A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:26:36 · Daniel Saks
[00:26:36] S0: yeah so step one for any company is know your TAM so you have to understand and build a comprehensive TAM map that would articulate okay for my business here are the segments that I can go after here are the exact companies here are the people at those companies and to have that living TAM map is actually a very costly or difficult exercise in fact when I was at AppDirect I remember maybe at our series C we hired Grant Thornton a firm and we paid a few hundred thousand to build this TAM map that showed okay here are the industries you can go after telco software manufacturing here's the estimated market size today with tools like Landbase you can have Claude build that TAM map for you and as you mentioned there is a key which is like how do you prompt it to do the right things and a lot of our efforts are helping our customers understand the perfect prompt but if you already have a lot of context in your Claude code you could literally go to Claude code and say use Landbase to build me a comprehensive TAM map and it's going to look through your call recordings it's going to look through your CRM it's going to look through your win-loss records it's going to look through your website it's going to look through your competitors and it's going to say okay here are the top segments that you should go after here's the tiered prioritization of them and then it can do a lot of research and qualification so a lot of times traditionally in prospecting if you just ask Apollo like hey find me manufacturing companies in Ohio they're not going to actually be the manufacturing companies you want there's going to be a lot of fluff in there it's going to be really confusing so what we can do is actually go in automatically and do research to understand like is this the exact person or story that you would need so for example with Landbase like while we service manufacturing companies like Honeywell or ABB or Schneider Electric we weren't going into the traditional selling arms we were typically looking at what are the IoT initiatives that they're underpinning and you can't do that type of work on ZoomInfo or Grata or Crunchbase you'd have to do a lot of manual research and that's why in the past reps were left to do this on their own it would be very time consuming and manual but with Landbase and Claude this can be done centrally by the head of RevOps by the
00:28:46 · Daniel Saks
CRO by the CEO if it's a smaller company and having that visibility to your TAM map gives you all the power in the world to understand how you forecast how you think through your pipeline how big your TAM is and if you have to build adjacent TAMs how well you're penetrating your initial TAM and just as I mentioned the key to product market fit is identifying these tight beachheads in which you can dominate so with AppDirect it was initially large telcos around the world and then it moved into adjacent fields what's super important is understanding like are you penetrating that so like Peter Thiel through Mithril was one of our investors at AppDirect he always talked about the idea of dominating a small niche market that can really grow and then finding adjacent markets or adjacent products to be able to expand that's what I really refer to as this magnetic momentum so having a TAM map allows you to do it's a total addressable market it's allowing you to understand okay for my initial segment how well am I penetrating that how much more you know should I hit at it you can even find out through Landbase like where your competitors penetrated versus you and this is all really helpful for an executive team for a board to understand how to navigate so for example at Landbase one of our recent pull areas has been what we call fractional SDRs so these are top callers that maybe left you know a big company as a BBR and went out on their own and they find their own customers but for these fractional SDRs they need to spend time list building and that's very time consuming very difficult so there are these like power sellers or fractional SDRs Fletcher Cox Jesse Rupa Tony Brophy these are like you know people who have huge LinkedIn followings and are seeing a lot of success in calling what we found is we enabled one of them to use their CLI then all of a sudden they're like I'm going to talk to more of my friends now we have like this whole influencer network that's using it and promoting it and then it's impacting their downstream channel so it's an example where the fractional SDR market's very niche it's not big enough for me to say that I'm going to be a you know 10 billion dollar company from but the pull in that market is strong so I can say how well penetrated are we on these fractional SDRs and what's the next adjacent market that we can move to where we can
00:30:57 · Daniel Saks
capture a higher contract value or have a bigger TAM and then how do we penetrate that market going back to like how I started the conversation when you said like what does product market fit feel like I don't believe the product market is fit is something that you don't have and then you have and you always have it and it's just like easy I believe that you're always fighting to find product market fit in adjacent categories and the way you can feel it is the pull so the example of you know us with fractional SDRs is important and how do I navigate that it's using Landbase but I have my TAM map I understand that fractional SDR is actually a pretty small segment of my TAM but I'm dominating that and because of that dominance I can then go into the next market that might still be a smaller niche market but I can dominate that too instead of being too wide
00:31:45 · Pablo Srugo
[00:31:45] S2: one of the things on TAM is like with this this breadth and niche like one of the challenges I see is I've got I mean there's companies I was talking company it sounds like customer success AI for customer success or like everybody has customer success like my world is everybody so you can segment however you want the upside is you're not going to run out I mean you can you can go crazy on volume and just go I've got other companies that are like I sell to a market that's still a big market but it's like maybe there's thousands of leads if you really think about it and like you will run out does that mean outbound just doesn't work or it's like you have to do it a different way how do you think about the relationship between you know how many accounts there could be and how you therefore should treat outbound
00:32:24 · Daniel Saks
[00:32:24] S0: yeah so I think like the best outbound companies are ones that have massive TAMs and massive value props so they have their own pull I'd call like Rippling, Ramp, Frigade they're probably the powerhouses for sophistication in outbound prospecting and they have the credibility to go out there and they have the hook that's going to be very strong I think for most companies that's not the reality they either have a small TAM which means you have to be much more careful on how you activate that TAM or if they go after too wide of a TAM they're going to fall into issues where the pull is not strong enough and therefore they have a lot of people marking in the spam and therefore the campaigns get burned and they don't see a lot of success so what we believe is you need to go with precision and even if you have a small TAM oftentimes that small TAM could actually be large companies with many people and you have to figure out okay who within this company do I go after so traditionally there was like ABM motions account-based marketing so what we've found is you can use land-based to intelligently approach account-based marketing and even though your TAM might just be a thousand fortune 1000s within those 1000s there may be millions of people that you have to figure out who am I going to navigate to and the titles are not obvious or indicative of who owns what the outcome is so that's where you want to bring intelligence to the forefront to say okay who should we go after in which priority have they talked about this on LinkedIn is their job description open for the pain point that I have that we can solve and that level of precision can make you as a seller or founder-based seller or SCR team or AE far more efficient because you're going after the right people at the right time with the right value problem
00:34:03 · Pablo Srugo, Daniel Saks
[00:34:03] S2: so that's kind of step one is kind of build that TAM and understand what it is and what kind of game you're playing what would be step two [00:34:09] S0: yeah so key thing with that TAM is to score it and prioritize it and understand who are the top accounts in which you want to put a lot of effort to traditionally called account-based marketing and what we even do is we say okay for our top tier A accounts I'm the one that's going to do the outreach because they're so strategic and important and we're going to put effort to go in person and meet them because the contract value can be big the next tier would be people that my team can go after and they're in the sweet spot and then there's lower tiers in which hey it'd be nice if they reach out to us but we're not going to we're going to do that on autopilot using the AISDR functionality of you're prospecting out on LinkedIn or email but maybe not giving calls or not spending in person time so the key is prioritizing your reps time because to drive pipeline you know the limitation is always going to be your time and capacity you want to make sure that you're focusing on the right things