One of the biggest downfalls of a Federal sales rep is a lack of understanding regarding their total addressable market (TAM) and whitespace. Total addressable market is the entire revenue opportunity for a product or service in a given market. Whitespace is the total addressable market (TAM) within a sales rep given territory. For a sales rep, your TAM and whitespace provide a roadmap on where you need to spend your time to effectively build a revenue pipeline to achieve your annual quota.

By understanding your TAM and whitespace you can:

  • Understand if your revenue are goals are realistic based on the projected availability of funds within your territory
  • Target your time toward the low hanging fruit
  • Quickly pivot your sales efforts to other agencies depending on funding availability

4 Steps To Identify Your Total Addressable Market Within The Federal Government

1. Define Your Broad Territory

Before you can begin diving into specific departments and locating points of contact, you need to understand at a broad level your sales area. In Federal sales, your territory will typically be confined to either:

  • Department of Defense
  • Intelligence Agencies
  • Civilian Agencies

If you working in a large organization, your territory may be even more confined to a specific military department.

2. List Out All Of The Agencies, Departments and Bureaus Within Your Broad Territory

This is the area that requires some research and that many sales reps gloss over. Is it tedious researching and listing out every agency and department within your territory? Yes. Does it provide a more detailed insight into the vastness and opportunity within your territory? Also yes.

Do the work here and you won't be disappointed. The best way to start this process is actually through Wikipedia and below are a few links to get you started:

These lists will get you started but keep in mind you can dive down deeper into each of these sub-agencies. This is when you need to apply your customer knowledge to know where your list stops. If your target customer is the CIO then you don't need to go into the details of the other offices in an agency. Similarly, if an Air Force Wing Commander is your decision maker then you don't necessarily need to dive into the details of the groups and squadrons beneath his/her control.

3. Find Contact Information

At this point you have a list of all of departments, agencies and bureaus you can do business with, now you need to find the people within each of them that you need to sell to. The following sites can help you identify and uncover contact information for your target customers:

  • LinkedIn
  • Leadership Connect
  • Agency Websites

Use an excel spreadsheet (sample below), your organization's CRM or our FedSalesTracker to organize your research.

CIO​ First​ Name​ Last ​Name​ Phone​ Email​ LinkedIn​
US Department of Commerce​ Rod​ Turk​ (202)482-4708​ rturk@doc.gov​ Yes​
Bureau Economic Analysis​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​
Bureau Industry & Security​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​
Census Bureau​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​
Economic Development Admin​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​
NIST​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​
NOAA​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​
Sample Tracking Sheet For Points of Contact

4. Add Information About What You Have Previously Sold & The Deals You Are Currently Working

By this point you have a list of all of the agencies you can do business with and contact information for each agency. Now, add the following information into that same list:

  • Note which agencies you have already sold to. Include what product you sold, quantity and revenue amount.
  • Note which agencies you currently have in your pipeline. Include what product you are selling and your projections for quantity and revenue amount.

Once these items are incorporated look at all the, wait for it, whitespace in your tracking sheet and that will show you areas of opportunity and the person you need to contact. You can also use the information from your previous sales and projections to help guide your prospecting conversations.

Short On Time? We Can Build Your Total Addressable Market For You!

Request a FREE Consultation from Sanctum Federal! Our team has successfully built several Federal sales startup practices and secured millions of dollars of revenue directly from the Federal market and our mission is to help other organizations do the same!

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