TAM build and sizing
Purpose
Give a market number that a finance lead can check, and a company universe that can be filtered into a campaign without cleaning.
When to use
- A finance lead needs a defensible market size, with its source and limits stated.
- A company universe is needed that can be filtered into a campaign without cleaning.
Route elsewhere when:
- The ICP itself is not yet defined. Use icp-builder.
- An existing list needs sorting against the ICP. Use audience-icp-filter.
Inputs
- ICP definition. Industry, company size, geography, business model, disqualifiers. Ask for the minimum (industry, size, geography) if missing.
- Counting unit: companies, not contacts. Decide how subsidiaries, franchises, and multi-brand groups are counted.
- Contract value. Median or trimmed mean of comparable closed-won deals, annualized. Never use a price-page maximum or an unlabeled range.
- Existing CRM export (optional), to measure coverage.
Procedure
- Freeze the ICP. Write inclusion and exclusion rules before counting. Separate required filters from preferences, and note which filters each source can measure.
- Enumerate companies. Retrieve from a source that returns matching companies. Record the source, query date, filters applied, filters omitted, and any cap. A count alone is a count estimate, not a list.
- Deduplicate on root domain, not company name. Name variants are common; domains are stable.
- Cross-check with a second method (registry, known-account sample, or CRM classification). Investigate large gaps before averaging.
- Record provenance on every field: source, date, and confidence. Do not infer a field that can be retrieved.
- Log saturation. Run additional queries until new domains per query approach zero. Record the yield curve. If the run was capped, say so.
- Separate the tiers. Verified-size companies and unknown-size companies are reported as separate numbers. Unknown is not disqualified.
- Size revenue:
- Account TAM = eligible accounts.
- Revenue TAM = eligible accounts multiplied by confirmed annual contract value.
- Contact target = eligible accounts multiplied by buying roles per account.
- SAM and SOM. SAM applies the must-have criteria and removes thin-coverage segments. SOM keeps only accounts with active signals in the last 90 days. Note that SOM changes each quarter.
- Measure current coverage (if a CRM export is given). Classify each CRM account as in-TAM, out-of-TAM, or unknown against the same ICP. Only in-TAM accounts count as coverage. Report account, contact, and role coverage separately.
- Rank segments by company count, coverage ease, and signal density. Name the top three.
- Plan any fill in governed batches. Resolve identity before creating records. Review cost and sample quality before each batch. Creation and spend require approval. Research and planning can run freely.
Output
- A TAM summary table: TAM, SAM, SOM, each with companies, contact target, and notes.
- Breakdown by industry, size, geography, and funding stage, each with a signal-density column.
- Segment ranking with the reason for each.
- Coverage report: verified and unknown tiers, saturation log, cap disclosure, CRM coverage (if measured).
- A list of companies, one row per company, deduplicated on domain, with provenance columns.
- Recommended next step: which segment to build a territory from first.
Quality bar
- Each number names its source, date, unit, and main limitation.
- Account, revenue, contact, and role coverage are never combined.
- Any capped result is labeled a floor, not the universe.
- A CRM account counts as coverage only if it is in-TAM.
- If verified in-TAM accounts already exceed the estimate, revise the estimate upward rather than forcing the count down.
- No ETA is projected from fewer than three comparable snapshots.
Rules
- Sizing and enumeration only. Contact finding and email verification come after the list is approved.
- Contract value is the input to revenue sizing. Do not guess it.