Business model audit

Many B2B growth plans fail because the business model gets less scrutiny than the campaign creative. I have seen campaigns look perfect on paper yet fizzle in market because the underlying business model leaked value.

A fast audit before any spend reveals those gaps while they are cheap to fix. Since 2014 I have run these audits for clients ranging from seed stage SaaS firms to global marketplaces. The pattern is always the same. Three or four mis-aligned assumptions hide in plain sight, yet once exposed they take less than a week to repair.

The audit fits inside one morning and uses information you already hold in your CRM, analytics and customer notes. No consultant is required. You only need focus and a willingness to confront uncomfortable data.

In this chapter I walk through four steps that lock your model before you touch the ad budget. Each section ends with a bridge so you keep momentum to the next task. We start with the ideal customer profile because every later decision rests on knowing exactly who buys and why.

Open your deal list for the past year and isolate every customer that renewed or expanded. Export their firmographic data so you can sort by industry, headcount, funding stage and tool stack.

Look for clusters. You may discover that bootstrapped software vendors with ten to fifty staff adopt faster than venture backed firms. Buying might also spike after a specific trigger such as a compliance deadline.

Write a provisional profile that lists the observable traits, the common trigger and the success metric these customers chase. Avoid aspirational language. Stick to data you can filter against when you build targeting later.

With the buyer clearly described you can now shape a promise that speaks only to them. That promise is the focus of the next section.

Positioning compresses your value into one sharp sentence that anyone at the company can repeat. I draft it using the formula: We help [profile] achieve [outcome] by [unique approach].

Test the sentence with five existing customers on a brief call. If they finish it for you, the wording is working. If they pause or suggest edits, refine until it lands instantly.

The same sentence becomes the backbone of ads, decks and sales outreach. Using one statement across channels builds memory faster and avoids internal debates over wording.

Once the line resonates you must check that every team uses it consistently. That alignment is the focus of the next section.

Gather leaders from marketing, sales, customer success and product in one thirty minute call. Ask each person to describe the product in under thirty seconds.

Record the phrases and compare them against the positioning sentence you finalised. Any drift signals future friction in the funnel.

Next inspect the hand-off between teams. Does sales receive lead context such as use case and urgency tag? Does success return churn reasons or expansion triggers to marketing?

When the narrative and the data loop match we can model the funnel numbers with confidence. Those numbers make up the next section.

Start with raw counts for last month: website visits, demo requests, qualified opportunities and signed deals. Calculate step conversions and note your average deal size and gross margin.

Build a simple spreadsheet that links spend to traffic, traffic to deals and deals to payback period. Adjust the conversion inputs to create best, realistic and worst cases.

If the worst case payback extends beyond your cash runway you know the budget risks. Improve the weakest conversion or reduce spend until the model stays within runway.

With assumptions tested and stress limits noted, you can decide whether to launch now or fix leaks first. We will wrap up with a quick recap and next steps.

A ninety minute audit secures four foundations: precise buyer profile, sharp positioning, cross-team alignment and robust funnel maths. Together they stop marketing euros leaking into mismatched leads and endless hand-offs.

I have seen teams triple return on ad spend after making these fixes before launching creative. The changes were usually small, such as pruning two personas or tightening a value message.

Block a morning next week, follow the steps and list every risk you uncover. Patch what you can in days, budget for larger repairs and launch growth experiments with clear eyes. The small investment now will save a much larger cheque when scale magnifies every flaw.