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As VCs, we see companies come up with 5-year financial models - what we look for is the thought process - rarely the specifics! The ONLY guarantee is that what's on the model will NOT happen - as epitomized by this @DailyDilbert cartoon! 
@DailyDilbert This is particularly true for very-early stage companies - especially in the B2B sector - where the core value proposition is still being defined, customer ROI hard to measure and CAC still is hard to quantify.
This doesn't mean you can't have a model - its important to at least have a sense for all the costs and challenges you are likely to face in sales and marketing process - and what the problem is and the impact of solving it to the customer.
Identifying the customer, defining your value proposition, trying to quantify the acuteness of the problem, getting a sense for how compelling your solution is to their problem - all these are proxies to your sales cycle and ability to charge fair value.
Price discovery is however a bit of an art and a science - several tech startups look at what it costs them and put a margin on top of it. That's the easy way out and is often what lazy founders do...because they're scared to ask the customer what their product means to them!
The concern - "What will they think if I ask them these questions?" is definitely dwarfed by the alternate - Spending seven years of your life to find out that your product's value proposition wasn't compelling in the first place! Make sure you confirm from your early customers..
So when VC's ask an early stage company for a model, what we're really looking for are your assumptions, your thought process, and whatever validation you have from customers of the product value proposition - and consistency among these.
Even when you raise later-stage rounds - Series A/B - people are primarily looking at the thought process, except that in these rounds, it needs to be backed by data. So keep the model simple - but based on common sense, clarity of thought and be transparent with assumptions made
To summarize however, don't wing-it, don't BS your way - keep a simple and logical model, one that you can explain in a simplistic manner. If you can't whiteboard the basic model, you have a problem!
