Composite case
This autopsy is a composite. It reflects patterns SLAM sees repeatedly across commercial due diligence, assembled from multiple engagements and observable market dynamics. It is not any single company, and any resemblance to a specific business is coincidental.
The Setup
The Business
B2B software for the professional-services sector, sold through a direct field team.
The Numbers
£20M ARR on a multi-year record of consistent sales performance.
The Deal
Acquired by a PE firm partly on the strength of that track record, priced as a proven, repeatable engine.
The Thesis
The commercial performance is real and repeatable. Underwrite continuation and modest acceleration.
This was a bet on a track record. The business had shown years of consistent attainment, reliable forecasting, and a healthy competitive win rate, and the investor priced it as a proven engine that would keep running. The premium was paid for repeatability. What nobody tested was whether the track record measured real performance, or measured the reporting process that produced it. Those are not the same thing, and here they had quietly diverged.
What Diligence Saw
The performance history was the centrepiece of the case, and each supporting figure reinforced the impression of a disciplined, reliable commercial organisation.
88%
Average quota attainment across the team
Read as strong
±5%
Forecast accuracy, consistent across quarters
Read as reliable
65%
Reported competitive win rate
Read as a moat
"Price"
The management narrative for why deals are lost
Read as understood
Each figure supported the story that this was a proven engine. But attainment, forecast accuracy, and win rate are all outputs of a reporting process, and a reporting process can flatter every one of them without anybody lying. The track record was not falsified. It was inflated, quietly and in three separate places.
The Unravelling
Deal closes. Plan underwritten on the performance record.
The premium reflects a proven, repeatable engine. The track record is treated as an objective baseline.
Attainment collapses when quotas are held firm.
The new owners refuse mid-period quota changes. Reported attainment drops sharply, exposing that the historical figure was not measuring what everyone assumed.
The quota history is reconstructed.
Historically, quotas were quietly renegotiated down mid-period for reps who lobbied hardest. "Attainment" had been partly a measure of negotiation, not selling.
The forecast misses in a way the record said was improbable.
Several reps miss at once. Their numbers shared an assumption the rollup had treated as independent, so a single market shift sank the whole team together.
The first neutral loss review is run.
The real competitive win rate is well below 65%. Many losses management had filed under "price" were actually execution failures nobody had ever examined.
The pattern becomes clear.
The proven, repeatable performance was a reporting artifact: attainment inflated by renegotiation, forecast reliability overstated by hidden correlation, win rate overstated by biased loss data.
The performance baseline is restated.
The engine the deal was priced on was materially weaker than the track record showed. The acceleration plan is replaced by a rebuild of the reporting itself.
The Diagnosis
Three separate mechanisms had each inflated a different dimension of the performance record. None was fraud. Each was the quiet, rational drift of a number nobody had a reason to interrogate, until a new owner did.
Quotas were informally renegotiated down mid-period for the reps who pushed hardest. Reported attainment therefore measured negotiating persistence as much as commercial performance. Holding quotas firm after close, which any disciplined owner would do, collapsed the very number the track record was built on.
Individual rep forecasts each looked reasonable, and the rollup summed them as though they were independent bets. In fact they shared an unstated assumption. Historical accuracy held only while that assumption held, so the forecast looked reliable right up until the shared dependency broke and the entire team missed simultaneously.
The 65% win rate and the "we lose on price" narrative came from a process that never neutrally examined losses. Loss reasons were self-reported by the reps who lost, who had every incentive to blame price rather than their own execution. The real win rate was lower, and the real loss causes were addressable execution gaps that nobody had surfaced.
Why It Compounded
Each mechanism inflated a different face of the same track record: attainment, forecast reliability, and win rate. Underwriting the deal on that record meant paying a premium for a baseline that three independent reporting artifacts had each pushed upward. The dangerous part is that none of them looked like a problem from inside the business, because each was simply the path of least resistance for the people producing the numbers. It took an owner willing to hold the line to reveal that the proven engine was, in three separate ways, a measurement of the reporting rather than the performance.
The Cost
Collapsed
Attainment, once quotas were held firm
Below 65%
The true competitive win rate
Overstated
Forecast reliability, once correlation surfaced
Restated
The performance baseline the premium was paid for
What a Behavioural Diligence Would Have Caught
Each artifact leaves a trail in data the business already keeps. A diligence that tested the reporting, rather than trusting its outputs, would have found all three.
Adjustment-History Test
Pulling the full quota adjustment history, original versus final by rep and by manager, would have shown attainment was partly the product of mid-period renegotiation, and that a non-trivial share of the team received downward adjustments.
Correlation Test
Interviewing reps about the assumptions under their largest forecasted deals would have revealed the shared dependency the rollup concealed, and shown the true confidence interval was far wider than the track record implied.
Neutral Loss Review
A third-party win-loss review, rather than self-reported loss reasons, would have exposed the real win rate and reattributed losses from "price" to the execution gaps that actually drove them.
The track record was not a fabrication. It was a set of honest-looking numbers, each quietly inflated by the process that produced it, and the premium was paid for the inflation.