Jyothsna Durgados
Introduction to GreenFig Education Series
As part of GreenFig’s mission to enable lifelong learning and to accelerate skill development for high demand jobs with our microdegrees in applied business science, we are offering you a sneak peek into the GreenFig experience with our four week Education Series.
We provide highlights from the Digital Marketing Science classes taught by Tracy Eiler, CMO of InsideView. She is a marketing pioneer who is passionate about shaping the next generation of marketers. She was recently named a B2B Demand Marketing Game Changer and is ranked among the Top 30 Most Influential Women in B2B Marketing Technology.
Ms. Eiler moonlights as a GreenFig instructor, teaching the same cutting-edge topics that she’s advancing at InsideView, including how to align sales and marketing, define the total addressable market, and determine ideal customer profiles.
We are excited to offer our blog readers a taste of the job-ready skills our students are gaining this fall to prepare themselves for high-trajectory careers in the digital economy.
Putting it together: Turn Total Addressable Market into Closed Deals
In part three of our GreenFig Education Series, you will learn more about using your ideal customer profile to determine your true total addressable market and then how to turn that TAM into a targetable list for sales and marketing.
This is the third in a four-part series explaining the concept of total addressable market and providing tips to help you begin identifying, gathering data on, and targeting your company’s total addressable market. Click here to read part one’s overview of total addressable market, or click here to read part two’s tips on defining your ideal customer profile.
Why are these concepts – the notion of distilling your target market down to the granular level – and putting them into practice critical to growing your B2B business? The answer is simple, ROI. Companies who focus their efforts on these initiatives experience a better return on their marketing dollar investment.
Put Sales and Marketing to Work by Turning Total Addressable Market into Targets
Now that you have created your ideal customer profile (ICP) you can accurately determine your total addressable market (TAM). On one hand, TAM is just a number (e.g. you have 2,389 potential targets). On the other hand, TAM is a list of accounts and contacts that gives you access to your entire market. Your TAM is 2,389 account names, addresses, firmographics, and more. Beyond that, it is the thousands of contacts who fit the roles and titles that match your ICP.
As an aside, this is where TAM really helps supercharge other initiatives such as account-based marketing and account-based sales (jointly abbreviated as ABM). It focuses every go-to-market program on precisely the accounts that fit your targeting criteria. Your ICP tells you the attributes of your best targets, TAM tells you who all of those targets are and your sales and marketing teams can then pare that down into a more manageable list of target ABM accounts.
To determine the size and potential of your TAM, you generally need to utilize a third-party data service. Again, more granularity is better and when you begin to identify unique characteristics to define your market it is going to take more than an internet search or a list purchase to find your TAM.
Knowing your full TAM helps you identify and fill the gaps in your current sales and marketing database. Most companies do not have complete coverage of their TAM. What’s missing is called whitespace and it is not just missing accounts, it is the thousands of missing contacts within those accounts and the missing attributes (email address, phone number, etc.) of those individual contacts. Once you identify your whitespace, you can begin importing net new prospects and correcting, cleaning, and adding missing data to your marketing automation and CRM systems.
Now that you have complete coverage, it is up to you to keep that data clean and current. However, simply knowing your TAM puts you far ahead of most competitors.
In the fourth installment, you’ll learn how total addressable market can be used beyond just sales and marketing to justify new investments, identify new markets, and much more.
If you missed the previous installments in this series, you can find them here:
Part 1 Maximize Growth by Targeting Your Total Addressable Market
Part 2 Ideal Customer Profile Brings Total Addressable Market into Focus
Blog written by Jyothsna Durgados
See Tracy in Action
For more information on GreenFig’s upcoming courses taught by industry pros like Tracy Eiler, contact us.
Learning and applying industry-current concepts like TAM and ICP in an accelerated format is why GreenFig graduates so effectively add value to their employers and differentiate themselves from their peers.
Paula Sansburn, COO
