In this instructional video, Jeff Miller explains why agencies that think they have maxed out their Total Addressable Market (TAM) are often mistaken. He argues that TAM is not a single static number but a function of three variables: the marketing channel, the offer, and the avatar (the persona used in ads). Using a case study of a dentist‑focused agency, he shows how only a small slice of the overall market is actually reachable – those dentists who use Facebook/Instagram, want to grow, and match the ad avatar. The client in the story believed they had exhausted their TAM at $150K/month, but Miller identifies the real bottleneck as an over‑narrow avatar, not the market size, channel, or offer. He reviews the client’s sales pipeline, noting healthy show (60%) and close (35%) rates, but a low average order value (under $5K) that makes scaling costly. Miller recommends three high‑impact levers: (1) change the avatar in advertising to capture a new slice of the market, (2) explore different channel placements (e.g., other Meta products, YouTube, in‑person events), and (3) broaden the offer or target unaware/problem‑aware audiences to increase AOV and overall revenue. He also stresses the importance of targeting people who have never heard of the brand, as most growth opportunities lie outside the current awareness funnel. The video concludes that by adjusting avatar, channel, and audience awareness, the agency can realistically double revenue to $300K/month without overhauling the sales process or dramatically increasing ad spend.
Chapters
I was talking to a client yesterday. They were at $150K a month and they want to go to $300,000 a month. And the conversation that they brought up to me was balancing around the idea of, do I need a different, uh, client, different market, um, a different, uh, person who should be spending money with me? That really has an underlying thread of, did I max out my TAM? Total addressable market. 99% of the time when a client comes to me saying, did I max out my TAM? Or I believe I maxed out my TAM. 99% of the time that is incorrect. Usually they've maxed out something else. And what I wanna give you is a framework or a walkthrough on how to think about TAM in a way that's actionable and makes sense and enables you to grow. So take me as an example 5 years ago. My ideal client was a dentist. Right? And I did not have access, by the way, to 100% of my dentists. I did not have access to the entirety of all dentists. I only had access to a small percentage of dentists. So if you imagine 100% of dentists in like a circle, right? I only had access to a small percentage of dentists, and specifically it was dentists who visit Facebook and Instagram consistently. So you got 100% of dentists, right? Some of them read magazines, some of them are not on social media, some Some of them are not doing blank. Some of them are on YouTube or TV or something like that. Whichever way that they make their shoppingness, right? I only had access to not 100%, but a section of those that use Instagram and Facebook consistently, so consistently I can advertise to them, right? And then there was a section of that, and it was dentists who want to grow. Not all dentists want to grow, by the way. Some of them want to sell. Some of them want to increase their margins. Some of them want to get more employees. Some of them just want to buy more chairs. Some of them want to expand, which is different than growth, by the way. So it was a section of dentists that use the channel Facebook/Instagram, aka Meta. And then it was a section of those who want to grow and get more patients. And then from that, it was dentists who want to identify with me as their avatar. So it's a percentage of a percentage of a percentage of a percentage. Effectively, by the way, when we talk TAM, what we're really talking about is a function of 3 things. One, your channel. 2, your offer. And 3, your avatar, AKA this guy. So the vast majority of dentists that came on board and spent money with me were dentists that identified with a 35-year-old white male. And that's actually what most of the dentists look like. They were not 65-year-old Black women. They were not 18-year-old Indian men. They were just me, because that's who was in the ad. And if you look at a company like Disney, they do not have their guy out in front. They have all the different characters, because Cinderella people are different than Toy Story people, which are different than Harry Potter people. They— the audience is attached to a different avatar. You need to understand this, right? So if I was looking to change my, uh, access to this addressable market, I could change the channel. That could be a conversation about Facebook versus YouTube. It'd also be a conversation about internet versus in-person. Good conversation about in-person events versus online events. Changing your channel. Number 2 is the offer. If I talk about getting them more patients, that's different than selling your practice, which is different than getting better employees. Which is different than increasing your margin, which is different than selling more chairs, etc., etc., right? And then third, finally, is me. So here's