SOM

TL;DR

Serviceable Obtainable Market — the realistic share of SAM the company can capture in a defined planning horizon.

SOM is the company's near-term plan: which slice of SAM is reachable in the next 1–3 years given the team, capital, and competitive context. It should be small enough to be credible and large enough to justify the round.

A strong SOM is calculated from sales capacity (reps × quota × win rate) or from PLG funnel math (visits × conversion × ACV), not from a hand-waved 'we'll capture 1% of the market'.

Worked example

Same dental SaaS — given a 12-rep field team, an estimated 18-month sales cycle, and competitive density, the realistic 3-year SOM is 4,500 practices × $12,000 = $54M ARR. That's the number tied to the financial plan.

Common pitfalls

• The classic '1% of a $100B market' SOM that no investor finds credible.
• SOM larger than what the team's hiring plan can support.
• Conflating SOM with revenue forecast and missing the gap between obtainable and actually-obtained.

When this shows up in a pitch deck

SOM appears on the Market slide and again, implicitly, on the Financial Plan and Use of Funds slides.

See SOM in context

SOM shows up most often in these scoring rubrics and investor profiles — jump straight to who cares about it and how to pitch them.

In VC frameworks

• Sequoia Capital — pitch deck framework

Related terms

• TAM — Total Addressable Market — the total revenue opportunity if the product captured 100% of every customer who could conceivably buy it.
• SAM — Serviceable Addressable Market — the portion of the TAM that the company's product, geography, and channels can realistically serve.
• Bottoms-Up Market Sizing — Calculating market size by counting the actual eligible customers and multiplying by realistic per-customer revenue.
• Win Rate — The percentage of qualified sales opportunities that result in closed-won deals over a given period.
• Sales Velocity — A composite measure of how quickly a sales team converts pipeline into closed revenue, derived from deals × win rate × ACV ÷ cycle length.

Use this in your next pitch deck

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