135: How to Build Your Total Addressable Market

Welcome back to The Practical Prospecting Newsletter!

In today’s newsletter, I’m sharing the exact SOP we use to build a client’s total addressable market (TAM).

Agenda:

• Why This is Critical For Outbound Success

• Step 1: Start With Your Customers

• Step 2: Scrape the Companies

• Step 3: Run a Qualification Prompt (and refine it… a lot)

• Step 4: Validate TAM Coverage by Mapping Back to Customers

• Step 5: Segment the Accounts for Messaging

P.S. I’m launching my first-ever community in Q1 2026. It’ll include exclusive templates, in-depth campaign breakdowns, access to the exact SOPs/training videos my team and I use, and much MUCH more. You learn more and join the waitlist here!

Why This is Critical For Outbound Success

First, why is building a list of your entire market so important? Two reasons…

Reason #1

Cold email should be used as a marketing awareness tool first and foremost. Outbound is about timing. If the right people in your market see you in their inbox once or twice per quarter with something relevant and educational, eventually, they’ll respond when the timing is right.

Side note: this does not mean blasting people with 4+ email sequences in a two-week span. If you want the full breakdown on that, read this newsletter: Why Burning Your TAM is a Myth.

Reason #2

Once the TAM is scraped, enriched, and segmented, everything downstream gets easier. Campaign creation becomes faster, messaging gets sharper, and you stop wasting time writing “great copy” for segments that only end up having a handful of findable leads.

With that said, below is the step-by-step process we use to thoroughly scrape (and validate) a client’s entire market.

If you want accuracy and total coverage, it takes a lot more than slapping a couple of filters on in a data tool and calling it a day!

1. Start With Your Customers

Before touching any filters, we enrich our clients customer list.

Our objective is simple:

How does this customer base actually show up on data platforms?

We analyzed:

• The LinkedIn industries they’re labeled as.

• Typical employee-size ranges

• Company types

• Common keywords in company descriptions

This matters more than most people think.

ICP definitions are often aspirational. Customer data is reality.

By reverse-engineering patterns from real customers, we created a baseline profile rooted in evidence instead of assumptions.

Side Note:

• If you don’t have a sizable list of customers to use as data for your TAM build, you WILL have to make some assumptions. Then, as you test outbound campaigns, you’ll start getting data to validate or invalidate those assumptions.

2. Scrape the Companies

One of the things we look for when enriching a clients customer list is what % of their customers have a company LinkedIn profile.

Usually, most, if not all, of their customers have a company LinkedIn profile. However, if you sell into an industry where your customers don’t tend to have company LinkedIn profiles, then I highly recommend following the steps laid out in this newsletter: How to Scrape Hard to Find ICPs

Once we know what the ICP looks like in the wild, we used Clay’s “Find Companies” feature to search across the entire LinkedIn company universe (using the filters that match what we found by enriching the client’s customer base).

At this stage, the goal is coverage, not perfection.

We’d rather slightly over-include and fix it later than miss large sections of the market early.

Of course, you don’t have to use Clay to scrape your TAM. We use it because it gives us an easy way to search across all of LinkedIn. And this is important because LinkedIn will almost always be the most up-to-date source of truth.

But you could do the same thing with Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, Apollo, etc.

If you do use a different tool, though, then you’ll want to map your TAM build to how your customers show up on THAT data tool specifically.

3. Run a Qualification Prompt (and refine it… a lot)

Next, we built a qualification prompt (which we run in Clay.com) designed to research each company on our list and decide whether it’s truly an ICP-fit.

Creating this prompt is as simple as explaining your ICP to ChatGPT, and then asking it “Build me a prompt that looks at a company website and determines if they are an ICP fit or not based on this criteria”.

This step is never perfect on the first pass.

We’ll usually run the prompt on the first 100 companies → spot-check the results → flag edge cases → update the prompt based on the edge cases → then repeat until we get it as close to perfect as possible.

4. Validate TAM Coverage by Mapping Back to Customers

Once the list is built, we always sanity-check it by asking one simple question:

Do all of their customers appear in this list?

If you’ve built the TAM right, all of your customers should show up on the list. 

If any of your customers aren’t on the list, that means you’re missing a chunk of the market. 

So in this step, if any customers aren’t in our TAM list, we investigate why…

• Industry mismatch?

• Missing keyword?

• Incorrect size filter?

• Prompt logic issue?

Then we keep adjusting until every customer appears.

5. Segment the Accounts for Messaging

With the TAM locked in, we run a final research prompt to segment each account into the buckets we’ll actually use for outbound.

One important reminder: you only need to segment your market if it changes how you message.

If two segments would receive the same email, there’s no reason to split them.

We usually segment by:

• Niche

• Size

• Technology

• Operating model

• Any other traits that would meaningfully change the messaging angle

This is what turns a TAM from “a list” into a messaging engine.

Without this step, every campaign eventually defaults to generic copy.

Thanks for reading,

Jed

P.S. If you’d like our team to do this for you, book time with us here!