My last post focused on understanding how relevant your products are to your customers (Step 1 & 2), Step 3 below is about sizing your target market and quantifying what the current opportunity is. These are the key questions you need to consider as you work through sizing your opportunity.

Like Step 1 and 2 you’ll get more out of this step if you can get your sales, marketing and product teams working through these issues together. As a reminder all the Five Steps to Sales Growth are summarized here.

STEP 3: Current Market Opportunity

• When are customers ready to buy – are there market conditions that drive buyer readiness such as legislation, technology adoption or fundamental industry change on the horizon?
• Customer locations – Sizing the market by location can highlight future office sites, where to hire, where to build brand awareness, etc.
• Segments with identifiable value propositions – Do segments offer opportunity for separate lines of revenue, for example; new brands or bundling of products. Are different value propositions needed for each segment?
• Personas and motivations to buy – Humanizing demographics with the use of personas provides you with clear examples of the typical ideal customer (Buyer, User, and Influencer). This brings focus to conversations for your team about markets and customers.
• Size the Total Addressable Market – This is a numbers based exercise with as much real world data as can be gathered. Drilling down on the actual number of buyers will be useful here. Clear assumptions of size, sale price and forecast quantity purchased should be presented for debate and reviewed as more information comes to hand. This information is critical for any business case or investor pitch.
• The ideal sell price – There are many ways to set a sell price from the heavily research to the suck it and see approach. Find a pragmatic balance for your situation using an appropriate amount of market testing and then get on with releasing it to market. Always leave yourself room to change this in the future, including ensuring your customer contract T&C’s enable price changes. If unsure start high, customers will not resist price reductions. Note also that a low price can translate to perceived low quality for some buyers.
• Assess customer Lifetime Value – Understanding your Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and Lifetime Value (LTV) will also be critical for any business case or investor pitch. For this you will need to know, or assume recurring revenue, gross margin, churn and discount rates. As an example of a SaaS business, if LTV is 3X or greater than CAC, it is a good sign the business model will work.
• Position against key direct and indirect competitors – Understanding your competitive landscape will be an exercise in ongoing intelligence gathering, however getting a broad fix on this early is important. Data from large competing companies is relatively easy to obtain and often where most stop. You will need to dig around for data on the mid-size and small competitors as these can be significant in number but may not have the public presence. Using locals to gather data, customer contacts and industry insiders will improve your competitor data quality.

​The level of quantification each business needs to size its target market will vary considerably depending on your sponsor’s and stakeholder’s requirements. In most cases I have found market sizing is a combination of facts, hypothesis and assumptions. Get comfortable with the level of ambiguity you will accept and move forward.

What are some of the challenges you have experienced in sizing your target markets, does any of the above sound familiar?

In my next post I’ll provide more examples and thoughts to help you tell your story – Step 4: How Are You Telling Your Story?.

Following on from my first summary post on the Five Steps to Sales Growth below are key questions, examples and thoughts to help you tackle Step 1 and Step 2. Ideally you will want your sales, marketing and product teams working through these issues together.

STEP 1: Service / Product Understanding

• What it does (today) - It’s important to understand what it does / creates / delivers in its most basic form. For a tangible product this will be a simple feature list, for a service this may be a clear statement about deliverables the customer will receive.
• Immediate and obvious benefits to customers – This is a one or two sentence statement in customer language about the problem solved and forms the beginnings of your value proposition statement. You will want to ensure messages about these benefits and what it does are consistently used in your sales team’s conversations with customers.
• Production / scale barriers – What are the prerequisites to offering your product services to customers. Are there constraints such as legislation, geography, maximum production capacity, language, market segment, etc?
• Manufacture, build, delivery and support costs – Build an understanding of your true and full costs from the beginning as it is much easier to develop processes and systems to capture this data early rather than once you are selling. This cost information will be key base data for future business analysis that you will be called on to do by multiple stakeholders.

Note: These points assume you already have customers using your product/service. If not and you are still defining what you will offer you should swap Step 1 and Step 2 around.

STEP 2: Customer Need Understanding

• Do customers know they have a need – Is your solution to the customer’s problem so obvious that they will buy without being educated or do you need to “train the market”?
• Confirm and test - Who is the actionable group of buyers within your target market and what’s in it for them? How do you compare to other products they know, what is it that sets you apart? Why are you better and what is the proof to your claim?
• Holistic view of stakeholders – Are there other stakeholders outside of your target buyers who may influence buyers, benefit from a buyers purchase, or create barriers to purchase. These could be officials that monitor legislation in a market or they could simply be the children of the people who buy your products.
• Common customer behaviours – What triggers the need to buy, how do buyers research, what is the cycle time from, need recognised to purchase made. What are the buyers' after sales relationship expectations, i.e. technical support, account management, loyalty discounts, etc.
• Common situational issues – Are there seasonal factors that you need to take into account such of end of financial year, stocking for Christmas, etc.

These are just a slice of the issues you may need to address for each step. Feel free to add comments from your own experience within your markets, products and services.
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In my next post I’ll provide more examples and thoughts to help you address the challenges of assessing your market size in Step 3: How Big is Your Market Opportunity?

​Over the past 17 years I have consulted to, managed and coached dozens of businesses from multinationals to early stage start-ups. "We need more sales" is often what I hear and at the core of the many answers to this question are the following five steps to sales growth.

​At times only one of these steps is top of the business agenda and that’s ok as long as it is in context with the other four. The biggest failures, however, occur when improving just one of these steps is considered as the full sales strategy and therefore relied upon to deliver sales growth. To build and maintain healthy sales, each step must be considered as being interdependent. 

Businesses often find that they are in a continuous evolutionary state with respect to almost every step listed. I can’t stress enough the importance of acknowledging each step as a fundamental component of the full sales strategy. Taking the time to audit where you are at with each of these steps is a far better investment than reacting to underperforming sales results by firing, hiring or changing incentive plans for your sales teams.

In this age of new digital sales techniques, tricks and skills being touted as the next best thing it has never been more important than now to develop a considered and holistic sales approach.

In my upcoming posts I hope to help your understanding of these issues by drilling down on each of the five steps with practical clues and share examples on how to execute for your business.

Details for each of these steps can now be found at the following links; Step 1 and Step 2, Step 3, Step 4 and Step 5 here