The TAM Illusion Destroying Your GTM Strategy: Sangram Vajre and Melanie Tschugmall on Why Your Addressable-Market Slide Is Lying to You
Notes from the podcast episode — and what it means for how you build GTM
Every pitch deck has one: the big, confident TAM slide. A market sized in the billions, a sliver of it captured, and a growth curve that follows. In this episode, GTM Partners CEO Sangram Vajre sits down to make the case that this number is doing more harm than good — it flatters the story, but it doesn’t tell you who to actually go sell to tomorrow.
Vajre’s answer is TRM — Total Relevant Market: not the theoretical ceiling, but the segment you can realistically reach, credibly win, and retain with the team and budget you actually have. It’s a smaller number than the one on the fundraising slide. It’s also the only one a go-to-market plan can actually be built on.
We hear a version of this on almost every fractional engagement. Teams chase a TAM built for investors while sales, marketing, and customer success quietly disagree on who the customer actually is. The market you’re addressing on paper and the market you’re winning in practice are rarely the same market — and that gap is where GTM budgets go to die.
Worth listening to if you're asking:
- Whether your TAM slide is a fundraising story or an operating plan
- Why “big market” and “winnable market” get confused at the top
- What changes when marketing, sales, and CS align on TRM instead of TAM
🎧 Listen to the episode on YouTube:
Stop Guessing. Start Scaling.
If “not invented here” is slowing your go-to-market down, that’s exactly the kind of blind spot a fractional CRO is built to catch.
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AI has made it easier than ever to generate ideas. It hasn’t made those ideas easier to sell. On Episode 39 of Simply Briefed, host Kristine sat down with CRO2go co-founder Melanie Tschugmall to ask the question every founder eventually runs into: why do strong products still fail commercially — and why do so many companies insist on solving problems that have already been solved somewhere else?
The TAM Illusion Destroying Your GTM Strategy: Sangram Vajre and Melanie Tschugmall on Why Your Addressable-Market Slide Is Lying to You
AI has made it easier than ever to generate ideas. It hasn’t made those ideas easier to sell. On Episode 39 of Simply Briefed, host Kristine sat down with CRO2go co-founder Melanie Tschugmall to ask the question every founder eventually runs into: why do strong products still fail commercially — and why do so many companies insist on solving problems that have already been solved somewhere else?
Painkiller or Vitamin C? Melanie Tschugmall Joins Simply Briefed to Ask Why Europe Keeps Reinventing the Wheel
AI has made it easier than ever to generate ideas. It hasn’t made those ideas easier to sell. On Episode 39 of Simply Briefed, host Kristine sat down with CRO2go co-founder Melanie Tschugmall to ask the question every founder eventually runs into: why do strong products still fail commercially — and why do so many companies insist on solving problems that have already been solved somewhere else?