How about a project that could benefit your organization's top line and market share — AND your team's reputation? Changing not only how you're known, but what you're known to do? 

Providing the business with go-to-market (GTM) assurance and advice may be just the ticket.

In part one of this series, we laid the groundwork for what it means to audit GTM activities and how to get started. We stressed the importance of kicking things off by:

• Expanding conversations to build relationships and trust
• Leading with questions (e.g., GTM structure, processes, priorities, pain points, culture) to identify and validate potential opportunities
• Starting with advisory — and limiting scope to where you’re confident you can drive value

In part two, we’re sharing examples of GTM audit and advisory projects where Internal Audit teams are already adding value. What’s been well-received? And what are some easy places to begin? 

Many thanks to everyone who participated in our second GTM roundtable, whose ideas, success stories, and lessons learned helped inspire and inform this article (and a big shout-out to Ana Toomer, who led the discussion!). We’re keeping up the momentum with a third GTM roundtable.

So let’s dive in: What are some GTM areas where Internal Audit is already delivering value?

1. Partner Compliance 

I know I just said “start with advisory,” not audit. But several teams have found that partner compliance audits offer a familiar and non-controversial entry point to auditing GTM. 

Partner compliance audits are reviews focused on whether external partners (e.g., vendors, contractors, distributors, JV collaborators, customers) are complying with your organization’s policies, contracts, and any applicable laws or regulations. 

Admittedly, it feels a little like cheating: As in, “Of course the auditors want to look at something compliance-related.” But partner compliance audits get efforts focused on the revenue side of the equation versus the expense side. As one roundtable participant put it, “It’s an easy hook.” 

So if you need a starter audit, consider this route. For example, you can look for potential chargebacks, misapplied credits, and other opportunities to identify unrecognized revenue. These opportunities also let you wear your audit hat: You can validate that revenue numbers are reliable and happening in accordance with customer and partner contracts. Additional focus areas include data privacy/security (especially around sensitive or customer data), SLA adherence, and operational controls.

Plus, partner compliance audits can deliver value beyond compliance. For example, one team’s partner compliance audits were super helpful for better understanding the customer experience. Internal Audit was able to provide meaningful feedback for the organization’s Product and Pricing teams, helping them modify pricing tiers to give partners more flexibility in maintaining their margins. 

**Ana Toomer is leading a partner channel compliance roundtable on May 13, 2026. Sign up now!** 

2. Customer Life Cycle

Sales and Marketing teams have different goals. They tend to operate in silos, focused on different data points, metrics, outcomes, and problems. Internal Audit can provide an independent, bird’s eye view to help these work together better. 

Sales and Marketing Collaboration and Strategy 

Sales and Marketing don’t always communicate or collaborate well, impacting the top line more than either party wants to admit. For example:

• Are Sales teams using Marketing-created materials? Marketing devotes significant time to creating case studies, presentation decks, one-sheets, and white papers — but Sales doesn’t always use them. What assets does Sales actually need to help them close their deals? 
• When building talk tracks and assets, is Marketing leveraging Sales’ knowledge? For example, are they participating in Sales calls to hear what customers are actually saying?
• Is the Sales strategy linked to the Marketing strategy? How is each team’s performance incentivized and measured? What are each team’s KPIs, and where can they agree on shared metrics? What does Marketing want (e.g., desired pitches) and how is Sales educated about it?
• Are Sales teams following up on Marketing-qualified leads? Sales teams often complain that Marketing sends them “junk” leads. Are leads being ignored or lost? How can the process be improved (e.g., handoffs, definitions around qualification, data management)?

Customer Data Management

Indeed, if Marketing says Sales isn’t following up on the leads they generate — and Sales complains about having to generate their own leads — it may come down to poor customer data management. 

That was the case in one roundtable participant’s company. A Sales-focused GTM audit project yielded the insight that the real issue was the lack of a customer data platform that helped connect the dots throughout the customer life cycle, ensuring clean handoffs between Marketing and Sales. 

Customer data management may be handled primarily through customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. But how that data is structured, managed, and served up matters (e.g., customer definitions, single source of truth, connecting multiple contacts at a single customer), so complementary solutions may be needed (e.g., databases). 

Pricing Strategy

Several teams have done GTM projects focused on pricing, impacting customer acquisition, churn, and renewals. Clearly, an advisory project focused on bringing in more new partners or customers — or reducing churn with existing ones — can be hugely valuable. 

