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"But, selling it to a company that have commitments to investors, paying customers and an executive team who might not all have technical backgrounds makes TDD a hard sell"

It's an incredibly easy sale. The whole basis of TDD is that it's an approach that makes your development efforts faster, with higher quality. A million graphics of the amount of time that development spends fixing errors are what sold TDD to the masses.

The theory of TDD is exactly what sells to the suits and the money counters.

The theory doesn't mesh with reality, though, and it's that engagement with the enemy (reality) where TDD falls down.

As an aside, in my own career I've seldom been able to incorporate TDD because each project has been novel enough that trying to define tests up front was just not possible. Yes, if I was implementing the re-invent the wheel "sum two numbers" type example, it's trivial. But most of the time it's a vague API for a vague need on an uncertain technical foundation, and until the clay has taken form we really weren't sure what we were dealing with.