Marketing due diligence has become an important part of the commercial due diligence process for PE investors. However, the quality of your marketing due diligence—and how effective it will be in making better investment decisions and value creation plans—depends on the quality of the marketing data you collect. Not all data is created equal. When assessing a SaaS company’s growth potential or pressure-testing a management team’s value creation plan, you need clear, specific insights, which start with accurate and reliable data.

Inquisio was built to solve this problem, giving PE investors data-driven clarity to uncover marketing growth potential and make smart, confident decisions during due diligence and post-acquisition.

Inquisio’s Approach to Data

The question “where did this data come from?” is the foundation for credible analysis. We live in a world where AI tools like ChatGPT are being used to shortcut research. But we know they’re not giving us specific contextual information.

Inquisio is a purpose-built platform that addresses the realities of PE dealmaking, using curated sources and human expertise to produce insights you can trust. It builds insights from a structured blend of data sources, including vetted third-party tools and proprietary internal knowledge. Unlike ChatGPT, which relies on generalized benchmark data and publicly scraped content, Inquisio pulls from four rigorously selected data streams, then layers AI on our data sources and expert adjustments to give you a more complete and reliable picture of a company’s marketing performance.

Let’s take a closer look at Inquisio’s data sources and how they come together to create a custom marketing due diligence report.

How Sources, Expertise and AI Come Together to Create a Custom Report 

Inquisio’s data engine uses a deliberate and layered process that reflects the real-world complexity of SaaS businesses, providing more grounded and accurate insights into a company’s marketing function.

The four data sources we draw from—two internal, two external—include:

External Sources

1. Third-Party Marketing Intelligence Tools

We tap into trusted industry-standard third-party keyword and marketing insight platforms to gather directional digital marketing intelligence. This gives us a first view into an industry’s digital maturity, traffic trends, competitive positioning, high-level channel performance and how target companies stack up in their categories.

2. Institutional Benchmarking Data

We also use institutional benchmarking data from trusted and well-established SaaS performance and benchmark studies. This gives us a broader market view—what typical metrics look like for companies of a similar size or industry—and serves as a directional reference point. It also gives us a reality check on performance metrics—what “good” looks like across growth rates, CAC payback, funnel conversion and more—so we’re not evaluating companies in a vacuum. This also allows us to keep results relevant to current market conditions and stay up to date with shifting trends.

Internal Sources

3. Proprietary Operating Data

Then comes one of Inquisio’s key differentiators: our proprietary internal database. Inquisio is backed by How To SaaS’s extensive operating experience inside high-growth B2B SaaS companies, including battle-tested data on actual performance benchmarks and proven GTM motions. These are not publicly available numbers but the result of years of hands-on advisory work and are aggregated, anonymized and used to cross-reference, adjust and validate what we’re seeing from external sources. We apply quality checks, reviewing for anomalies and inconsistencies. 

4. Expert Knowledge & Subject Matter Insight

This is another key differentiating layer: context gained from our expertise of having worked with hundreds of SaaS companies across nearly every stage and vertical. This is baked into our assessments, layered on top of the numbers to identify risks, red flags and upside opportunities that templated frameworks often miss. We analyze a company’s baseline inputs—like industry, company size and funding stage. Then we apply contextual adjustments based on dynamic factors—such as average contract value, sales cycle complexity or TAM. This allows Inquisio to generate outputs that reflect the unique realities of the business you're assessing.

5. The Role of AI

AI plays the role of a smart assistant, helping structure and analyze the data we trust. It helps detect outliers and apply adjustments based on historical patterns in our database. Together, these sources and AI make Inquisio’s outputs more accurate, context-rich and actionable—especially compared to tools like ChatGPT, which often rely on limited datasets and surface-level generalizations. The result is a nuanced and trustworthy marketing due diligence report you can use to make informed investment decisions.