Also called: Serviceable Addressable Market
TL;DR
Serviceable Addressable Market, the portion of the TAM that the company's product, geography, and channels can realistically serve.
SAM narrows the TAM to the customers the company can actually reach with its current product, geographic coverage, and go-to-market motion. SAM is what's relevant to operating decisions; TAM is what's relevant to long-term ambition.
SAM should always be smaller than TAM and meaningfully larger than SOM. A SAM equal to TAM means the company hasn't done the work to differentiate. A SAM equal to SOM means there's no growth runway.
Same dental SaaS, its software runs only on Cloud, only in English, and requires a 5+ chair practice. SAM filters: 90,000 multi-chair English-speaking US practices × $12,000 = $1.08B SAM (45% of TAM).
Investor-grade Market slides nest TAM > SAM > SOM and show the 1 to 3 year SAM expansion path.
SAM shows up most often in these scoring rubrics and investor profiles, jump straight to who cares about it and how to pitch them.
Total Addressable Market, the total revenue opportunity if the product captured 100% of every customer who could conceivably buy it.
Serviceable Obtainable Market, the realistic share of SAM the company can capture in a defined planning horizon.
A precise definition of the buying organization that gets the most value from your product and is the cheapest to acquire.
Calculating market size by counting the actual eligible customers and multiplying by realistic per-customer revenue.
A go-to-market strategy where a company defines and dominates a new market category instead of competing within an existing one.
Long-form deep dives on the slides SAM most often shows up on.
Deckmetric scores your pitch across 10 VC frameworks and against 8 investor types.