I kid you not: The most impactful audit of my career was auditing sales.

Leadership at my company was doing all they could to help Sales and Marketing increase sales in an incredibly tough economic climate. Internal Audit wanted to help.

We met with one division’s Sales leaders to understand how they were contacting all of their key accounts, with the idea that this could help drive the most revenue the fastest. The execs immediately saw the value: Our analysis would give them detailed, independent feedback and analysis on key sales processes. 

We got the green light, spending three weeks meeting with Sales managers and following up with Marketing to corroborate key details. When I shared our observations with Corporate, I got responses like “Are you kidding me?” and “I had no idea.” It was the single most engaging meeting I’ve ever had with a large number of executives. Several recommendations were accepted immediately.

Until then, these execs mostly knew us for our SOX work. Now, they knew we could do more.

From that moment on, I was hooked on Internal Audit. It was transformative for me, my team’s brand, and how I saw the potential scope of my career.

In fact, it caused me to leave that company to join a Big Four Advisory practice so I could get more and better Internal Audit experience.

The bottom line: Your company’s success depends on its ability to increase top-line revenues and market share. That’s why your business leaders spend most of their time focused on go-to-market (GTM) success drivers like marketing, sales, customer experience, and partnerships. 

These are foundational pillars of corporate success. But Internal Audit doesn’t often audit them. 

As the Internal Audit Collective’s 2026 audit plan benchmarking survey reinforced, most audit plans prioritize essentials like cybersecurity, fraud, controls reviews, TPRM, and ERM. 

But your business exists to master its products and services — not its controls. 

Providing organizations with GTM assurance and advice is a critical opportunity for Internal Audit to deliver relevant value. That’s why the Collective is pushing the agenda. We recently held our first roundtable, which yielded great insights on getting started and ideas for next steps. Many thanks to Ana Toomer (who’ll lead our next GTM Auditing roundtable discussion on 3/20/26 — register here) and all the other roundtable participants for generously sharing their insights. 

This article shares key takeaways, with the goal of helping teams that have not traditionally audited GTM better position themselves to take on this vital work.

1. Be Courageous & Make the Jump

A failure to audit GTM activities often stems from (1) lack of understanding of what to audit and (2) hesitancy about entering uncharted territory (or areas where audit isn’t normally known to be involved).

It takes courage to audit something you’ve never audited. But my own experience proves that auditing GTM can be transformative — expanding Internal Audit’s knowledge and relationships, strengthening its reputation, and reinforcing the power and value of independent assurance. 

What’s more, if Internal Audit isn’t focused on the GTM risks and initiatives business leaders care about most, we risk becoming irrelevant and devalued. We also risk being the first team downsized, outsourced, or cut when business is bad or reorganization is underway.

Of course, it’s highly unlikely that your organization will ask you to look at GTM. 

You need to raise your hand. 

2. How to Identify Relevant Entry Points 

Teams have successfully identified potential opportunities through several channels.

Internal Audit Involvement in ERM

Different functional groups see GTM through different lenses. Internal Audit’s objective, enterprise-wide perspective on risk — and cross-functional relationships — can help bridge the gaps.

Internal Audit teams that own ERM are using it as an avenue for identifying and validating potential GTM focus areas. If you don’t own ERM, it’s still a sound path for getting involved. Talk to ERM about key GTM risks, probing for areas where independent feedback can add value to key GTM leaders.

Significant Business Reorganization

Many teams have been successful in identifying GTM audit opportunities in response to business restructuring or transformation. For example, they may examine how new sales team reporting lines, sales processes, or partnerships are performing (e.g., are outcomes aligned with the new strategy that was defined and rolled out?).

The key consideration: matching the right opportunity with the right timing. Make sure you give new outcomes sufficient time to develop.

New Leadership 

Some leaders are considering GTM advisory projects following leadership changes or long-term trends of frequent turnover. 

Indeed, compensation data platform Pave found that GTM execs — especially CMOs, CROs, Sales SVPs and VPs, and Business Development VPs — tend to have the highest turnover, with median tenures of 1.8–2 years. Product, Design, Growth, Customer Success, and Engineering leaders aren’t far behind at 2.1–2.5 years.

Again, be aware that timing matters. Allow new leaders time to implement strategy and start seeing results before assessing specific outcomes (e.g., strategic alignment, operational efficiency, market performance, resource allocation, sales incentives/behaviors).  

New Product Rollout

Internal Audit’s analytic chops, objectivity, and relationships can help organizations identify potential GTM issues and opportunities (e.g., pre- or post-implementation review, operational readiness, compliance/regulatory) in the rollout of a new product or service line.

Our next roundtable will include a deep dive on potential GTM audit and advisory projects specific to new product launches. Bring your ideas and questions. 

