Sales reps have to juggle their time between finding new business, ringing prospect lists and discovering new opportunities for existing customers. Sales Directors want to ensure that all barriers to efficient selling are removed for their sales teams, and it’s important to highlight one sales misnomer: your Total Addressable Marketing (or TAM for short). This is often not reflective of the addressable market that’s actually out there.

 

Whitespace analysis can unearth your true TAM – it’s essentially a sales activity that delivers insight based on comparing two datasets to see if there’s a fit. That’s your market compared against your ideal customer profile – this will determine your TAM. it’s essentially allowing you to find companies that aren’t on your radar. For example, sales intelligence tools like Zint can scout how many companies use a specific CRM, how many have marketing teams etc. It works with your business objectives and translates it into what type of new business works best for achieving those goals. Expanding your TAM when you thought you’d exhausted it is a great first step to learning just how much you can explore with whitespace analysis.

 

Why is whitespace analysis important?

 

Sales leaders always have that burning feeling about what they don’t know. With lofty targets, they strive for complete visibility over their sales process, strategy and pipeline.

 

Whitespace analysis done properly should extend your TAM – your current one could be limited, making it an inaccurate representation of the actual total addressable market. 

 

What can you expect to unearth when expanding your TAM though? It’s not just an opportunity to increase your prospect list. It’s about finding missed opportunities that would otherwise be unturned. 

Let’s not forget, whitespace analysis isn’t just for finding new customers but new opportunities within your existing customer base. Whitespace analysis works to uncover more of what you don’t know in your customers to provide clear cross-sell opportunities.

 

How to use Whitespace Effectively for Unearthing New Prospects

 

• Understand your ideal customer profile

To build out a plan for conducting effective whitespace analysis, you need to know your ideal customer profile inside out. Not only that, you need to take what you know about your ideal customer to its limits. Find new information that’ll create a more sound understanding of them, even if it’s something that won’t contribute on the surface of it. 

• Divide your time wisely

We’ve already mentioned that the role of a sales rep is a balancing act. Ensuring you divide your time wisely to put time toward scouting your new TAM will give you vast reward in the long run – and it will also influence your other responsibilities. Your prospecting list will grow, your admin time will shrink, leaving you with more time to unearth new opportunities. 

• Expand your industry knowledge

When you’re expanding your TAM, you need to expand your knowledge of the market. Understanding what you don’t know is a starting point – make a list of everything you want to explore so you have a note of what to research when you have some time. 

• Become a subject matter expert

When you’re approaching companies in your newly expanded TAM, you need to have your selling and nurturing hat on, but you also need to be a subject matter expert to manage anything thrown at you. Unearthing niche new companies to nurture requires having niche information at your fingertips about how your product or service applies to this new expanded market. 

 

How to use Whitespace Effectively for Unearthing New Opportunities in Existing Customers

 

• Use this as an opportunity to find new challenges

 

With new information comes new potential challenges that you don’t know your customers are facing. Not knowing what you don’t know may have set you back in the past, but with new whitespace analysis to show you what you didn’t already know, it offers new angles to sell your products and services. 

 

• How do you know the time is right? Research, Research, Research

 

Don’t jump onto a call with your customers immediately after seeing a brand new opportunity through whitespace analysis – without proper research that is. Finding the opportunity to sell something new can be exciting, particularly if you’ve not seen much growth from a customer. However, nurturing the customer by having an open discussion about challenges in this instance is the best approach… not before your research though. Write down how this new information on your customer can transform into actionable insights they’ll find useful and link products to those challenges. 

 

Whitespace analysis widens your scope to ultimately sell more – grow your customer base and also enrich your existing base with new information uncovered. The Zint platform conducts whitespace analysis with your ideal customer profile in mind to deliver insight into your existing customers and TAM. 

 

If you’ve got to the end of this blog thinking that whitespace analysis may be the solution to your sales challenges, you can book a demo to see how it works for your business.