Go to Market Strategy Template for VC Investment Memos

Most go to market strategy template pages are written for founders. This one is written for the person reading the founder's deck. Below is a one-page GTM section you can paste into an IC memo, plus the questions that fill each line and the numbers that should make you stop. It takes about 25 minutes per deal once you have the habit.

Why an investor needs a go to market strategy template at all

A founder's template answers "what will we do". An analyst's template answers "what would have to be true, and how do we check it". Those are different documents.

Take the 180 inbound decks a small fund sees in a quarter. Nearly all of them have a GTM slide. Most of that slide is a list of channels, which tells you nothing about whether any of them works.

The IC memo needs one thing from this section: a position. Is the go-to-market plausible, fragile, or unproven? Everything below exists to get you to one of those three words with evidence behind it.

The seven lines of a one-page GTM section

Keep the section to one page. If it runs longer, you are summarising the deck instead of judging it. Use these seven lines, in this order.

• Buyer and trigger. Who signs, who uses, and what event makes them buy now. "Mid-market finance teams" is not a buyer. "Controllers at 50-200 person companies after a failed audit" is.

• Motion. Self-serve, inside sales, field sales, partner-led, or a mix. Name the primary one only.

• Channel evidence. Which channel produced the last 10 customers, with counts. Not which channel the founder prefers.

• Price and sales cycle. Average contract value and days from first call to signature. Mark every figure as reported or verified.

• Unit economics so far. CAC payback in months, with the method stated. Blended and paid-only numbers differ a lot.

• Competition and substitute. The incumbent tool and the spreadsheet it replaces. The spreadsheet is usually the real competitor.

• Next 12 months. The two or three bets the round pays for, with the metric that proves each one.

Anything you cannot fill goes in as "unknown", not as a guess. An honest blank is more useful to the partners than a smooth paragraph.

What to ask for on each line

The template is only as good as the questions behind it. These are the ones that tend to separate real plans from slide plans.

For the buyer line, ask for three named customers and what each was doing the week they bought. If the founder cannot name the trigger event, the demand is probably pushed, not pulled.

For channel evidence, ask for the source field from the CRM, exported, for every closed deal. A clean export takes a founder ten minutes. A founder who needs two weeks has a data problem you should record.

For price and cycle, ask for the shortest and longest deal in the last six months. The average hides the story. A 14-day deal and a 140-day deal are two different businesses sharing a pipeline.

For unit economics, ask how sales salaries were allocated. Founder time that is left out of CAC flatters the payback by a wide margin. We estimate the distortion at one to three months at pre-seed, but treat that as a rule of thumb, not a benchmark.

Where the template breaks: pre-seed versus Series A

The same seven lines carry different weight by stage. At pre-seed there is almost no channel evidence, so the memo should weigh the buyer line and the founder's learning speed. At Series A the channel and unit economics lines dominate, because the plan is now about repeating something that already works.

MicroVentures makes a similar point: investors first grasp the plan, then test its execution and later revisions. We would add one rule. At pre-seed, score the quality of the experiments, not the plan.

Ask what the founder tried in the last 90 days, what they dropped, and why. A team that killed two channels with a clear reason is a better bet than a team defending a channel with 3 leads.

Checking the claims: customer calls and data you can pull yourself

Founder numbers are inputs. Your own checks are evidence. Budget three kinds.

First, two or three customer reference calls, one chosen by the founder and one you find yourself. Ask what they used before, what it cost them, and who else they evaluated. The unprompted competitor name matters more than the praise.

Second, a public-data pass. Job postings show what the company is hiring for: five open SDR roles and no marketing hire says something about the motion. Traffic estimates, review-site volume and pricing-page changes show the same thing from outside.

Third, a database cross-check. Pull the company and two comparable ones from a private-market database such as PitchBook to see how peers at the same stage grew. Treat the comparison as context only. Peer sets in early-stage data are thin and often stale.

Every claim in the memo should carry a tag: reported by founder, verified by call, or verified by data. The tags take thirty seconds to add and change how the partners read the page.

A worked example: filling the seven lines in 25 minutes

Here is how the first pass looks on a fictional seed-stage workflow tool. The numbers are invented for illustration, not drawn from a real deal.

The buyer is a head of operations at a 100-person logistics company, and the trigger is a missed delivery audit. The founder says the motion is inside sales. The CRM export shows 7 of the last 10 customers came from two partner referrals, so the primary motion is actually partner-led. That single finding rewrites the plan.

Price is reported at $18,000 per year, with cycles between 21 and 95 days. The CAC payback is reported at 9 months, but sales salaries are excluded, so the memo records it as "reported, method unclear". Competition is the incumbent ERP module and a shared spreadsheet. The next 12 months hold two bets: a third referral partner, and a first outbound hire.

The verdict reads "fragile": the demand is real, but it depends on two partners. The memo then lists the one call that would move it to "plausible", a conversation with the largest partner. That is the whole section, and it fits on one page.

Red flags worth writing down

Some patterns are common enough to keep on a short list. None of them kills a deal alone.

• Every customer came through the founder's personal network, and no one else on the team has closed a deal.

• The deck quotes the total addressable market but never names the first 100 buyers.

• CAC is quoted without a payback period, or payback is quoted without a method.

• The sales cycle is described as "short" with no days attached.

• The plan needs a hire the round cannot afford for the first 9 months.

Write each flag with its source and your confidence. "Founder-only sales, per CRM export, high confidence" is a usable line. "Seems founder-dependent" is not.

Keeping the template in your workflow

A template that lives in someone's drive gets abandoned. Put it where the deal already lives. Many small funds keep the memo as a page in Notion with the seven lines as properties, so every deal is comparable at a glance.

Funds that run their pipeline in Affinity usually attach the memo to the opportunity and log the verified-versus-reported tags as fields.

The point is no re-entry between the CRM and the memo. If an analyst copies numbers by hand, the template will be skipped by the third deal of the week.

If your fund also tracks follow-on ownership, Carta data on cap tables belongs in the "next 12 months" line, since dilution changes what the round can fund.

What this template will not do

It will not tell you whether the market is big enough. That belongs in a separate section with its own sources.

It will not rank founders. A weak GTM section at pre-seed often reflects a young company, not a weak team, and the memo should say so.

It also takes judgment to fill. A template reduces the blank-page cost, but it does not replace the call with a customer. Coverage before conviction: fill all seven lines before you decide how you feel about the deal.

How to roll it out across a small fund

Start with one deal already in diligence. Fill the seven lines retroactively and see which ones you could not support. That gap list is your standard question set for the next intake.

After five deals, compare the sections side by side. The lines where every deal says "unknown" are the questions your intake form should ask founders up front. That moves work from the analyst's Tuesday to the founder's submission.

Then agree on the three-word verdict with the partners: plausible, fragile, unproven. Define each one in a sentence so that two analysts reach the same label on the same facts.

Want to see how a seven-line section reads inside a full memo draft? Book a briefing with Accorata and we will walk through one on a live deal.