For example, one roundtable participant’s team undertook a renewals pricing benchmarking study, using analytics to assess how the business can right-size annual pricing increases for renewals. Other potential focus areas include: 

• Looking at price leakages (e.g., discounts, volume rebates, payment terms, promotional credits)
• Benchmarking internal and competitor pricing
• Analyzing the customer experience to understand pricing tiers vs. value
• Assessing potential for dynamic pricing models 

Sales Compensation

Looking at how Sales compensation structures (e.g., incentives, commissions) are designed and monitored can often be a “low-hanging fruit” project with a big financial impact. For example, are commissions being calculated accurately? Is there a clawback process for returns or cancellations? Are compensation structures driving the right behaviors? 

Of course, this isn’t a great first project. You’re not going to make many friends in Sales if you’re immediately seen as “corporate police” targeting their paychecks. But once you’ve established trust and credibility, these projects may be of interest to Sales leaders.

3. GTM Operating Model 

Organizations are always trying to optimize GTM. Projects focused on GTM operations can be hugely useful for getting a clear view on what’s happening and where improvement opportunities may exist. For example…

Individual Sales Cycle

• Is Sales doing what they should be doing? Are they booking enough meetings, calling leads that were assigned to them, and following their methodology once they have customer meetings booked? At what points do deals tend to stall?
• Are Sales forecasts enabling effective planning? Are they forecasting their sales commit numbers with enough accuracy for the FP&A team to reliably communicate expected revenues and numbers downstream? Sales’ ability to forecast revenues with a certain level of accuracy can have massive downstream impacts: If you expect to bring in X dollars, you budget Y for materials, Z for hiring, and so on. The forecasting process makes the world go ‘round — and if it’s not working as it should, it’s often an indicator of poor sales leadership.
• Is there a win/loss feedback loop? Is Sales accurately capturing and tracking the reasons deals were lost? 

Process Transformation

If the business moves forward with process changes, Internal Audit can help ensure that efforts are set up for success and that transformations met their goals. For example:

• Pre-implementation: Can the existing tech stack accommodate the planned transformation? Are support teams mature enough?
• Post-implementation: Did the process transformation achieve its objectives? Are newly implemented processes free of control issues? 

Accountability

Several roundtable participants have helped their organizations identify, understand, and explore opportunities to improve GTM team accountability. In many cases, auditors were doing other projects when they found these opportunities. The reality is that GTM incentive and governance structures can create the potential for questionable behaviors, poor decisions, and conflicts of interest. 

Admittedly, this is another sensitive area. But it’s super important for helping the business ensure they have the right checks and balances in place to reduce risk and revenue leakage, incentivize desired behaviors, and protect the brand. 

Example focus areas include:

• Incentive/compensation design (see above)
• Customer contracting/onboarding (e.g., terms, approvals, exceptions)
• Decision-making/approval controls around pricing, discounting, thresholds, and margins
• Decision-making/governance around new product launches (see below)

4. New Product Rollouts

When organizations are developing and rolling out new products, Internal Auditors can add value through independent insight on controls design, monitoring, and decision making, helping the business proactively identify potential governance, risk, and control issues. 

Organizational Readiness

Will the entire organization be ready to support the rollout? For example:

• Are Product, Engineering, Operations, and Sales aligned on what the product will be?
• Reviewing the product roadmap, what are likely potential failures (e.g., overly aggressive timelines, ownership or accountability gaps, key vendor or tech dependencies)?
• Will customers (internal or external) know what the product is and how to use it? 
• Does Marketing understand the product well enough to market it effectively? Does Sales know how to sell it?

Governance Framework

One roundtable participant’s team is looking at a product rollout from a governance lens. Projects in this area can assess whether organizations have established effective governance covering:

• Oversight — clear ownership/roles, decision rights, escalation paths, monitoring, etc.
• Processes and controls — key controls across the product life cycle
• Compliance — Alignment to internal policies and external regulations
• Risk management — how product-related risks are identified, assessed, and mitigated
• Third-party management — due diligence, ongoing monitoring
• Monitoring and reporting — of rollout and performance
• Change management — approvals, documentation, discipline, transition to business as usual

THE LAST WORD: Increasing Impact Means Expanding How We Add Value

To prove Internal Audit’s relevance and value in 2026 and beyond, we need to do a better job of aligning our audit plans with what actually matters to the business.

Too often, our plans neglect CEO and board priorities in favor of routine audits they don’t care about. 

You can elevate Internal Audit’s impact — and reputation — by helping your organization with the GTM activities that influence revenue, performance, strategy, product quality, and competitive advantage. 

So what are you waiting for? Start a conversation with Sales, Marketing, or Product. Validate how you can add value. And of course, look to the Internal Audit Collective for more project ideas and guidance to help you propose your first or next GTM audit project. 

To start, why not sign up now for our next GTM roundtable? Partner channel compliance audits are a valuable but comfortable way for Internal Audit teams to get a foothold on GTM. 

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