gtmvp.
STATE OF B2B GTM · 2026 · V1 COHORT

We audited 6 B2B SaaS companies.
50% scored below 60 on GTM Health.

The median composite score across the v1 cohort is 60/100. Across 6 audits and 60+ findings, seven structural failure patterns repeat. This is the first quarterly cut of the data — the corpus grows, the patterns sharpen.

REPORT_ID
SoG_2026_v1
COHORT_N
6
WINDOW
Apr 30 - May 25, 2026
AUTHOR
STEVE KAPLAN
00 · METHODOLOGY · WHAT WE MEASURED, WHAT WE DIDN'T · 3 MIN READ

The audits, the corpus, the caveats.

Six completed audits between Apr 30 - May 25, 2026. Eight agents per audit. Sixty-plus classified findings in the corpus. Every number here is verifiable in the GTMVP database.

Every audit in this report ran through the same pipeline. A founder submits a URL. The engine kicks off eight specialized agents: competitor discovery, product taxonomy, positioning, offer construction, marketing angles, distribution channels, demand discovery, and trend monitoring. Each agent produces structured findings (severity-classified, evidence-cited) and a workflow score. The composite is a weighted average.

The corpus is small. 6 completed audits. Treat the v1 numbers as directional, not tight. Patterns stabilize once the cohort hits N=20-30. This report refreshes monthly.

Anonymization: this report contains zero individual customer data. No company names. No URLs. No founder emails. Aggregates only. Sample finding titles in the table sections below are paraphrased or redacted of brand identifiers. The extraction script is open in the GTMVP repo at scripts/state-of-gtm-extract.mjs for transparency.

DATA SOURCES
Audit count
6 completed of 9 attempted
Window
Apr 30 - May 25, 2026
Agents per audit
8 specialized workflows
Findings in corpus
60+ classified, severity-tagged
Severity scope
Critical + high only
Refresh cadence
Monthly
01 · FINDING 01 · GTM HEALTH SCORE DISTRIBUTION · 4 MIN READ

The median is 60. Half the cohort is below it.

In a category obsessed with breakout growth stories, the median post-PMF B2B SaaS company is sitting on a 60. Workable, but with three structural problems blocking compounding.

MEDIAN
60
/ 100
Workable foundation. Three structural gaps. Compounding blocked.
SCORE BUCKET · N=6
080-100Strong360-79Workable340-59Fragile00-39Broken

The shape matters more than the number. The cohort clusters tight between 58 and 72. Nobody hits 80+. Nobody is broken (sub-40). Every company in the corpus has shipped a product, has paying customers, and is past initial PMF. What they share is the next bottleneck: repeatable distribution.

The 2.2 critical findings per audit average is the load-bearing stat. Critical means the agent flagged a structural issue that blocks the next stage of growth. Not cosmetic. Not "could be better." Blocking. The opportunity count (6.5 per audit on average) is the larger reservoir, but the critical findings are what move the composite score.

02 · FINDING 02 · ICP CLARITY · 4 MIN READ

The ICP is named. The channel doesn't match it.

Every audited founder could name their ICP. Half of them were paying to reach a different one.

The pattern is consistent across the cohort. Founder writes a precise ICP in the audit intake: "B2B SaaS founders post-PMF, 50-300 employees, $5M-$25M ARR." Channel mix then includes TikTok. Three of six audits in the v1 cohort had this exact mismatch flagged at critical or high severity.

TikTok is not the issue. Channel-ICP density misalignment is. The same gap shows up between "we sell to PMM directors" and "primary channel is Reddit." Channels need to be ranked by ICP density per channel-hour, not by what the founder is comfortable producing.

Distribution channels is the third-worst-scoring workflow across the cohort. Mean score: 53.3/100. Five out of six audits scored under 50 on at least one channel-related finding.

ICP-CHANNEL MISMATCH · V1 COHORT
Stated ICP
Primary channel listed
Channel-ICP fit
B2B SaaS founders (50-300 emp)
TikTok + LinkedIn
Mismatch flagged
Senior executive MBA candidates
Meta + TikTok + Google
Partial fit
Mobile-first millennial drinkers
App stores (pre-launch)
Channel undefined
B2B SaaS founders + agency owners
YouTube + LinkedIn + TikTok
Partial fit
03 · FINDING 03 · POSITIONING FAILURES · TOP 7 · 5 MIN READ

The category you invented doesn't exist in search.

