Mastering Persuasion: The Key to Effective Go-to-Market Strategies for Executives

Too many executives have the wrong mental models, which lead to flawed G0-To-Market (GTM) practices. Like being too busy evangelizing solutions. Like being too focused on “planning” and other activities under the company’s control. Bluntly; the marketplace doesn’t care about your company – unless you satisfy their most urgent needs.

Not enough attention is placed on defining what mental models will lead to executive and Board decision-making outcomes that entice the marketplace to care. Without a radical shift away from existing mental models, companies will continue to follow flawed GTM practices and realize 70+% product failure rates. Breaking out of that pattern requires curiosity and humility, both of which are often missing.

Here is the starting point for a new mental model: Your ultimate mission as an executive is to build a great and enduring company. When you cut through all the noise, there are only two metrics that matter – dominant valuations and dominant operating performance. Your company realizes those two outcomes through its marketplace interactions with three groups: investors, corporate partners, and customers. Regardless of whether you are paying attention to them, these three groups are either doing some level of ongoing due diligence to evaluate the effectiveness of your company’s go-to-market strategies and performance or, worse, you are invisible to them.

Here is what is really striking: Your company has no direct control over any of the three groups.

That means executives are in the persuasion business.

Robust GTM strategies – which lead to satisfying top customer needs – are the means of persuasion. If your company gets its GTM strategy right from the very beginning, you will take products and services to market in a way that convinces investors, partners, and customers that they should care enough to invest in your company, partner with your company, and buy your product or service.

All companies and executives have blind spots – in mental models and in knowing what GTM work must be done in order to be persuasive. If you want to overcome any GTM blind spots, you need to be a GTM athlete who can deliver on all three parts of The GTM Persuasion Framework:

1. Product-Segment Fitness
2. Business-Model Fitness
3. Organizational Fitness

Dig deeply from the beginning to find the differentiating GTM levers that will make you persuasive.

The GTM Persuasion Framework is powerful because it directly guides companies at their four primary value creation moments:

1. New product investments
2. Current product performance improvements
3. Financing diligence
4. Partnering diligence.

Gut-check question: Do you initiate dialogues that seek to engage, understand, and persuade?

Those behaviors are prerequisites to developing robust GTM strategies that will withstand external marketplace due diligence scrutiny by investors, corporate partners, and customers.

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