3. How to Open Doors & Get Buy-In 

Understand the Business Problems

There’s often a disconnect between business leaders’ and Internal Audit’s views on organizations’ key business problems. Protiviti’s Executive Perspectives on Top Risks survey reliably finds that GTM risks and strategic investment priorities are top of mind for executives and boards — while Internal Audit still focuses primarily on cybersecurity, TPRM, and controls reviews. 

Work on gaining a clearer understanding of your organization’s GTM activities and related business problems. Your initial goal is knowing enough to ask compelling questions. 

Next, validate that you’re on the right track. Here’s how.

Expand Conversations 

Understanding GTM activities and business problems mainly involves more conversations with more first-line business leaders. 

Expand the stakeholders you talk with beyond Internal Audit’s traditional second-line relationships (e.g., Finance, HR, IT, Compliance). Talk to Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Product, Innovation, Growth, and other GTM-adjacent areas. 

Just go start a conversation. 

Lead With Questions 

The teams that have gotten the most traction on GTM auditing all started the same way — by initiating conversations and asking questions to narrow in on the right opportunities. Ask stakeholders:

• What are you trying to accomplish? What are your big initiatives this year (e.g., new sales process, reducing customer acquisition costs, shifting resource allocation to increase impact)? 
• What are you most worried about? What hurdles stand in your way? 
• What key processes, controls, and metrics support all of the above? 
• If Internal Audit could act as a free resource to provide independent analysis and feedback on how your team is doing relative to process X, control Y, or metric Z, what would you be interested in learning more about?  

Business stakeholders love free resources. They’ll probably be open to your offer. 

(If they say no, it may be that you just don’t know enough to be compelling… yet.) 

Set the Right Tone: Start With Advisory

Roundtable participants resoundingly agreed: You’ll get more traction faster by leading with an advisory engagement based on a validated business problem — not an audit. 

Leading with an advisory project sets a tone of constructive help and partnership. We’re not saying “You did X or Y wrong”; we’re saying, “Here’s what we’re doing, and here are opportunities to do better.” We’re spotlighting a business problem they’ve identified and helping them advocate for change. 

4. How to Deliver Value That Builds Credibility

Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew

An open door won’t stay open if you fail to deliver real value. Scope to where you’re confident you can deliver value, avoiding likely rabbit holes and scope creep.

Leaders recommended honing in on “bite-sized” opportunities, such as measuring specific types of outcomes against yardsticks leadership has already defined. 

Bring Your Analytics Skills to the Table

Most GTM projects start with data analysis — something squarely in Internal Audit’s wheelhouse. Offering up analytics skills their team lacks is a fantastic way to get in the door and start showcasing the value you can provide. 

Of course, analytics are also an excellent method for learning about the organization's key GTM business processes and problems. 

For example, one roundtable participant helped their Sales team analyze how long it took for sales opportunities to transition through all of the sales stages. After analyzing timing results versus expected transition timing, they noticed that contract reviews were taking significantly longer than expected. Internal Audit then performed additional analysis on opportunities with the longest contracting times, enabling them to make recommendations on how to remove previously unknown contracting bottlenecks.

Make Sure Reporting Answers: “Why Should I Care?”

The quality of your reporting is critical — especially if it’s your first project. Make sure you can always answer: “If I was the leader, why would I care?”

One roundtable participant shared this wise guidance; his CAE had pressed it upon him during their first GTM project. Put simply:

• Don’t tell them anything they already know. 
• Don’t be nitpicky. Pointing out simple compliance violations or true one-in-a-thousand anomalies = not helpful.
• Focus on relevance and value. Include only what you’re confident they’ll care about.

THE LAST WORD: Don’t Underestimate the Value of Auditing GTM Areas

I recently talked with an Internal Auditor whose company was acquired by a PE firm. The entire Internal Audit team was eliminated. Then, the PE firm promptly stepped in to review and improve upon key business processes. 

Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence for Internal Auditors in this situation. And here’s the irony: Reviewing and improving upon business processes is what we do. 

But we’re traditionally known to do that for Finance — not for the business at large. And this PE firm doesn’t care about having an A+ payroll or AP process. They care about improving the GTM processes critical to improving market share and increasing top-line revenues.

If Internal Auditors placed more focus on these areas, maybe we wouldn’t be the first team cut. 

We often talk about the need for Internal Audit to provide more insight and foresight, as opposed to backward-looking hindsight. GTM-focused recommendations are much more suited to the former. That’s why it’s critical to expand the scope of our audit plans to include GTM. 

If you are an Internal Audit Collective member, here’s what you can do now: Register to attend the next GTM roundtable. Ana Toomer will lead the session, kicking us off by sharing how GTM is broken down in her organization, providing a framework to help us understand the range of potential opportunities. Then, we’ll brainstorm specific ideas for advisory projects related to new product rollouts. Lastly, we’ll have an open forum to share more ideas, with the goal of creating an inventory of GTM project types, including example analytics. The goal? You’ll leave the session ready to start driving GTM auditing forward in your organization. 

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