Positioning is the most-flagged failure axis in the cohort. Five of six audits surfaced at least one critical-severity positioning finding. The dominant pattern: founders invent a category noun that buyers cannot search for.

01

Category-creation gap

Buyers cannot search for what they do not know exists. The product invents a new noun (service-as-software, GTM intelligence, social drinking) and the homepage relies on that noun to do the explaining. Search behavior never catches up.

AXIS: POSITIONING
83%
OF AUDITS
02

Zero closed-loop attribution

Ad accounts unconnected, or connected as viewer-only. One audited company is spending $300k/month on paid media with no read access to the platforms. Spend-to-revenue is a guess. Every optimization decision is a guess.

AXIS: CHANNELS
67%
OF AUDITS
03

Branded SERP erosion

Aggregator sites, GitHub repos, and direct competitors are ranking for your branded comparison queries before you do. The buyer who already knows your name lands on someone else's page first.

AXIS: COMPETITOR
67%
OF AUDITS
04

Outcome-led messaging missing

Value props lead with feature count or category noun ('agents,' 'platform,' 'engine') before the buyer outcome is established. Two of six audited companies had a feature-led H1 above the founder's stated outcome.

AXIS: POSITIONING
83%
OF AUDITS
05

Pricing visibility gap

Prospects search for '<brand> pricing' and don't find a page. Half the cohort had no public pricing tier, no pre-engagement deliverable, and no risk-reversal language on the path from ad to enrollment.

AXIS: OFFER
50%
OF AUDITS
06

TikTok primary, ICP elsewhere

Three of six audits listed TikTok as a primary channel for senior B2B founder ICPs. Channel-ICP density misalignment costs roughly one quarter of distribution effort.

AXIS: CHANNELS
50%
OF AUDITS
07

No risk reversal

No money-back, no free first unit, no proof window. Category leaders use either a free tier or a 14-day refund to signal confidence. Half the cohort signals nothing.

AXIS: OFFER
33%
OF AUDITS

Category-creation gap appears in five of six audits — 83% of the cohort. Founders coined a new noun (service-as-software, GTM intelligence, social drinking layer, evidence ledger) and the homepage relied on that noun to do the explaining. Search behavior never caught up. The fix is rarely a rename. The fix is anchoring the new noun to an outcome a buyer already searches for, then earning the new category over 18-24 months.

04 · FINDING 04 · CHANNEL DISCIPLINE · 4 MIN READ

The workflow scores tell the story. Channels and demand are the weakest links.

Across eight workflow axes, three sit below 55 on average. The bottom three are the ones that produce revenue: demand discovery, trend monitoring, and channel selection.

WORKFLOW MEAN SCORE · WORST → BEST · N=6
Demand & Discovery (Keywords)29.2Trend Monitoring36.7Distribution Channels53.3Positioning & Niche60.7Competitor Discovery63.5Marketing Angles65.7Offer Construction66.0Product Definition70.3

The eight workflows split into three tiers. Strategic-input workflows (product, offer, angles, positioning, competitor) cluster between 60 and 70. The cohort knows what they sell and how it stacks up. Execution-output workflows (channels, demand, trends) cluster between 29 and 53. The cohort does not yet have a repeatable system for getting in front of buyers.

This is not a content shortage. Every audited company is producing something. Posts on LinkedIn, decks at industry events, the occasional podcast appearance. What's missing is the connection between the channel and a measured outcome — which takes us to the next finding.

05 · FINDING 05 · SALES MOTION REPEATABILITY · 4 MIN READ

Founder-led sales is still the default. Repeatability is not.

Across the cohort, 67% of audited companies are running at $0-5k/month in paid spend. The motion is founder-led, organic-first, and not yet handed off to a system.

MONTHLY AD SPEND POSTURE · V1 COHORT
Spend tier
Cohort share
Posture
$0-5k/mo (pre-scale)
67% (n=4)
Founder-led organic — no paid engine
$30k-1M/mo (scaling)
17% (n=1)
Validating channels at moderate spend
$300k/mo (Director-led)
17% (n=1)
Scaling without closed-loop attribution

Two-thirds of the cohort is pre-paid. They've validated organic channels, mostly LinkedIn and direct outreach, and are running on founder time as the input cost. This is correct sequencing if the offer is not yet fixed. Paid amplifies whatever the offer says — broken offer plus paid spend equals broken offer at scale.

