Filters
Zen and the art of finding your total relevant market
Whether it’s a Series A or an IPO, your pitch deck probably included a slide that says the Total Addressable Market for your product/service is in the neighborhood of 30-50 gajillion dollars.
But building and executing a GTM strategy is very different from getting funding.
When you actually start assigning GTM budget and resources, you need to stop thinking about Total Addressable Market (TAM) and start thinking about Total Relevant Market (TRM).
What is Total Relevant Market?
We’re all familiar with the concept of Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), which can be fairly broad, like mid-market Salesforce users in the U.S. and Canada.
The GTM Operating System calls us to go deeper and find our best fit customers using firmographic, behavioral, or technographic characteristics.
Understanding who your buyer is and what they need is key to ensuring you know how and when to connect with your market.
How do you want to be perceived by your buyer? What realizations do they need to make about their problems to require your solution?
TRM and the 3 P’s
If you read MOVE, you’re familiar with the 3 Stages of GTM Business Transformation, also known as the 3 P’s:
Problem-Market Fit
Product-Market Fit
Platform-Market Fit
The lesson here is that if you’re still in the Product-Market Fit stage, you don’t necessarily need to be focused on customer cohorts and intent data.
However, if you’re at Platform-Market Fit and you’re still thinking about a broad TAM instead of multi-faceted segments and cohorts, you will struggle to achieve efficient growth.
What characteristics should you be considering?
By including these characteristics, you will have a clearer understanding of your TRM:
Firmographics: Bread and butter direction for your organization - can often be the only thing people discuss which can be a mistake.
Technographics: Think outside the box in terms of how technology information can enrich your profiles. While software companies will have natural “fits”, any company can deduce sophistication from technology even if they don’t sell tech themselves.
Qualifying Characteristics: This is the most nuanced and company-specific set of requirements. Internal facts that make them a good fit for your solution.
Readiness to Buy: What factors would put a company in a place to enter into a buying cycle. Behaviors that show they are “In Market” to buy.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to defining, quantifying, and operationalizing your ICP.
We’d love for you to join us for a virtual Leadership Summit coming up May 25 from 1:00-4:30 p.m. EST that tells all about how to identify and qualify your TRM. Even if you can’t attend the whole thing, sign up anyway because then you’ll be on the list to receive recordings and slide decks.
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Love,
The GTM Partners Team
P.S. Join us at Inbound: Here’s your Discount Code . . .
We are excited that our Co-Founder and CEO, Sangram Vajre, is speaking at Inbound again this year.
Hubspot has given us an exclusive 15% discount on General Admission passes that we can offer to all GTMonday subscribers (that’s you!). It expires on July 31, 2023, can only be used for new purchases and cannot be applied retroactively.
Discount code: GTMPartners
The line-up was just announced last week, and looks incredible as always.
