Free Symptom Read

This is the self-serve version of BoldGTM's free 30-minute call — the same five questions, run alone, on paper, before you talk to anyone. It will not diagnose you. It will make you write down what you actually think is going on, then check that against what your own evidence supports. Bring the output to the real call, or stop here if the answer is clear.

Do it in one sitting. Thirty minutes, no research trip in the middle — the point is to see what you already know and what you're guessing.

The symptom you keep re-fixing is not the problem underneath it.

"Outbound isn't working" is a symptom. It is not a problem statement, and it cannot be fixed — only re-fixed, differently, every quarter. A problem is what survives after you've separated the thing you feel from the thing that's actually happening. This worksheet exists to do that separation before you spend a dollar or a hire on a guess.

Five questions, in this exact order — the order is the method.

The order matters: the fifth question asks for your diagnosis before anything below offers one.

1. Free text. Say the symptom in your own words, unfiltered. Don't clean it up.
2. Forced rank, 1–5. List five consequences of this symptom continuing, and rank them most costly to least. No ties — the ranking is the point, not the list.
3. Name the tier. Which part of go-to-market does this live in — pipeline, sales process, onboarding, retention, pricing, channel, team structure, or something else in your own words?
4. Name what broke, specifically. Not "morale is bad" — "three reps independently stopped logging call notes in week two." Behavior, not feeling.
5. Branch: know or don't know. Commit your own causal claim, in one sentence.

The fifth answer is a commitment, not a draft you get to revise.

Write your answer to question 5 now, before you read the next section. Do not skip ahead and come back to fill it in once you've done the arithmetic below — that defeats the entire exercise. The value of this worksheet is not the math. It's whether your math agrees with what you already believed before you did any math. That comparison only means something if the belief was written down first.

If you've already read ahead: stop, close the section below, and write your answer now.

A composite example, worked through all five questions.

Composite. Not a client. Built to show the mechanism — the consequence ranking below is illustrative, made to teach the arithmetic, not lifted from a real record.

Sales enablement, 6-figure SaaS. Reps knew the product. The same questions kept coming back.

• Q1 — symptom: "Sales asks the same questions, every cycle."
• Q2 — ranked consequences:
  1. Product roadmap gets built on sales's guesses, not customer signal.
  2. Reps burn call time re-answering the same objection live.
  3. New reps ramp slower — nobody owns the answer.
  4. Deals slip while reps wait on someone to weigh in.
  5. The same complaint resurfacing dents morale.
• Q3 — tier: Sales enablement.
• Q4 — what broke: No one owns turning field feedback into a product answer. Reps re-explain the same objection, live, every call.
• Q5 — committed cause: "Feedback has no owner."

Your ranking is already doing arithmetic — here's the number it produces.

The formula: s += (6 − rank) / 5 for each ranked item, then score *= 1.25 where your stated top concern and the deduced cause agree. A consequence you didn't rank contributes nothing — it's absent from the sum, not scored as zero.

Applied to the composite's five ranks:

Rank	Weight (6−r)/5
1	1.00
2	0.80
3	0.60
4	0.40
5	0.20

Sum = 3.00. The rank-1 consequence ("roadmap built on guesses") is a direct symptom of nobody owning the feedback loop — which is exactly the Q5 claim ("feedback has no owner"). Stated focus and deduced cause agree, so the multiplier applies: 3.00 × 1.25 = 3.75.

Do the same with your own five ranks. If your rank-1 consequence traces back to a different mechanism than your Q5 claim, don't force the multiplier — that disagreement is the most useful thing this worksheet can hand you. It means you ranked one thing and diagnosed another.

Thin evidence is not a smaller answer. It's the honest one.

BoldGTM runs two real, named checks before it lets a diagnosis stand. Apply both to your own Q5 claim before you act on it.

The Convergence Gate. Grade your evidence by source class, not count — three interviews saying the same thing are one source repeated, not three:

• HIGH — at least 3 distinct sources, at least 2 distinct classes, mean quality ≥ 0.6
• MED — at least 2 sources, mean quality ≥ 0.5
• LOW — everything else

Quality weights, verbatim: first-party 1.0 · corroborated 0.8 · single-operator 0.6 · mixed 0.5.

Continuing the composite: two rep interviews (interview class) plus a CRM export showing the same objection logged repeatedly (a second, different class) — n=2, d=2, quality weighted around 0.9. That clears MED (n≥2, q≥0.5) but not HIGH, which needs a third independent source. A support ticket, a churn-survey comment, or a board question would move it there. A third rep interview would not — same class, still counted once.

The Abstention Rule. BoldGTM's evidence rubric scores on a 0–100 scale, six criteria, tiers A (≥70) / B (45–69) / C (<45) — and one rule that overrides all of them: an unknown answer scores zero and raises a flag. It never scores an average, and it never gets rounded up. Three flags, and the record leaves the funnel rather than entering it on a guess.

Apply it here: look back at your five answers. Count how many you genuinely don't know — not "haven't thought about," but don't have a dated fact or a named instance for. Three or more unknowns means the honest output is not a diagnosis. It's "not enough evidence yet," plus the cheapest way to get the next piece. Guessing past this point is the single most expensive habit in GTM, because it looks like progress.

Sheet: one tab, intake, one row per symptom.

If an agent runs this with you, it writes the row; if you run it on paper, copy the header into row one of a blank sheet and fill one row per sitting.

date,symptom,c1,c2,c3,c4,c5,tier,what_broke,committed_cause,rank_sum,multiplier,score,evidence_n,evidence_d,evidence_q,gate,next_move

The composite above, as one row:

2026-09-06,"Sales asks the same questions, every cycle","Roadmap built on sales's guesses","Reps re-answer the same objection live","New reps ramp slower","Deals slip waiting on an answer","Morale dents",sales enablement,"No one owns turning field feedback into a product answer","Feedback has no owner",3.00,1.25,3.75,2,2,0.9,MED,"Add a third source of a new class: support tickets or churn-survey comments"

gate ∈ {HIGH, MED, LOW, ABSTAIN}. c1–c5 are the ranked consequences, most costly first. evidence_n / d / q are the counts the Convergence Gate reads: distinct sources, distinct classes, mean quality.

What you should be holding at minute thirty.

• A symptom stated in your own words (Q1), separated from what specifically broke (Q4).
• A causal claim you committed to before doing any math (Q5).
• A confidence read — HIGH, MED, LOW, or an honest abstention — built from your actual evidence classes, not your conviction.
• Either a next move, or a named piece of missing evidence and the cheapest way to get it.

If your Q5 claim and your ranking agree, and your evidence clears MED or better, you have enough to act. If they disagree, or you're sitting on three-plus unknowns, you have your next move: go get the evidence, not the fix.