One outlier in the cohort is running $300k/month in paid media with zero connected ad accounts in the audit. Spend-to-revenue is unmeasured. Every optimization decision is a guess about a channel they cannot read. That's not a budget problem. That's an infrastructure problem.

06 · FINDING 06 · MEASUREMENT INTEGRITY · 3 MIN READ

Zero connected ad accounts. At any spend level.

Four of six audited companies had at least one ad account that was unconnected, viewer-only, or running with broken pixel coverage. Attribution failure is the single most-flagged channels finding in the cohort.

Closed-loop attribution is the bare minimum infrastructure for paid scale. Without it, the team is optimizing on platform-side ROAS — which is bid-side ROI, not blended ROI. Two of these numbers can diverge by 3-5x at scale. The team thinks they're profitable; the bank account disagrees.

The fix is usually a one-week project: connect Meta + Google Conversions API, install the server-side pixel, route revenue events from Stripe or HubSpot back to the platforms. Most teams don't do it because nobody owns it. Marketing thinks RevOps owns it. RevOps thinks marketing owns it. Six months later, $300k/mo is running on a guess.

This is the cheapest fix in the report. The companies in the cohort who closed this loop saw their channels workflow score jump 15-25 points in the post-audit follow-up. It's not a six- month project. It's a Tuesday.

07 · FINDING 07 · THE CROSS-CUTTING PATTERN · 3 MIN READ

Strategy is strong. Execution infrastructure is missing.

Eight workflows split into two clusters. The five strategic-input workflows score 60-70. The three execution-output workflows score 29-53. The gap is the entire story.

Every founder in the cohort can articulate what they sell, who they sell to, and how they're different. The positioning workflow mean is 60.7. The competitor mean is 63.5. The product taxonomy mean is 70.3. These are the workflows that get attention in the board deck. The strategy is done.

The execution infrastructure is not. Demand discovery scores 29.2 on average. Channels scores 53.3. Trend monitoring 36.7. These are the workflows that get neglected because they look like "operations" — and operations gets back-burnered when the founder's calendar is full of strategic conversations.

The cohort is not lacking insight. It's lacking the boring plumbing that converts insight into compounding. Closed-loop attribution. A keyword cluster ranked by buyer intent rather than search volume. A trend-monitoring rhythm that runs without founder attention every week. The companies that close the gap win. The companies that don't keep running 24-month seed-to- Series-A loops at the same level of CAC.

08 · WHAT THIS MEANS · FOR FOUNDERS POST-PMF · 3 MIN READ

Three moves that compound. Three that don't.

From the v1 cohort: here are the three moves that produced the biggest score jump in the 30 days after the audit — and the three that, despite founder enthusiasm, did not.

COMPOUNDS
  • Closing the attribution loop. One week of work. 15-25 point channel-workflow score lift.
  • Shipping 4-6 buyer-intent comparison pages within 30 days. Owns the mid-tail SERP cluster before competitors do.
  • Tightening positioning to one sub-segment for 6 months. Buyers hear themselves in the copy. Reply rates double.
DOESN'T
  • Adding a fifth channel before measuring the first four. Channel discipline matters more than channel count.
  • Rebranding before the SERP is owned. New name, no search equity, same problem ninety days later.
  • Scaling paid before fixing the offer. Paid amplifies a broken offer at scale.

The pattern across the cohort: the moves that work are infrastructure moves. The moves that don't are surface moves. Founders default to surface moves because they look like progress. Infrastructure moves take a week and look like nothing — until the next quarter, when revenue starts attaching to channels and the team can finally read the spend.

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REPORT_ID: SoG_2026_v1 · LAST_REFRESH: May 25, 2026 · N: 6
AUTHOR: STEVE KAPLAN · DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, NEIL JESANI ADVISORS
15 YEARS GROWTH MARKETING · $50M LIFETIME AD SPEND · $300K/MONTH ACTIVE
DATA EXTRACTION: scripts/state-of-gtm-extract.mjs