"How big is our market?" sounds like a question for a pitch deck. It's actually one of the most practical questions a sales team can ask. The answer tells you how many reps to hire, how aggressive your targets can be, and whether you'll run out of prospects by next year.
In a market the size of Singapore, running out is a real risk. Here's how to size your niche properly.
Top-down versus bottom-up
There are two ways to size a market.
Top-down starts with a big published number and cuts it down: "There are hundreds of thousands of businesses in Singapore, we'll get 1% of them." It's fast and almost always wrong. It tells you nothing about who, specifically, you'll sell to.
Bottom-up starts from the companies that actually fit your product, counts them, and builds up from there. It's more work, but it gives you a number you can act on. That's the approach in this guide.
The three numbers you want
- Total addressable market (TAM): every company that could use what you sell.
- Serviceable market (SAM): the part of that market you can actually reach and serve today.
- Obtainable market (SOM): what you can realistically win in a set period, usually a year.
Step 1: Define your niche precisely
Start from your Ideal Customer Profile. If you don't have one, our guide to building an ICP with SSIC codes walks you through it.
Turn it into concrete filters:
- Industry, by SSIC section and the activities within it
- Headcount band, for example 11 to 50 or 51 to 200
- Region, if location matters to your delivery
- Company age, for example incorporated at least three years ago
Step 2: Count the companies
Apply your filters and note the total number of matching companies. This is your TAM.
Then remove the companies you can't serve today. Take out the ones already using a competitor on a long contract, the ones in a segment you don't support yet, and the ones your delivery team can't reach. What's left is your SAM.
Step 3: Count the people you'd actually talk to
Companies don't buy. People do. For each company in your serviceable market, how many relevant decision-makers can you reach?
Filter by the seniority and department of your buyer. You might find that only some of your target companies have a reachable Head of Operations, while many smaller ones are run directly by the owner.
This number matters more than the company count. It's your real prospect pool.
Step 4: Apply your funnel
Now work out what that prospect pool turns into. Use your own conversion rates if you have them. If you don't, start with conservative guesses and replace them as real data comes in.
Here's the calculation, with illustrative numbers only:
| Stage | Rate (illustrative) | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Companies in your serviceable market | 2,000 | |
| Companies with a reachable decision-maker | 70% | 1,400 |
| Conversations after outreach | 25% | 350 |
| Qualified meetings | 30% | 105 |
| Deals won | 20% | 21 |
In this example, a serviceable market of 2,000 companies produces around 21 customers from one full pass of outreach.
Step 5: Turn it into revenue
Multiply deals by your average annual contract value:
Obtainable market = deals won × average annual contract value
At an illustrative S$6,000 a year, 21 deals is roughly S$126,000 in new annual revenue from one pass.
Now ask the important questions:
- Is that enough? Compare it with your targets and your cost of sales.
- How long does one pass take? If one rep can work 400 prospects a quarter, 1,400 takes nearly a year.
- What happens next year? You can't approach the same prospects again straight away. If your market is small, plan an adjacent segment early.
Step 6: Sanity-check the result
- Sample the list. Look at twenty companies in your count. Are they genuinely a fit?
- Compare with reality. Does the number of customers you already have look sensible against your estimate?
- Watch the timing. Festive periods and financial year-ends affect when companies buy.
- Revisit it every quarter as you learn your true conversion rates.
If your niche turns out to be small
A small number isn't necessarily bad news. It's useful news.
- Go deeper, not wider. A small, well-defined market lets you personalise every approach.
- Raise your price. A niche product can often command more per customer.
- Plan your next segment. Identify the adjacent industry or company size you'll expand into.
- Look beyond Singapore if your product travels, but win here first.
Size your market for free
In SG Best Leads, searching is free. Apply your filters and see the total number of matching companies and contacts straight away, before you spend a single credit. Very large result sets show as "10,000+". Tighten the filters until you're looking at a market you can actually work.