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A Manifesto for CEOs: How to Connect Strategy to Execution
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Business transformation doesn’t happen through strategy alone—it happens through execution, alignment, and ownership of systems at the highest level.
As CEO, you don’t delegate Go-to-Market (GTM).
You own it.
GTM is not a marketing problem. It’s not a sales initiative. It’s not a campaign. It is the system that determines how your company creates, captures, and delivers value.
Without a cohesive GTM approach, your company risks misalignment, stalled growth, and inefficiencies that cost millions in lost opportunities.
To build a company that scales predictably and efficiently, CEOs must lead GTM as a transformational process—not a one-time strategy.
A Manifesto for CEOs
1. GTM is a Transformational Process, Not a One-Time Strategy
GTM is not a project or a product launch—it’s a continuous, iterative process that evolves as your business grows. The companies that scale successfully treat GTM as a system that requires constant refinement, rather than a static playbook.
2. Business Transformation Happens in Teams
You cannot fix marketing and think you’ve fixed GTM. Misalignment between marketing, sales, product, and customer success is one of the biggest barriers to growth. True GTM transformation requires breaking down silos so that every function operates as a single revenue-driving engine.
3. Systems > Goals
James Clear said it best: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” It’s not enough to set ambitious revenue targets. Scalable growth only happens when you implement repeatable, measurable, and cross-functional GTM systems. Without them, even the best strategy will fail in execution.
4. NRR is the #1 Business Health Metric
Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is the single most important indicator of your company’s long-term success. If you can’t retain and expand customers, acquiring new ones won’t save you. CEOs must prioritize NRR to drive efficient growth, improve predictability, and create a sustainable business model.
5. GTM is the Business. The CEO Owns It.
GTM is not a department—it is the operating system of your entire business. As CEO, your job is not just to acquire customers but to build a system that makes sustainable, scalable growth inevitable.
Understand Your Problems
Before you get to solutions, you need to understand your problems. We have three frameworks to help diagnose and understand what isn’t working.
The 15 Problems
We’ve worked with hundreds of companies, and the following 15 problems consistently appear across industries. They’re often the root causes of growth stalls:
🎬 ACTION STEP: Gather your functional leaders and have them identify their top 3-5 challenges from this list. This exercise creates alignment around the biggest barriers to growth.
The 5 Valleys of Death
While functional leaders may focus on department-level problems, executives and boards see high-level strategic challenges that we call the 5 Valleys of Death. These are critical moments where growth stalls unless the right GTM strategy is implemented:
🎬 ACTION STEP: Assess your company's valley and develop a plan to realign your GTM efforts accordingly.
The 3 P Framework for Growth
Companies often experience growth stalls when scaling operations. Before you can get into solution mode, you need to diagnose your business stage so you can align your GTM strategy accordingly.
1. Problem Market Fit: Identify and solve a significant customer problem.
2. Product Market Fit: Sell a single solution to a defined audience in a repeatable way.
3. Platform Market Fit: Expand through existing customers, multiple products, and diverse GTM motions.
Tailoring your strategy to your current stage prevents growth stalls from becoming full breakdowns.
🎬 ACTION STEP: Identify your current stage within the GTM framework. Ensure your GTM strategy aligns with this stage to maximize growth potential.
All of these problems add up to one common theme:
And that means you need a GTM solution.
We’ve tried for so long to fix all our problems by fixing a department. It doesn’t work.
Success requires cross-functional collaboration across all revenue-driving teams—sales, marketing, product, and customer success.
Alignment around a common GTM strategy is the only way to ensure sustainable growth.
Understand the Solution: the GTM Operating System
Many companies treat GTM as a set of disconnected tactics rather than a holistic system for scalable growth.
The GTM Operating System (GTM O.S.) solves this by providing a structured framework that aligns marketing, sales, customer success, and product around shared goals, processes, and metrics.
How the GTM O.S. Creates Business Transformation:
Unifies Revenue-Driving Teams – GTM O.S. eliminates silos by creating a shared framework across marketing, sales, customer success, and product teams. When everyone speaks the same language and tracks the same metrics, alignment happens organically.
Creates a System for Predictable Growth – Instead of chasing arbitrary revenue targets, GTM O.S. builds scalable processes that ensure consistent pipeline generation, conversion, and expansion.
Incorporates the Right GTM Motions – Whether a company is inbound-led, outbound-led, PLG-driven, or event-driven, the GTM O.S. helps identify and optimize the right motion for sustainable success.
Prioritizes Efficiency Over Volume – Growth is no longer about “more leads” or “more deals.” The system ensures that customer acquisition, retention, and expansion efforts are data-driven and efficient.
Drives Decision-Making with Real Data – GTM O.S. centralizes key GTM data, providing executives with the insights they need to refine strategies in real-time.
Each of the pillars of the GTM Operating System has a question that goes with it.
Answering these eight questions illuminates your business transformation strategy.
How the GTM O.S. Can Help
Building out your GTM on one slide using these 8 questions simplifies your strategy into a concise, integrated, actionable format that everyone can see and understand.
In fact, 68% of GTM leaders say their biggest problem is lack of internal clarity- more than market conditions, competition, or any other factor.
Building out your strategy on one slide creates that clarity that so many say are missing.
Here’s an example from Hubspot.
Click here to access the Map Your GTM O.S. on a Slide course (14-day access at no cost to GTMonday readers)
The course includes:
Love,
Sangram and Bryan
p.s. Hope to see many of you at Pavilion’s CMO Summit this week!
