TAM and VOC
Every so often, client demands come in waves, and most recently, we’ve entered the season of TAM (total addressable market) and VOC (voice of the customer). Throw in competitive review, which we’re getting asked about quite a bit too lately, and it all points to an outside-in perspective. CEOs we speak with are coming out of the woodwork wanting to know what’s going on out there, especially after a year of pandemic and change taking place in the way customers and enterprises work, consume information, and otherwise do their jobs using our products and services.
I’m hearing a lot lately about rebuilding companies of the future, and wrote last week about going back to work in the context of what one client said: rebuilding the company of the future. To do that well, CEOs want their cultures to be more externally focused, including on the following:
- Competitor savvy — what are others doing and not doing, and how do we monitor the outside world to know what’s going on in the spaces where we compete?
- How do we understand our customers’ needs and build a culture that thinks outside-first and outside-in?
- How big are our markets? What is the TAM of the markets where we compete? How much share do we have of that TAM (our share of market or SAM)?
Leadership wants to influence their cultures to think about the size of the market, customer needs, and then how they differentiate. These three go together, as I’ve written about in past blogs about the Outsell Growth Framework and the methodologies we put to use within it. We have to know how our customers want to use our products and what their needs and pain points are, and then we must speak into that. We must know how big the market is so we can properly plan our go-to-market and positioning strategies, and we have to know how we compete so we can position correctly when we do go to market.
Post-pandemic, the phone is ringing off the wall asking about TAMs, customer needs, market size, share and growth, and competitive positioning. I’ve never seen anything like it. In almost all instances, the leader wants to focus the company and culture on being more externally focused and driven, and they want more systematic approaches to how they go to market. No more broad, horizontal, universal plays — today it’s about focus, precision, and using resources wisely.
If you are in need of any of these perspectives, give us a call. I can safely say that many of the leaders we speak with have this on their minds. Put us to use. This is a sweet spot for us, and we’ve got your back.