Why I Stopped Trusting PE GTM Dashboards (And What I Use Instead)
I’ve sat in five portfolio company board meetings this quarter where the GTM update was a 20-slide deck of green arrows and hockey-stick projections. Each time, I asked the same question: How do we know this is actually working? The answer was always some version of "the CRO says so" or "we’re tracking pipeline."
Here’s the problem: pipeline is a lagging indicator. By the time you see the dip, you’ve already burned 6 months of runway. And "the CRO says so" doesn’t survive a leadership change or an LP audit.
I built Andru’s Revenue Readiness Index because I got tired of flying blind. It’s not a silver bullet—it’s a diagnostic. It forces you to answer three questions before you spend another dollar on GTM:
- Do we actually know who our best-fit buyers are? (Not who we wish they were.)
- Can our sales team articulate value in the buyer’s language? (Not our jargon.)
- Are our deals stalling for the same reasons? (Or are we just blaming the market?)
The index doesn’t predict the future. It just tells you whether your GTM engine is capable of hitting the plan you’ve already sold to the board. And unlike a consulting deck, it updates in real time.
Here’s what changed for me: I stopped arguing about what to do in GTM and started measuring whether it was working. The first company where I deployed this cut their CAC by 30% in 90 days—not because we had better ideas, but because we caught misalignment before it cost us deals.
The hard truth? Most PE portfolios aren’t instrumented to answer these questions. If you’re an operating partner and you can’t pull a comparable GTM health score across your holdings in the next 10 minutes, you’re flying blind too.
I’m not here to sell you a framework. I’m here to tell you that the frameworks you’re using now are probably lying to you.