Summary
In this article, I explore various strategies to unlock your total addressable market and boost B2B revenue growth. I discuss the importance of providing value-added content without gatekeeping and respecting prospect anonymity, which helps create a positive user experience.
Emphasising the power of digital selling, I highlight the effectiveness of implementing live streaming on social media platforms as one of the ways to engage with potential clients and showcase your business.
Lastly, I stress the need to rethink financial projections (in a good way!), considering the cost-efficiency and reach of salesXchange's take on digital selling and digital marketing compared to traditional telesales and BDR approaches.
Table of Contents
- Understanding TAM, SAM, and SOM
- The Challenges of Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing
- Creating Diverse Content
- Gradual Social Media Marketing
- Buying a TAM Database
- Building Anticipation with Email Marketing
- Using LinkedIn Banners
- Setting Up a Live Stream Show
- Enabling Self-Service on Your Website
- Rethink Your Financial Projections
- Key Takeaways
- FAQs
- Conclusion
1. Understanding TAM, SAM, SOM
If you're in sales, you may have heard that between 1% to 15% of your TAM start their buying journey every week. That means, if a TAM was 10,000 businesses, approximately 100 to 1500 businesses are prime – every week!
A percentage of them will engage with your business if you’re visible and accessible. If only fifty watched, that’s 0.5%, it would be the equivalent work effort of at least fifty BDRs or telesales operatives.
The costs and benefits of this strategy are unmatched in anything you will have ever done before in the lifetime of your business.
Before diving into strategies to unlock your Total Addressable Market (TAM), it is important to understand the concepts of TAM, Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). These terms help you define the potential market for your product or service, which is essential for planning your sales and marketing efforts.
- TAM: Total Addressable Market represents the entire potential market for your product or service.
- SAM: Serviceable Addressable Market is the portion of TAM that you can feasibly target and serve with your current capabilities and resources.
- SOM: Serviceable Obtainable Market is the realistic portion of SAM that you can capture, considering competition and other factors.
No one wants to teach anyone to ‘suck-eggs’, but the repeated problems within B2B seems that less and less marketers are aware of these acronyms and therefore are unaware how to address this issue.
The critical issue is to understand who, in your own manageable geographic area can be contacted. This is going represent 100% of the businesses you could ever sell to.
2. The Challenges of Traditional B2B Sales and Marketing
Traditional B2B sales and marketing methods have become increasingly ineffective as they tend to focus on automation and impersonal approaches. Common challenges include:
- Overemphasis on marketing automation platforms (MAPs)
- Low cold-call success rates; now as low as 300-1
- Inability to connect with prospects who prefer anonymity
- Inability to connect with prospects who want to self-serve
- Inability to connect with prospects who want to define the ROI before speaking to a salesperson
- Content gating that makes your business invisible to search engines
- Content gating that 100% of business buyers click away because they hate filling out forms to obtain information
To differentiate your business and connect with your TAM, you must employ creative strategies that cater to the preferences of modern buyers.
3. Creating a Diverse Content
Most B2Bs create blogs and provide a few downloads and gate as much content as they can, so Marketing can grab all the attrition they can. However…
For this new approach to work, your teams need to excel at creating diverse content to align with the diversity of prospects who want your products. Not everyone wants to read a blog. Some want to listen to your podcast on the way to work, some prefer videos and others enjoy live streaming. And then of course there are those who do like to read and download your content to read on their iPad over the weekend.
With some preplanning it is possible to take a long form written article, which is also available as a PDF download, talk about it on a live show, record the live show for your website and convert the show into a podcast and distribute it across the world.
From one article, you now have five separate content items all of which could have ten adverts promoting each media type. That’s fifty adverts from one article, catering for every preference. Can you see how and why this works.
4. Gradual Social Media Marketing
In today's digital age, businesses are expectant of an instant result. This does not happen – ever!
The primary position for all CEOs is to understand and accept that other buyers will buy like you do.
B2B buyers do not live in a vacuum! They, we, know what technologies are available, pretty much, therefore we don’t need some salesperson trying to contact us telling us how to run our business, especially as they probably have never run their own business before.
Everything is about recognition. If you start with the least effort and least expectation and build up, you will gradually start reaping the rewards.
We have developed a strategy called Social 444 which stands for posting four adverts, four times a day over four weeks and repeat. We have since changed this to ten adverts per day and repeat. This equates to creating 300 separate adverts or posts for our content. The affect is LinkedIn only sees one advert per month and does not get upset with ‘spam’. Social 444 sounds better than 10,10,4 – well, I think so, what do you think?
