The model change
Your TAM is too big to be useful.
We help you find your Pain Addressable Market (PAM): the accounts with a quantifiable reason to buy right now, and the ones already showing it.
We build these for vertically niched GTM organizations
What the wait costs
By the time an account talks to a seller, the decision is mostly made.
A CRO has finite SDR capacity. Spend it on accounts that fit the TAM but have little reason to buy, and the cost lands in the numbers: quota attainment, pipeline coverage, and a week of prospecting spent on accounts that were never going to convert.
6sense 2024 Buyer Experience Report, plus published reply-rate and SDR cost benchmarks. Industry figures, not our results.
Old world, new world
Signal-based selling was supposed to fix this. Better idea, same underlying problem.
Something happening at a company is not a reason to contact them. A funding round, a new executive, an acquisition: none of it matters unless it changes the problem you solve. So we run the logic backward.
01Old world
The formula is working as designed.
Most companies have the same meeting every quarter: CAC is up again, nobody can say exactly why, and the "high intent" accounts the team has been chasing look like the same names from last quarter, reshuffled.
TAM narrowed through SAM down to SOM asks one question, who could buy, and answers it by industry, company size, and geography, never asking who is hurting badly enough to buy now.
TAM was built to size a market for a board deck. Your reps inherited it as a call list.
02Old world
What you think is an outbound signal probably isn't.
A company raises $30 million. A Google Ads vendor treats that as a buying signal and emails the head of growth. The round tells you they have money. It says nothing about whether they spend enough on ads to need the product.
Add $100,000 a month in ad spend and it changes. Funding is capacity to buy. Ad spend is evidence of the pain. Intent Data Platforms sell you the first and let you assume the second.
"It shows intent for potential customers who might just be opening our marketing emails and clicking the unsubscribe button."
G2 reviewer, on 6sense Sales Intelligence
6sense did not fix that scoring. It stopped using the word "intent" and rebranded around something it calls Signalverse. It also licenses Bombora's data, so switching platforms can mean buying the same signal twice.
The same five accounts, lit on every screen, in the same week.
03New world
Your TAM is not your market.
PAM is what's left once you stop asking who could buy and start asking who's exposed to the problem right now. Spend moves off accounts that were never in pain. Sales gets a list it can believe again.
A client of ours spent 20 years authenticating physical IDs in casino gaming. They had one banking customer, found by accident. An executive saw the product on a casino floor while already hunting for a better way to handle IDs at the teller line. Right product, right person, no repeatable motion.
The cage and the teller line are the same instant in a different building. A stranger hands over an ID and an employee has to decide if it's authentic. So the market isn't "banks." It's banks with a lot of strangers walking in.
No regulator asks a bank how many strangers hand over an ID.
04New world
When the signal is invisible, build a proxy.
Nobody publishes walk-in traffic. So you ask what footprints the invisible behavior leaves behind, then join public data until the shape of it appears.
A legal AI platform's best customers shared one odd trait: unusually high Google review volume. Personal injury firms ask for reviews when a case closes, so review count tracks case volume. Add ad spend in the most expensive keyword category in America and you have firms drowning in cases with the budget to fix it.
A proxy is evidence, not truth. When ours was wrong, we published which accounts moved.
05New world
An account crosses into AIM when something documented changes.
Hiring a fraud leader sounds like a strong signal. The question was never how it sounds. It was how often it fired, and whether it fired at institutions we'd already scored as exposed.
Four verdicts are below. Two held. One got demoted to a fit factor. One we killed. A signal is not intent. It is evidence, and evidence gets graded before a rep ever dials.
A Sample Client Build
Their PAM was bigger than the list they were working, and scored on something else entirely.
Four weeks, standing start. The inherited model they came in with covered 1,473 institutions and weighted 70% of its score on fraud and AML risk. The thing driving the sale was how many strangers walk through the door.
- 2,323institutions in the PAM we rebuilt from FDIC and NCUA source data. 1,488 banks, 835 credit unions, a reason code on every row
- 13candidate signals run backward against 90 days of market events before we trusted any of them
- +0.80correlation between our walk-in proxy and CRA exam data. That's how we knew the exposure score held
- ~6accounts a week crossing out of that PAM into AIM at steady state. 200 to 300 emails and 20 to 30 calls, not 5,000 blind sends
Before you build one
A signal engine needs a market that can feed it.
Banking cleared all four. A data center market we looked at alongside it had maybe 80 to 150 relevant organizations. That's the difference between watching a few thousand accounts for rare events and watching a hundred.
Do you have enough at bats?
Companies don't hire a head of fraud every Tuesday. If you only speak when something happens, you need enough qualified accounts under watch for those events to fire often enough to matter.
Can you measure what you care about?
Banking leaves evidence lying everywhere: FDIC and NCUA registries, Call Report financials, CRA evaluations, merger and enforcement records. Some markets publish almost nothing.
Do the signals fire often enough?
A signal has to fire often enough to create opportunities, and early enough that there's still something left to influence.
Do you belong in the conversation?
Perfect timing is worth nothing if your first sentence has to explain why you're calling. Our client had two decades in a regulated gaming environment, which bought them a hearing with BSA and AML buyers.
By role
The same list reads differently depending on what you own.
Report 01 of 03 · Free PDF
A New Mental Model: How to Build a Bespoke Signal Engine From the Pain Up
A working guide to building your Pain Addressable Market around signals unique to your business, and using it to find the accounts that have the problem you solve right now.
Report 02 is the build.
The data sources, the schema, the scoring model and the monitors behind everything in Report 01. Get it the day it ships.
Have questions on how to build this?
