RepVue

This Week in Sales: July 11, 2024

RepVue Team
RepVue TeamJul 11, 2024

Contents:


🐏 TAM is a Sham. Look at RAM Instead.

The total addressable market (TAM) concept is a sham. It’s a mechanism for founders to raise money based on numbers that will never be attained.

It’s also the cause of many of the recent layoffs.

Every company starts with a small reachable addressable market (RAM) and zero sales people. RAM consists of ideal prospects who are in a position to buy your product right now — not 3 years from now.

RAM expands as the product improves, awareness grows, and the company matures.

Then the company starts hiring sales people. 

Everything is going well and investors pour more money in while sales capacity is still smaller than RAM.

Then the sales team grows faster. Maybe it’s now growing 2x–3x the pace of RAM growth. Then sales capacity catches up and passes the RAM. Now there are too many sales people.

It will happen literally every time. To every start-up. Sometimes it may not happen until billions in revenue. Sometimes much much sooner.

Now think about what might happen if RAM suddenly has a sharp decline and shrinks, say, 40%. After your sales team size is way too big already…

Welcome to the past two years.

Will execs learn a long-term lesson — or will the cycle repeat itself in 2024 or 2025? Who knows? 

That’s why every rep needs to understand how the mechanism works and evaluate this when evaluating companies.

— Ryan Walsh, CEO & Founder


New & Hot Sales Orgs

🔥 Keyfactor
🔥 Vena Solutions
🆕 Payzer
🔥 Flare
🆕 EBSCO
🆕 Demyst
🆕 Trackstreet
🆕 Botco


Sales Insights and Resources

AI Sales Tools: Boost Your Efficiency and Close More Deals

How Do SaaS Companies Decide to Hire More Reps?


🤸 What a Feeling

Anonymously rate a company to get full access to RepVue's sales org data
  • Salary & compensation data
  • % Team to achieve quota
  • Product market fit scores
  • Leadership scores
Explore Companies

Want to join the RepVue community?

Take 2 minutes to anonymously rate your current or former sales organization to get free access to all of our data!