Combining your followers and the general newsfeed exposure from LinkedIn creates significant exposure via impressions and engagement. For us, we achieve 1000+ impressions per week and 60+ engagements.
Whilst we have a relatively low following, approx. 2,500, if you have a larger more establish following and more salespeople who equally have larger followings, you will be able to increase these impressions and engagements significantly.
That said, Social 444 is based upon your organisation creating adverts for your existing content and promoting the content before you promote your product.
You will see on our infographic The Engagement Scale – Behaviour; we have identified that B2B buyers, like us, behave in a certain way when it comes to online content. First, we glance at an advert. Then gradually we take more and more notice until at some stage in the future, when we’re actually ready to begin our buying journey, we can start looking at ‘said company’ and if their content is readily available, we’ll take a closer look.
It’s not rocket science, it is simple, but it takes away the KPIs marketers have relied upon to achieve bonuses, because this strategy is like putting out breadcrumbs to attract birds. It requires content to be created and ceases any reliance on marketing technology and SaaS.
The infographic below links to The salesXchange System; our detailed restructuring of new business development. To learn more, click the image below.
5. Buying a TAM Database
If you don't have a database yet, consider purchasing one. The typical cost is around £350 for every thousand names. For a target of 10,000 names, you should anticipate an investment of £3,500.
If you know the Standard Industry Codes (SIC), then you need to find a data provider and buy a list to include the CEO, VP Sales, Co. Name, Address, Turnover, Number of Employees, Business start Date. All simply stuff.
There is one more thing. By knowing their turnover or number of employees, you can be pretty certain about their profitability, e.g. divide their turnover by the number of employees. But more importantly, you don’t need to be paying for access to firmographic data from the likes of D&B or Zoominfo or any other online data provider that happens to integrate with your CRM.
6. Building Anticipation with Email Marketing
Once you have your database, it’s time to start crafting (perhaps with the help of ChatGPT!) your emails.
What you’re going to is warm up your prospects to want to watch your live show. Take a look at this article were where I cover most of the things you need to know. But for now, bear with me.
Create an email series say twelve weeks in advance of your live stream series. Send out one email per week for eleven weeks. In the last week, send out daily emails along the lines of ‘it’s coming, it’s coming, it’s coming’.
So far, you have multiple adverts appearing on LinkedIn. Now you are emailing your database every week, telling them your live show is coming to LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and embedded on your website.
7. Using LinkedIn Banners
Whilst you’re sending out your emails, budget permitting, you can pay LinkedIn to promote banner adverts to the exact same email database (once it’s uploaded to LinkedIn Campaign Manager). This means your TAM are receiving emails and will see the same or similar advert on their newsfeeds.
I recommend that the Call to Action on the banner adverts are to Follow your Company. This means prospects are more likely to click rather than be invited to follow an individual and risk getting cold-called!
8. Setting Up a Live Stream Show
If you haven’t done anything like this before, it can be a bit daunting. However, I have/was in the same situation as you are now. It took a while to work things out because I look at technology and then build out a process, which is what I’ve done with salesXchange.
To set up a live stream show, there are some things to be aware of, but don’t be concerned about any of this as we will, should you ask – plan and set up everything from start to finish. Here’s a few things you might like to know:
- Invest in the right equipment: Choose suitable cameras, microphones, and lights to provide a professional and engaging experience for your audience. Although we have everything inhouse.
- Choose engaging hosts: Select outgoing and gregarious staff members to front your live stream show. Salespeople make the best hosts – just saying.
- Create a format and show flow: Plan the structure of your show, including sections such as news, new products, interviews, and more. We have about thirty or so templates/show segment ideas, so you won’t be at a loss as to what to say.
- Interact with your audience: Encourage viewers to ask questions and engage with your live stream show, making them feel involved and valued. There is so much interaction technology these days, it’s just a matter of deciding how you want to present your business. Not everyone wants laughing emojis and love-hearts floating across the screen.
Businesses need to adapt to new ways of engaging with their target audience. Digital selling, is the enablement and presentation of the entire business sales and presentation process prospects with a driver to enable prospects to self-self-serve, self-educate and buy online, (not ecommerce), having been provided with a complete explanation of everything required, enabling them to sign off an order, without speaking to a salesperson.
When a business focusses on the browser experience from the start, the natural finish is for the browser to become a prospect and then a customer.
By embracing digital selling with live stream shows, businesses can connect with a larger pool of potential prospects in a cost-effective and engaging manner. This approach not only helps companies showcase their products and services but also fosters stronger relationships with their audience, ultimately driving B2B revenue growth.