what's interesting. When I was talking to this agency who's doing $150,000 a month, wants to grow to $300,000 a month, they believed that they had maxed out their TAM. But the reality is that they had maxed out their avatar, which is interesting, right? They had maxed out their avatar, not the other 2 parts, not the offer. and not the channel, they'd max out their avatar. And what they had to have a philosophy around is changing that circle and changing which part of the channel and which part of the offer and which part of the avatar they are addressing. So if they simply put a different person in the ad, they could have a different section or slice of the market. If they talked about their offer differently, they get a different section or slice of the market. If they did a different channel, they could have a different section or slice of the market. So it's the big picture. For $150K a month, we've gone to $300,000 a month. There are operational improvements that we could do, but the easiest thing to do is simply change the person in the ad. Very quickly, you can have a different slice of the market. That's concept number one. But your TAM is really a function of 3 things. It's your channel, it's your offer, and it's your avatar. Here's the other thing we went over. We talked about their pipe or their sales process. And they believed that there was something that could be improved with their sales process. So we looked at the numbers and we looked at the percentage of people that show up and the percentage of people that close. So if you imagine a pipe, right, you have inputs, which is like your inquiries, your schedules, your advertising. Your output are signed clients and dollars, right? And what happens in between when somebody schedules and somebody pays? And the numbers that they had Were 60% show rate and 35% close rate. That's aces, by the way. They thought there was something wrong with their show rate, that they needed to get 70%, 80%. I said, that's incorrect. I have clients doing $1 million a month with a 50% show rate. So immediately out of the gate, there was nothing wrong with their show rate. The next thing was their close rate. I have clients doing $1 million a month with a 30% close rate. So their pipe was fine. The problem was the input to the pipe and the output of the pipe. Right now, their average order value over 12 months is less than $5,000, which makes it really, really, really hard to grow. And I'll tell you why. You could have this disciplined approach where like, I'm getting 3.5 or 4x on my return on ad spend. So, you know, I need to invest more aggressively into it. But the reality is that you're not making so much incredibly large, copious amounts of money that everybody on your team and you says, holy shit, I need to devote all the time, effort, and attention I can, plus some borrowed attention, borrowed time, borrowed emotion, borrowed money to keep getting more. If you were closing $15,000, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 deals, there would be so much opportunity That everything you'd be doing would be lined up to getting more of that opportunity. At a sub-$5,000 a year, it's not worth, or it's not an overwhelmingly large worth to get more of those people. As such, by the way, we can't spend a boatload of money, time, effort, energy, attention to get more clients. I'll give you an example. If I went up to you and I said, hey, by the way, if you sign a client, they're worth between $60,000 and $70,000 a year to you, and they renew every year for 5 years, it's $350 grand. You would say, all right, well, let's go fucking set up a trade show, bro. I don't care. I'll take 2 weeks off work, whatever. There's a chance I can make $300,000 in the next 5 years with a client. Let's fucking party. That's a very different line of thinking. You would say, holy shit, I need to do every commercial I can. Yeah. I need to spin up every client getting channel I can. I am willing to put more time, effort, energy, attention, personnel, KPI scoreboard to make sure that I am getting everything I possibly can. That's just what would happen if your clients were worth more. But at five grand, it's almost not even worth the frustration, challenge. You notice I'm changing my wording here: frustration, challenge. Difficulty because they're simply not worth enough to figure it the fuck out. The side effect of that is, you know, you can't hire really expensive people that are absolute experts to do it. But I want to keep it in terms of this client in particular who runs a shop with like him and 3 or 4 employees. There's simply not enough dollars to make it so overwhelmingly obvious that all your activities line up to say, fuck it, I need to spend as much time, effort, energy, and money Notice it's not just money to get more of these clients. So at $5,000 or sub-$5,000 a year, okay, we get them or we don't, whatever, right? So that's a bigger challenge, by the way, which is the pipe is fine, but the output is not so massive that we say, fuck it, let's do everything. The input, by the way, was normal everyday advertising. And he had effectively 3 ads that were performing over time, but they were effectively