TAM is so important for understanding the potential and opportunity for a given business. Management needs it. Board expects it. Investors demand it. This is a metric that should be a living breathing number and tracked and entered into board decks and discussed at length. HOWEVER, your TAM is NOT a bunch of Opportunities that are created in your CRM with an arbitrage revenue amount and close date so you can show an inflated pipeline. I partook in this nonsense, once! It was a cluster F@ck!
Think about this, Opps created with a close date and a $ amount that have never been contacted, let alone qualified. And not just a few, your TAM should be large and in some cases enormous. Please do not make this mistake, ever. This is not a sound plan to get your sales and marketing team to start contacting these potential prospects.
A better plan for addressing your TAM and expanding sales and revenue is to:
1). Create them as leads and assign those leads out to sales reps or SDR’s based on geography or sector. Have a marketing journey created and start to educate these companies on your product and service.
2). If you do not use leads in your CRM, make these TAM companies accounts, and do the same as #1 with regards to reaching out.
3). Best bet yet, use the hashflag.io method, which is to track these companies, see what they’re engaging with digitally and proactively reach-out with a message that they’re interested in. Hence, intelligence outreach.
The worst plan:
Creating a bunch of fake Opps in your CRM and just making a mess of your data and then having the annual kick-the-can event, which is when all of these fake Opps close date needs to be moved to another arbitrage date.