Click here if you'd like to read another article specifically about reaching your total addressable market using live streaming.
9. Enabling Self-Service on Your Website
Once you've established your multiple diverse media types, such as live stream shows and started connecting with your TAM, it's crucial to provide a seamless experience for prospects on your website. Enable self-service by offering the following:
- Removing all demand generation content access forms
- Provide comprehensive and easily accessible content, including videos, podcasts, downloads, and more
- Clear navigation and a great user experience
- Transparent information about your products and services
- Tools and resources for prospects to learn and implement your offerings
- FAQs and the ability to ask and add new questions
By allowing prospects to self-serve on your website, you cater to their desire for anonymity and empower them to make informed decisions at their own pace.
10. Rethink Your Financial Projections
Now is the time to take a moment to reflect and plan ahead. Digital selling has the potential to transform your business, reducing the reliance on an excess of employees who may be underperforming or justifying their roles through corporate jargon. You can tell I'm not a fan of that approach.
By connecting with the largest possible audience, you can swiftly gauge their reactions. If you don't facilitate a self-service option, you'll never truly understand their needs. This is where user experience and customer experience strategies come into play.
Keep in mind that as this approach gains traction, it will connect with more potential prospects than an entire team of telesales agents and BDRs combined, all while costing a fraction of your current expenses. You can thank me later.
How will this impact your profit and loss statement for this year and your projections for the next? Once the 300 adverts are published and automatically posted, they don’t need to be changed for eighteen months to two years. You’re left with a weekly live show to communicate to hundreds or even thousands each week. I’ll let you do the maths when it comes to staffing requirements!
11. Key Takeaways
- Traditional B2B sales and marketing methods are becoming less effective, with automation and impersonal approaches alienating potential prospects.
- Live stream shows can help you engage with your Total Addressable Market in a more personal and interactive way. Also consider greater use of video and podcasts.
- Focus on setting up a live stream show using salespeople as the hosts.
- Promote your show using Social 444 and email marketing in conjunction with LinkedIn banner marketing to increase followers.
- Regularly update your audience on upcoming content and events.
- Enable self-service on your website to cater to prospects' preferences for anonymity and self-paced learning.
12. FAQs
Q: How do I connect with a total addressable market?
A: Find a reputable List Broker and buy a database based upon the SIC Codes that match your total addressable market, then select from a variety of content options they will want to see, read, or listen to.
Q: What alternative content types are there?
A: Review your existing written content and see if it is possible to adapt the content to a podcast, live show, or video.
Q: How can I get a high level of exposure when prospecting to a TAM?
A: Consider implementing the salesXchange Social 444 strategy which suggests creating 300 individual adverts auto posted on social media to promote your content. Ten adverts are posted every day for a month and then repeated.
Q: How can I enable self-service on my B2B website?
A: Provide comprehensive content, clear menu navigation, transparent information about your products and services, and useful tools and resources for prospects to learn and implement your offerings.
Q: What equipment do I need to set up a live stream show?
A: Use the expertise of salesXchange or invest in suitable cameras, microphones, and lights to provide a professional and engaging experience for your audience.
Q: What are the benefits of a live stream show for my B2B business?
A: Live stream shows can help you connect with a larger audience on a weekly basis, build brand recognition, and engage with prospects who prefer anonymity. This approach will reduce human resource requirements, lead to increased exposure and greater profitability for your B2B organisation.
Conclusion
Times have changed, but you woldn't think so following most B2B marketers these days. Too many are focussed on the bright, shiny and cool AI toys, most of which in our fields, relate only to making pretty pictures and a massive explosion in text-based activity. What prospects want is the ability to engage and learn about products. this is nothing new, it's been happening for decades. What is new is the behaviour of marketers who are ignoring the basics.
The operative word is 'show'. Show your prospects who you are, what you sell and how it will work for them, in their scenario and you're good to go.
To achieve this basic tenent of running a business, coral your total addressable market in one place, tell all of them your story at the same time and every week new prospects will start appearing.
They won't smash your door down, but they will gradually warm to you the more you provide them with what they want. The reason you need to do this is once you start the process, the first part is a waiting game that costs pennies. Then the deals will start happening. Everyone wanted to believe the strapline of the film Field of Dreams - 'Build it and they will come!' Well, this is it.
Speak soon, Nigel.
The author and founder of salesXchange, Nigel Maine is a B2B marketing and sales expert with a proven track record in scaling up growth for Technology, SaaS, and Professional Services organisations. With 30 years hands-on experience and unique approach, Nigel has developed an effective strategy that dramatically increases exposure and profitability for B2B organizations.