him. So the avatar by itself was not, again, big picture, you know, the big circle. Section of a section of section. All of his clients, by the way, were like 80% like him, with an exception to the rule every now and then. So his inputs, which were 3 ads, were not generating such a wildly large, over-the-top result of massive amount of inquiries that makes him say, holy shit, you know, we got something here, right? So effectively, by the way, he had found his settle point, which is what I call it. And if you imagine climbing a mountain. We had figured it out, climbed the mountain to $150K a month, and now we're trying to get to $300K a month. But this mountain ain't going to get us there. What effectively we have to do is climb down the mountain, repack, and climb up the next mountain, which he believed was doing a new offer with a new audience. But I'm here to tell him it's really about changing your avatar because your avatar is $150K a year. And by avatar, I don't mean your client. I mean The guy in the ads. That's what I mean, right? Your combination of channel, offer, and avatar. The other option this person has is a different channel. And I want to make sure that we don't disregard the fact that if you just simply change your avatar, you could double your business. Changing your look, changing your feel, all that. So again, number one, it's your avatar. Number two, it's then your channel. If you go into your analytics and you take a look at all the details, chances are 80% of your advertising is coming in not from all of Meta, but likely one placement or one sub-placement. So for example, with us, it wasn't Instagram that was pulling in all of our clients. It was actually Facebook ads and Facebook images that were pulling all of our clients, not Reels, not Stories, not Instagram, nothing like that. It was a Meta product, but it wasn't all the Meta products. It was a subsection of Meta products. That was the channel that was working. And then the avatar and then the offer, right? So if he figured out a different placement that could work for him, he could incrementally grow. Not as great as changing the avatar, but still have massive growth. So that was one of the recommendations I had with him. Number one is if we have a different avatar, we could probably double without changing our offer or changing who we do business with. As a side note, if we figure out a new placement, then all of a sudden we could grow by another 10 or 20%. The other big picture, and this is point number 3, is that as a whole, in the entirety of his ecosystem, he was relatively unknown. So I'll give you an example. When Gary Vaynerchuk goes on stage and does a hoopla, hell yeah, gives a speech somewhere else, he gets a whole new batch of people that never heard of him before. So again, if you imagine, you know, the universe of people that heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, there are always people who have not heard. Somebody gives a speech to somebody Brand new market, all of a sudden it's a brand new audience and is a new section of— what he was not doing, either by purpose or by not, is he was not addressing or going after people who had never heard of him in the past. And that's a function of algorithm, by the way. Very often as offer owners, we accidentally segment our future clients into the 5 awareness stages. Mm-hmm. unaware, problem, solution, product, and most. But as offer owners, we're really only talking to people who want to purchase our product or are very much most aware of us. We're leaving out the 3 biggest, the 3 biggest, which is unaware, problem aware, and solution aware. Yeah, that's correct. Right. And so if we go after people who have never heard of us, a.k.a. brand, right, then all of a sudden we're addressing a brand new segment of the marketplace. So for this client in particular who's at $100K a month and wants to go to $300K a month, his philosophy was, oh, I need a different offer and I need a different client. And I kind of laid out an idea that that is not necessarily correct, and chances are it's probably incorrect. What he needed to do was have a new framework of understanding of where he is and where he wants to go. His pipeline was fine. The input of advertising was a function of his marketplace. and his circle of clients. The vast majority of clients has not heard of him. The vast majority of the clients were only looking for the offer, but if we changed his channel and changed his avatar, we could probably double, as well as probably charging more, but that might be more difficult than we think. But overall, if I had to segment his business activities into things that would move the needle, it's not sales team training. It's unlikely to double up on the follow-up. And it's unlikely to be— have a new offer. And it's probably unlikely to have a case where he can just simply double his prices. That would be useful, but that's just a function of where he is in his business. It's likely to be the case that if he had a different avatar, a different channel, and focused on people who are very much unaware of him, he could go from $150K a month to $300,000 a month. That's it for this video. Peace out. Bye.
