Introduce a "Calibration Cycle" & Optimize Marketing Investment

Founding teams often race from the building stage to go-to-market (GTM) without a brief intermission to calibrate their strategy. This is a costly error. Under the pressures of development, it is difficult for founding teams to set aside time to align on pivotal marketing questions at the deep, nuanced level required for effective marketing execution. Often, they are not only unaware of potential misalignments across their team — but haven’t tightly aligned their strategy to the perceptions, beliefs, and needs of their target audiences and the market environment.

A lack of alignment ensures drag on your entire marketing investment: without a blueprint to guide it, you can’t focus work or calibrate outcomes to business goals. It’s very difficult to know what marketing work actually matters or how it should be sequenced. Marketing resources can do marketing activities, but it’s impossible to gauge whether the results are useful or on target.

Taking a momentary pause to align, synchronize, and converge on key strategic questions before the full throttle of GTM investment gives founding teams a nexus from which to focus execution and measure outcomes.

A GTM Calibration Cycle drives positioning and narrative that is the core of effective fundraising and sales pitches. It establishes a blueprint for execution that guides subsequent investment of resources and budget. The outside agencies and freelancers needed to help execute brand, communications, launches and campaigns can be onboarded and aligned quickly. Spend on launches and campaigns can be activated with a singular focus on the results that truly matter.

The Calibration Cycle can be brief: this isn’t about losing speed. In fact, by setting this foundation early, it accelerates execution — and makes it possible to get to market faster. By applying an agile approach to this work, teams develop working hypotheses that meet a minimum threshold — which they pull into their strategic blueprint and use to jumpstart execution. By promptly integrating market feedback into the blueprint via recalibration cycles, they ensure not only continuous refinement, but rapidly and easily communicate shifts to all stakeholders along the way.

To accelerate GTM Calibration Cycles, I developed a comprehensive yet straightforward blueprint that I provide exclusively to my coaching clients that are navigating the shift from development to go-to-market without senior marketing resources in-house. Interested in learning more? Send me a message — let's talk!

Does this resonate? Share your comments! Know someone who needs to hear this? Share it with your network!