Most of the portfolio companies you inherit have a marketing technology problem that looks deceptively simple. They own too many tools. Their systems don’t talk to each other. Leads get stuck in gaps between platforms. Reports take three days to pull together and are outdated by the time they’re finished.
This sounds like a technical issue. It’s not. It’s a business issue.
When you ask a portfolio company where revenue actually comes from, you often get different answers depending on who you ask. Sales credits a particular rep’s relationship. Marketing points to a campaign. Finance has a third number entirely. This doesn’t happen because the team is incompetent. It happens because the infrastructure doesn’t exist to answer the question cleanly.
That infrastructure is often fixable without a major replatforming, and the fix directly impacts your ability to grow the company during the hold period, and optimize its value at exit.
The Three Questions Your Diligence Team Should Ask
When you’re evaluating a portfolio company’s go-to-market engine, the questions matter less than whether they can answer them cleanly and clearly.
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Can you trace revenue by segment, channel, and campaign without manual work? Most portfolio companies can’t. They have a “revenue” number, but the path from marketing dollar to closed deal involves cross-checking multiple spreadsheets, asking three different people what something means, and eventually producing a report nobody fully trusts.
A clean system answers this in two clicks. You see: How much revenue came from direct sales versus partners, which campaigns influenced which deals, what the cost was to acquire each customer, and where the margin sits. A buyer during diligence wants this answer. You want it now. -
Can you follow a lead from first touch through closed deal, including all channel partners?
Many portfolio companies have decent visibility into leads that come directly to them. But for manufacturers with distributor or dealer networks, the picture breaks apart. You can’t see which dealers are actually converting prospects. You can’t see whether a lead coming from your brand campaign is being worked effectively by your channel partner or sitting dormant. You’re blind to a meaningful portion of your revenue machine.
An integrated system means that when a prospect downloads content from your website, attends a webinar, gets handed off to a dealer, and eventually buys, every relevant system knows what happened. That visibility is worth money. -
If you sold this company tomorrow, would a buyer see the go-to-market engine as an asset or a risk?
During sell-side diligence, buyers want to understand how revenue happens and how confident they can be that it will keep happening. A company that can’t clearly explain its funnel, its conversion rates, or how it acquires customers at reasonable cost looks like a roll-up play. A company that has a documented, measurable, repeatable revenue engine looks like a business.
The three best gifts you can give a future buyer are: clear revenue attribution, predictable unit economics, and a technology foundation that won’t require a year of rework.
Why Rationalizing the Stack Matters More Than You Think
Most PE teams think about the marketing technology stack once: when something breaks or when someone makes a new buying decision. That’s a mistake.
A rationalized stack—fewer tools, better connected, with agreed-upon definitions of what constitutes a lead, opportunity, and customer—is a value lever.
Start with cost. Every tool has a contract, an implementation cost, training overhead, and a person who has to manage it. A portfolio company using fifteen marketing and sales tools is probably paying for five of them to do roughly the same work. That’s waste. Consolidating to the three or four that actually matter drops OpEx and, more importantly, eliminates decision paralysis.
More importantly: cleaner data means clearer insight. When marketing and sales use the same system of record for customer and prospect information, when both teams agree on what a “qualified” lead looks like, when every deal is tagged with the campaign or channel that sourced it, your growth initiatives become measurable. You can fund what works, reallocate away from what doesn’t, and do it fast enough to matter.
That measurement also makes management easier. Instead of debating whether a program is “working,” you look at whether it moved metrics you all agreed on in advance. That’s a different conversation.
A Staged Approach: 12–18 Months to Exit-Ready Data
You don’t need to solve this all at once. A practical timeline looks like this.
Months 0–3: Visibility.
Map every system that touches a prospect or customer record. This takes a week of work and usually reveals redundancy nobody realized existed. Standardize the basic definitions: what is a lead, what is marketing-qualified, what is an opportunity, what triggers it moving to the next stage, when do you call something a customer, when do you call something churn. Put these in writing.
Produce one simple revenue dashboard. Not comprehensive. Simple. It should show year-to-date revenue, revenue by major channel, pipeline, and win rate. A non-technical executive should be able to look at it without explanation. This becomes your weekly reference point.
Months 3–9: Simplification and integration.
Identify your system of record for customer data. For most B2B companies, that’s the CRM. Make a clean decision about which marketing automation platform, if any, is your second system. Connect the two so that information flows bidirectionally without manual intervention.
Document which tools can be sunsetted without losing signal. Most portfolio companies discover that they can shut down two or three tools without changing anything material, because another tool already does that work.
Establish a basic integration: when a lead is created in marketing automation, it flows to the CRM. When a deal is won, that information goes back to marketing so you can see the full lifecycle. When a deal is lost, you know that too.
Months 9–18: Optimization and story-building.
By this point you have clean data. Use it. Reallocate marketing budget toward channels and campaigns that produce the best unit economics. Document what changed: which programs lowered cost per acquisition, which ones increased deal size, which shortened the sales cycle.
Build this into a narrative. Not a marketing narrative. A business narrative. When you go to exit, your data room includes a clean explanation of how the go-to-market engine works, how much it costs to acquire a customer, and how predictable that is.
This is routine work. Not a digital transformation. Not a technology overhaul. Just deliberate infrastructure planning.
Evaluating Your Teams and Vendors
When portfolio leadership presents a GTM initiative or a vendor pitch, have one clear filter.
Ask for a single view of a recent closed-won deal. Show me the complete path: where did this prospect come from, how did they move through the sales process, what influenced the decision, how long did it take, what was the acquisition cost, what’s the deal value. If the answer requires three people, two spreadsheets, and an interpretation of what probably happened, there’s work to do.
When vendors pitch solutions—whether they’re agencies like us, RevOps consultants (again, like us), or new software — ask them to define success in hard revenue terms. Not engagement metrics or pipeline volume. Revenue. How do they measure it? How do they keep it measurable? How do they know whether their work actually moved the needle on customer acquisition cost, win rate, or cycle time? Check out this case study about making $1.9M in revenue with a $60K spend in six months (link to Sakai video)
Most vendors can’t answer that clearly. The ones who can are worth listening to.
The Goal Isn’t Perfection. It's Leverage.
You’re not trying to build a technology masterpiece. You’re trying to build a growth engine that is measurable, defensible, and repeatable. That’s what makes it valuable during a hold period and attractive at exit.
A portfolio company with clean revenue data and a simple measurement framework is a portfolio company that can grow faster, make faster decisions, and go to market in a way a buyer can immediately understand and extend.
The best-run PE-backed companies don't have the fanciest technology. They have the clearest view of what’s actually happening. They built that view deliberately, kept it simple, and used it to make decisions.
That’s the work. That’s the leverage. Everything else is noise.
