How This Diagnostic Works

What We Measure

The diagnostic assesses your GTM system across six dimensions, chosen because each one independently predicts whether a senior GTM hire will succeed or fail in your environment.

1. 1

   ICP and Targeting - Whether your ideal customer profile is validated and signal-led, or assumed and stale.

2. 2

   Messaging and Narrative - Whether your messaging reflects what buyers actually think and say.

3. 3

   Pipeline and Conversion - Whether your pipeline is healthy and your conversion patterns are understood.

4. 4

   Team Structure and Role Design - Whether roles are designed around the system, or built reactively around available people.

5. 5

   Data and Feedback Loops - Whether you have reliable data and active mechanisms to learn from what's working.

6. 6

   AI and System Readiness - Whether AI is embedded in your operating model, or bolted onto an unchanged one.

Each dimension is assessed through three single-construct questions designed to measure one thing precisely. Six dimensions × three questions per dimension = 18 questions total. The full diagnostic takes under six minutes.

How Scoring Works

Each question has four answer options ranked from strongest to weakest practice (A through D, scoring 4 to 1). Your answers produce a score for each dimension, and an overall score from 0 to 100.

Your score is mapped to one of four bands:

Any dimension scoring below 60% surfaces a specific risk flag explaining what that gap typically means in practice.

How the Methodology Is Built

The diagnostic is built on three principles.

1. 1

   Single-construct questions. Each question measures one thing - the thing it claims to measure. We don't bundle multiple concepts into one answer. If we want to know about RevOps ownership, we ask about ownership. If we want to know about AI operating-model change, we ask about that specifically. This makes the scoring honest and the results defensible.

2. 2

   Evidence over opinion. Every benchmark statistic shown in your results is sourced from published research. The 150 to 400% of base salary senior hire replacement cost figure comes from SHRM and the Center for American Progress. The 78% quota attainment statistic comes from the Ebsta x Pavilion 2025 GTM Benchmarks Report, which analysed $48B of pipeline across 2,000 CROs. We don't generate statistics. We cite them.

3. 3

   Honest about bias. Three specific questions - Q5 (sales/marketing alignment), Q7 (pipeline health), and Q13 (CRM data quality) - are known to be vulnerable to respondent bias. A senior leader will systematically rate their own organisation more positively than their team would. Rather than pretending this isn't true, we capture your role at the start of the diagnostic and tell you in the output where role-perspective may distort the answer. This is documented openly so the methodology can be defended on its own terms.

The Systems Thinking Behind This Diagnostic

1. 1

   Why most senior GTM hires fail. The conventional explanation is candidate fit - wrong profile, weak onboarding, performance issues. The evidence - from Hunt Scanlon, Spencer Stuart, SHRM, and the Center for American Progress - points to a different cause. A senior hire arriving into a broken system spends their first year fighting the system, not building on it. Replacement cost ranges from 150 to 400% of base salary. Most of that cost is invisible until the role has already failed.

2. 2

   What "system" actually means. Six interlocking dimensions determine whether a senior GTM hire can succeed: who you target, how you talk to them, how pipeline converts, how roles are designed, how data flows, and how AI is integrated into how the team works. Each dimension affects the others. A weakness in one usually shows up as a symptom in another. Diagnosing the symptom rarely fixes the cause.

3. 3

   Why this matters before the hire, not after. Once a senior hire is in seat, the cost of fixing the system around them is significantly higher - replacement risk, team disruption, lost runway, opportunity cost on the next 18 months of revenue. The diagnostic surfaces system gaps while you can still address them as part of the hiring decision, not after the role has already started failing.

For a deeper analysis of how systems thinking applies to GTM design, see Why GTM Hires Fail: The Systems Lens on signalforge.uk.

How the Methodology Is Maintained

This methodology is centrally maintained by SignalForge Intelligence and used identically across every partner deployment. No partner firm - including Five Recruitment, who brought this diagnostic to you - can modify scoring, benchmarks, or question design. This is intentional.

Centralised methodology preserves cross-partner comparability and protects the integrity of your results. If your diagnostic produces a 64/100, that score means the same thing whether the diagnostic was sent to you by one partner or another. The methodology is the IP. The partner is the relationship.

The methodology is reviewed and updated quarterly, with version numbers recorded against every diagnostic result. Updates are forward-only - your results will not be retroactively re-scored if the methodology changes after the date you completed the diagnostic.

What the Diagnostic Doesn't Do

In the spirit of credibility, here's what this tool isn't.

• It's not a comprehensive GTM audit. Six minutes is enough to surface the highest-leverage gaps. It is not enough to map the full system.

• It's not a hiring decision. The diagnostic informs the hiring decision; it doesn't make it. Whether to hire, and who, is a human judgement call.

• It's not predictive in any individual case. It identifies patterns. Patterns are probabilistic, not deterministic.

• It's not bias-free. The diagnostic relies on your self-reported answers. We name the questions where bias is most likely.

• It's not stage-weighted at v1. A Series A company is scored against the same bar as a Series D company. The output benchmarks reference your stage, but the scoring does not yet adjust for it. This is on the v2 roadmap.

Methodology Sources

The diagnostic is grounded in published research from the following sources.

• Ebsta x Pavilion 2025 GTM Benchmarks Report

• Forrester 2024 Sales and Marketing Alignment Survey

• Gradient Works 2025 B2B Sales Performance Benchmarks

• Validity 2025 CRM Data Quality Report

• ZoomInfo State of Data

• BARC Data, BI and Analytics Trend Monitor 2025

• SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management)

• Center for American Progress, Cost of Workforce Turnover

• Spencer Stuart CMO Tenure Study 2025

• Hunt Scanlon executive search insights, 2025

• HubSpot Sales Benchmarks 2024

• Understory 2025 B2B SaaS Marketing Benchmarks

Version History

The methodology is reviewed quarterly. Benchmarks are refreshed when new research is published. Questions are refined based on what we learn from running this diagnostic across many companies. The version of the methodology used for your diagnostic is recorded with your results, so any updates will not retroactively change your output.

Current version: v1.0 (April 2026)

Copy and output review: September 2026. Scoring unchanged.