking. Done well, it answers one question precisely: of everything in our revenue engine, what is actually capping growth right now, and what is it costing us?

The trouble is that most things sold as a "health check" do not answer that at all. They are vague qualitative checklists, a consultant walking your funnel and noting impressions, that produce a list of things that could be better and no way to rank them. A real health check is different in kind. It reads every GTM function, establishes what is capping growth, and quantifies the leakage in euros. That is how an engagement with Caugia starts: the first weeks go to reading the motion with your team, run by an operator, not a consultant. Caugia is an operator practice, not software.

What a credible health check actually measures

A health check is only as good as the model behind it. If it inspects a few functions and skips the rest, it cannot tell you which one is the real constraint, because the constraint might be in the part it never looked at. A credible check reads the whole system. Tom reads it across twelve areas, the functions that, together, determine how much revenue your go-to-market converts and keeps:

• Strategy and leadership. Whether the market, segment and value proposition are sharp enough to pull demand.
• Market intelligence. Whether you understand the market deeply enough to make structural bets.
• Product marketing. Whether value is articulated in a way the market understands and Sales can deliver.
• Pricing and packaging. Whether you are capturing the value you create, or leaving it on the table.
• Product readiness. Whether the product actually supports the GTM motion you are running.
• Enablement. Whether teams have the skills, content and coaching to execute consistently.
• Demand generation. Whether enough qualified pipeline is being created to feed the target.
• Sales execution. Whether there is enough pipeline coverage, and whether the team converts it.
• Revenue operations and systems. Whether the system of record and the forecasting are trustworthy enough to decide on.
• Customer success and retention. Whether the revenue you win actually stays, or leaks back out through churn.
• Expansion and net revenue retention. Whether existing accounts grow, or merely renew flat.
• Alignment and governance. Whether teams have the structure and cadence to stay aligned as you scale.

The point of reading all of them, rather than the two or three a given team worries about most, is that what is capping growth is rarely where attention already is. It is usually the function nobody is watching.

Checklist health check vs structured diagnostic

The word "health check" covers two very different things. Knowing which one you are getting is most of the value.

Both can be called a health check. Only one of them ends with a decision you can act on the same week.

How to run one

Whether you do it by hand or with a tool, a health check that produces a real answer follows the same four steps:

• Score every function, not a favourite few. Use one consistent model across the whole go-to-market, so nothing is graded more harshly just because it is more visible.
• Calibrate against benchmarks. A score in isolation is meaningless. It only becomes a signal when it is calibrated against public benchmarks, so a given score means the same thing for you as for the next company.
• Find what is capping growth. Rarely everything at once, and rarely one thing either: usually two or three functions set the pace for the whole system. Identify them, instead of treating twenty weaknesses as equally urgent.
• Quantify the leakage in euros. Put a number on what the constraint is costing, so the fix can be ranked against everything else competing for the team's time.

The first three steps are where most do-it-yourself health checks fall down. Scoring the whole system consistently is laborious, calibrating against credible benchmarks is hard without a dataset, and working out what is capping growth requires a model of how the functions interact. That is the work the first weeks of an engagement do with you.

What the output should look like

The output of a real health check is not a 40‑slide deck. It is a short list and a number: what is capping growth right now, what is missing, what is broken, what fixing it is worth in euros, and how your scores sit against benchmarks. Everything else is supporting detail. If a health check ends with a long list of generic recommendations and no ranking, it has described your go-to-market without diagnosing it. A diagnosis tells you what to do first.

How Caugia runs the health check

Caugia is an operator practice, not software. The first weeks of an engagement go to reading the motion with your team across the twelve areas above: where revenue is made and lost, what is missing, what is broken, and what each leak is worth in euros, calibrated against public benchmarks rather than expert opinion. The output is a board-grade read-out your team helped build, so nobody has to be sold on it afterwards.

Then the plan, with owners, which Tom Meijer, fractional GTM operator, runs with your team one to three days a week, reviewed weekly against the number agreed up front. The health check finds what is capping growth; the operator makes sure the organisation actually clears it. It is rarely one thing, and usually something has to be built.

When nobody can name what is capping growth, the engagement starts there, and the first thing the read tells you is whether the problem is where you think it is.