A thorough analysis of Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Available Market (SAM) and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) is important for understanding the market size and growth potential of your product or service, as well as for designing an effective go-to-market strategy. These concepts are also often central to pitch decks, and a thorough market assessment shows investors that you understand your market and have a realistic growth plan.
Briefly explained, what are TAM, SAM and SOM?
- Total Addressable Market (TAM): The total revenue potential of a product or service if it achieves 100% market share without competition (usually purely hypothetical).
- Serviceable Available Market (SAM): The part of the TAM that can be served by the company's products or services, considering your business model and strategy.
- Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM): The proportion of SAM that the company realistically can achieve in the short term, based on current resources and the competitive situation.
How do you calculate TAM, SAM and SOM?
Total Addressable Market (TAM): The total market opportunity
Many use a top-down approach to calculate TAM, where they analyze industry data, market reports, and research studies to estimate the total market size. This can provide some insight, but if you want to convince a professional investor, a bottom-up calculation will often be better.
A bottom-up approach is based on having a concrete or intended pricing. When using this method, multiply the number of potential customers by the average annual contract value or purchase amount. This not only provides a more original and precise assessment of the market potential than a top-down approach, but when using a bottom-up approach in your pitch deck, you are showing the investor that you have a deeper understanding of the market.
Let's take an exampleYou sell software for agriculture for 10,000 NOK per year. There are 37,267 agricultural businesses (2024) In Norway. If you multiply these numbers, you get a TAM of 372.6 million NOK. If you have plans to sell internationally in the future, you must include global or relevant markets in your TAM – but this only makes sense if you actually have international ambitions. Counting all the world’s agricultural companies will only give an inaccurate picture if your focus is only on Norway.
If, on the other hand, you dream of building Norway's next unicorn, Therefore, you need to think bigger. Venture capitalists rarely look at companies with a TAM of less than $1 billion – so if you want to attract these investors, you need to ensure that your market potential is large enough to be interesting. You can also use this opportunity to demonstrate how your TAM can grow over time through product development or market expansion.
If you are in a very early stage or working on a highly innovative product, and haven’t yet launched products, it can be challenging to perform a bottom-up calculation of the TAM. In such cases, you can instead analyze the price of comparable products and consider which premium your superior solution can offer. Focus on the value your product will provide to customers, conduct qualitative and quantitative surveys, and estimate what the customer would realistically be willing to pay.
TAM gives you an idea of the maximum market opportunity, but it is unrealistic to reach the entire market. Therefore, you need to narrow it down into market segments, demonstrated by SAM.
Serviceable Available Market (SAM): Which market segments are relevant for you?
SAM provides a more realistic picture of the market that your products or services can actually serve. To calculate SAM, you need to identify the most relevant market segments and estimate the size of each segment.
Following the previous example, and adding that your software is specifically designed for dairy farmers, we can narrow the market. In Norway, there were 6,499 dairy farms in 2023 (source), and if you sell your software for 10,000 NOK per year per farm, your SAM will be 64.9 million.
Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM): What market share can you realistically achieve in the short term?
SOM represents the share of SAM that the company realistically can achieve in the short term. In an investor presentation, you can, for example, present SOM as the market share your company can capture if you secure the desired funding and execute the strategy as planned.
Let's assume that your company sold software for 1 million NOK last year. With a SAM of 64.9 million NOK, you have a market share of about 1.5%. If the SAM increases to 80 million NOK next year, you can expect a SOM of about 1.2 million NOK. This is based on the expected growth rate in your segment. A more precise calculation of the SOM can be made by also taking into account factors such as competition, the company's capacity, and plans for developing new products and services in the short term.
Calculating the ASM is easier if you have a solid business model and realistic data from actual sales. However, even if you haven’t sold anything yet, you can still make a qualified calculation by identifying your simplest first customer.
For example, if you’re based in Ås and develop a solution for dairy farmers, you could start by mapping out how many dairy farmers of a certain size exist in Follo, and then expand the analysis to Akershus. This first segment, known as your «beachhead market,» is the part of the market where you have the greatest likelihood of rapid adoption and can build early growth.
Using this approach, you can realistically assess how much of the SAM you can actually capture in the short term, even before you have concrete sales figures.
Masterclass in the Go-to-market strategy: Who and where is your first customer?
If you are interested in learning more about Go-to-market strategy and calculating market potential, you can sign up for the ESSE masterclass led by BI and eSmart Systems on 19th June. here.
Photo by Owen Cannon on Unsplash
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