Finding the TAM for a horizontal product

A horizontal product makes the TAM hard to pin down

Alexander Ehrensvard is the main user of Vainu at Planhat. As Head of Business Development, his main concern is the company’s pre-sales pipeline: keeping a good flow of inbound leads and setting the sales teams up to succeed in outbound. Scaling a team means knowing your total addressable market, and that is difficult when the offering meets needs across sectors. In his words, “defining the TAM for a very horizontal product is a very difficult thing because you will find fits in various different industries and industry verticals.” Landing one customer in a vertical does not make that whole vertical the TAM. Data hygiene was the second theme. Planhat runs HubSpot, which pulls from various data providers that may use different formats when structuring their data, some referring to America as the “US” and others as “The United States of America”, which Alexander says can make segmenting a “horror show”.

Vainu is an important partner for us to make sure that we have good data hygiene in our CRM.

Similarity scoring instead of industry codes

Rather than boxing companies into industry codes, Planhat starts from a company it already knows is a good fit and uses Vainu’s similarity scoring to find the companies closest to it. As Alexander explains, “A key feature that we use in Vainu is similarity scoring because sometimes the use cases are similar in very different industries, and then it might make more sense to look at a distance score metric between two different companies and use that to define your TAM by [selecting a good-fit company] and then setting a threshold for how far away companies can be from that company.” The loop compounds: “A rep selects one company they like, and then you get ten. And then you take those ten, validate four of those companies, send them back, and get forty more companies.” On the CRM side, Planhat partnered with Vainu to keep the data in HubSpot clean, working from the principle that it pays to know what each data provider is best at. The result is time back and data Alexander does not have to second-guess: “Vainu saves me a lot of time...and it solves the thing I want to solve. I have automatic enrichment of data coming in, so I don’t have to worry about that, and I can trust the data quality... It comes down to having a data partner that you trust.”

The similarity feature is definitely a favorite... It just makes a lot of sense... to work with your TAM this way.

Alexander Ehrensvard, Head of Business Development