Years ago, I hired a guy from a huge CPG brand in Atlanta that rhymes with Boca-Bola.
Big mistake.
Everyone warned me that a big company guy didn’t want to do the work of a smaller agency, but that wasn’t the problem exactly.
Early on, he was very concerned because he felt the numbers on our new campaign were too low. He insisted that there wasn’t enough volume.
But I was more concerned about the lack of velocity. It wasn’t the number of emails; they weren’t moving the needle fast enough.
Here’s the thing: in B2B, you don’t need three million impressions; you need one deal.
Just one deal from one campaign is a win because the volume can be low if the value is high.
This isn’t always the case in B2C (especially in a global beverage brand), and that’s where it differs from B2B. It’s also why it’s hard to apply B2C thinking to the B2B world.
In supply chain, for example, you only have 20,000 shippers. Therefore, only so many fit within your ideal customer profile (ICP). The same is true in industries like pharma and power.
And you can’t get 3,000,000 anything when you only have a possible 20,000.
Your total addressable market (TAM)—and an understanding of its nuances and limitations—must factor into your volume metric, or it’ll be out of whack.
Because yes, volume is a numbers game, but only if you have accurate numbers.
Tactically speaking, you must ensure you have the email addresses of every human who can buy from you. Because, as Donald Miller says, “humans buy from humans.”
Unfortunately, companies don’t always understand what email addresses they have—or don’t have.
After connecting with a $50-100M mid-market supply chain company, we asked the question we always ask new clients: “Do you own your TAM?”
Their response? “No, but we have a lot of records (i.e., email addresses) we market to.”
Great, we thought.
Knowing that transportation software companies have 19,677 shippers with over $500M in revenue, we started to do the math. If their TAM was 20,000 global shippers, and 75% of them were in their ICP, they would have 15,000 records. And if you have roughly two humans per company, they should have about 30,000 records.
We got super excited about this until we got into their Hubspot and found…
(drumroll, please)
…2,000 records.
Worse, they’d obtained these through expensive, hard-to-execute methodologies. Their cost of acquisition was something like $2 per record. Ouch.
Fortunately, we told them we could probably find more. And using one of our favorite tools, SalesIntel, we discovered their TAM, and they now have 60,000 records in their database.
There are generally two ways to do your TAM:
- Use your current paying customers to identify your next customers because they look and feel like your current ones
- The “wishful thinking” approach identifying who you want to work with but who aren’t your customers currently
Either way, you’ve got to be honest with yourself about what you have now, what you hope to gain, and how fast you can get there. (Bonus tip: get your executive involved in the process of identifying your TAM; it’s that important.)
The other thing to note about your TAM? It will change over time.
The customers you want to serve will shift, and the actual humans associated with companies will change jobs. If you’ve emailed the same TAM you pulled in 2019, everyone has moved on. And if they didn’t want to hear from you then, they sure don’t want to hear from you now.
Remember, in B2B, volume is relative to value. So identify your true TAM and ICP within it, then focus on those people because a single deal from a highly-targeted campaign is a huge win when the value is high.