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Bombyll

By the time a deal reaches commercial diligence, the pitch deck has already done its job. What diligence teams actually test is whether the revenue engine behind the deck is real — repeatable, documented, and independent of any one person.

Beyond the deck

Growth rate gets you the meeting. What determines the outcome is whether that growth came from a repeatable system or from a handful of founder relationships that won't transfer to new ownership.

The five things diligence actually tests

Pipeline hygiene: are stage definitions consistent, or does every deal get manually reinterpreted?

Forecast accuracy: does the number the team commits to actually land, quarter over quarter?

Customer concentration and retention: is growth broad-based, or dependent on a handful of accounts?

Founder dependency: would win rates hold if the founder stepped out of the sales process entirely?

Unit economics by segment: not just blended CAC and LTV, but whether the numbers hold up broken out by customer type.

Why most companies fail quietly

Rarely does a company fail diligence loudly. More often, valuation quietly erodes because the answers to these questions come back vague, inconsistent, or founder-dependent — and the buyer prices in the risk of rebuilding the system themselves post-close.

Preparing before you're asked

The companies that come through diligence cleanest didn't build their GTM Operating System for the raise — they built it because it made the business run better, starting with a diagnostic, not a deck, and the documentation happened to be diligence-ready as a side effect. That's the order that actually works.

Preparing for a raise or exit?
Take the GTM Readiness Assessment