How big is my company’s opportunity? What roles do I serve? Who’s the person who needs my product or service most, and how many of them are out there willing to pay me for it?
You may have just started asking yourself these questions, or you may have done some market opportunity analysis already.
Great! Now what?
If you feel like you’re in the gap between your completed reports and where you need to go next with that information, you’re not alone. If you're not using market data to inform critical decisions, you're missing out on some of the biggest levers for your growth.
Scalepath CEO Ryan Detwiller sat down with Aaron Dun, SVP Marketing at CareAcademy to talk about how market-sizing data helped shape their strategic vision beyond the final analysis.
Ryan Detwiller - Scalepath: When you started at CareAcademy, you wanted to understand their market opportunity. What caused you to pursue that?
Aaron Dunn - CareAcademy: Particularly at an early stage company, understanding your target market is of critical importance. Of course, as you grow through each funding stage and major milestone that holds true too.
There were a lot of assumptions based on our own experience in the market, but we wanted to validate our thinking before we started making critical go-to-market and product decisions. We wanted to go a layer deeper than “we think there are 50,000 companies in this market” and “we think this is the job role we’re serving.”
We wanted to validate our thinking before we started making critical go-to-market and product decisions.
Understanding the difference between the roles we sell to that exist within a market was especially important to us. The markets represented by those roles are very different, and understanding those differences at the macro level was important to the next step in our market strategy.
Ryan: How did that new understanding inform your product decisions? How do you take market sizing data and then use it in the business?
Aaron: Step one was the validation.
Step two was to understand how we were going to clearly roadmap the opportunity in front of us, and not all of the different adjacent opportunities we could play in.
Our company is in the long-term care continuum, and that's made up of many different components. As we built the strategy to move beyond private duty home care to full home health, scaled home health agencies, payers, and beyond, our market sizing data-informed our product and content roadmap
That market sizing effort gave us the chance to ask, what do we need to build? What kind of applications of the technology do we need to address? What product changes do we need to develop in order to match up with our opportunity map?
There are always five critical things to do at once. So when you're doing one thing, there's four more you're not. We wanted to make sure that we were picking that one right thing to focus on.
Ryan Detwiller: It is about prioritization. In the beginning, every company is just figuring things out, but eventually, you have to ask, “OK, what is the actual direction?” Having data to back that up helps.
Anything else you want to share about the value of market data in general?
Aaron: I'm a relatively recent convert to the power of leveraging market sizing data in the day-to-day go-to-market and business strategy. My worldview until maybe 5-10 years ago was, ‘hey, we have to build a TAM model because we’ve got to show that our market is be bigger than a breadbox.’ We’d do that, and then the report would wind up in a proverbial drawer somewhere and move on.
What I've really come to grasp over the last few years is that you can use market sizing as a core lever of your go-to-market strategy to differentiate yourself.
The companies that are more strategic about leveraging market information will have a higher degree of confidence that what they’re targeting–and how they’re targeting it–makes sense. That information is actionable, and you can use it to win.
As go-to-market strategists, we’re always thinking ‘what pool is our competitor fishing in that we're not?’ We don't see what that competitor is doing every day, but they seem to be growing. Leveraging this kind of data helps you make sure you're not missing a fully stocked pond. You're not over there fishing in barren waters when there’s an abundance of fish just nearby.
Anytime you can arm your marketing and sales teams or even select roles like Account-Based Marketing experts with market sizing data, you can really hone in on a particular persona type by segment. You might have 50 of those but now with this new information, you know your messages are going to land and your likelihood of success goes up dramatically.
And that's what you want, right?
If you’re just getting started on your market sizing efforts, simple and free market-sizing templates can help get you started. But if you’re looking for something more, Scalepath can walk you through your total market potential, growth dynamics, and best growth opportunities for revenue.
