You’ve baked the best sourdough in the village. Regulars. Word of mouth. A queue on Saturday mornings.
Then someone asks: “What’s your TAM?”
“About 400 people. It’s a small village.”
That’s the wrong answer, and it’s costing you more than you think.
TAM isn’t about where you bake. It’s about who eats bread.
Three miles away: four coffee shops, a deli, a hotel doing breakfast for 80 guests a day, a farm shop full of tourists buying anything with the word “local” on it. None of them are baking their own bread. All of them need yours.
You haven’t moved the oven. Your market just tripled.
Here’s where most B2B companies flinch.
Partner channels feel like giving something away. Shared margin. Less control. Someone else is in the room with your customer. I’ve heard every version of this objection, and I’ve made some of them myself.
But the math is hard to argue with.
Selling direct to villagers: €3.50 a loaf, one at a time. Supplying the coffee shop down the road: 20 loaves before 8am, recurring, predictable. Lower margin per unit, but you’re not in the unit business anymore. Multiply by four coffee shops, and you’re a wholesale supplier with a distribution network. Your competitor, obsessing over walk-in footfall, doesn’t even know this game exists.
A partner who already has the relationship, the trust, the daily touchpoint with your buyer, isn’t a threat to your margin. They’re a shortcut to scale that took them years to build.
The question isn’t whether this model works. It’s whether your current channel strategy is leaving that kind of volume on the table.
If you’re a B2B company that suspects your TAM conversation is overdue, or your partner channel is underperforming what it should be, this is exactly what we work through in an initial call. No deck. No pitch. Just the numbers and what’s actually blocking growth.
You did the research. Population: 2,000. One bakery, a retired owner, no marketing. No obvious competition. You signed the lease.
Then you found the bread makers. Not one or two. Dozens. A village proud of its “self-sufficiency.” A WhatsApp group sharing sourdough starters. A farmers’ market every other Sunday, where three locals sell their own loaves.
The TAM analysis said 2,000 potential customers. The reality was a village that had already decided it didn’t need you.
This is the breadmaker problem.
It’s not about a competitor you can see. Not another bakery, a supermarket, a brand bidding on your keywords. It’s about existing behavior that has already filled the gap you thought was empty. Behavior that nobody put into the competitive landscape. Workarounds, habits, good-enough solutions that your prospects built, bought, or settled on long before you showed up. This is why the pipeline stalled. Not because of competition. Because the market had already moved on.
Raw market size never tells you how much of that market has already moved on without you.
The coffee shop signal
Here’s what you should have looked for before signing the lease.
How many independent coffee shops are in the village?
Not chains. Not the pub that does a panini. Independent coffee shops, the ones that care about their flat white, source their beans, and put a handwritten card on the counter explaining where the milk comes from.
These places are a leading indicator. They tell you the village has a segment willing to pay more for quality. An audience that has already opted out of “cheap and convenient” in favor of “considered and good.” When you walk in with a sourdough loaf and a story about your flour, someone will lean in rather than shrug.
You’re not just looking for a distribution partner. You’re reading the room.
A village with three independent coffee shops has already told you something about its appetite. A village with a Greggs and a Shell garage forecourt has told you something, too.
Neither is wrong. They’re just different markets. The mistake is treating them as equivalent because the population number is the same.
TAM isn’t a headcount. It’s a behavioral audit.
The number of people who could buy from you is almost always bigger than the number who would.
The gap between those two things is where most go-to-market plans quietly fall apart.
Start with what your market is already doing. Not your named competitors, the workarounds. The spreadsheet from two years ago that’s technically terrible but free. The agency hired because buying software felt like a commitment. If you can’t name those, you don’t yet understand the market.
Then ask whether that behavior has roots or whether people are quietly frustrated with it. Friction is your opening. Embedded behavior, the kind where someone has invested time, money, or identity in the workaround, is the breadmaker problem. It’s harder to shift than any named competitor, and it won’t show up in a competitive landscape slide.
Somewhere in that market, someone is already paying more for better. Already opted out of the cheap default. Already leaning forward when something new walks in. Find that person before you build your strategy around the wrong customer. They’re your signal that appetite exists.
The coffee shop is one of those signals. The bread maker is one of those warnings.
Learn to read both before you commit to the village.
If you´re investing in marketing and not sure why it´s not pulling through, it´s worth a conversation. Let´s talk
Next: once you’ve found the right village, the one with real appetite and the right signals, the question becomes whether the coffee shop is your customer, your channel, or both.
You are one of two bakers in a small village. Everyone knows you. Your bread is decent. Every morning, people choose between you and the baker down the road.
There is no new demand to generate. There is just an existing appetite to capture.
This is lead generation at its purest. And if you look honestly at how most B2B marketing budgets are built, this is exactly the logic underneath them: find the people already looking, rank higher than the competition, convert better at the bottom of the funnel. Fight for the same five percent of buyers who raised their hands this quarter.
It works, up to a point. But it assumes the village never grows. It assumes every potential customer already knows they want bread.
What about the person who skipped breakfast for years because nobody ever made it feel worth the detour? What about the company that has been living with a broken process so long they stopped noticing the cost? Nobody is searching for a solution to a problem they have not yet named.
That is where demand generation begins. Not at the moment of comparison, but much earlier. At the moment of recognition. When someone first thinks, “Actually, this could be different.”
Here is the thing that gets lost when people debate these two disciplines: technology businesses are still run by people. People who get tired, cut corners, inherit broken systems, and feel the same low-grade frustration your village baker’s customer feels when the bread is stale again, but they cannot quite be bothered to walk further. Emotion and habit drive B2B decisions more than most marketing strategies account for.
The buyer who already trusts you before your sales team calls is not just a warm lead. They are a different conversation entirely. Shorter cycle. Less price sensitivity. More honest about their real problem.
Demand generation is the work of becoming familiar before you are needed. It is education, perspective, and the kind of content that makes someone think, “these people actually understand what I am dealing with.” That is not soft marketing. That is pipeline development with a longer fuse.
Most companies underfund it because the timeline does not fit neatly into a quarter. The result is a marketing function permanently stuck fighting over the same small slice of in-market buyers, wondering why growth feels harder than it should.
The village can grow. The question is whether your marketing is built to grow it, or just to win the morning rush.
If this tension already sounds familiar, it is probably worth a conversation. We work with mid-sized B2B companies to build marketing that develops pipeline rather than just chasing it. Book a30-minute call here, and we can talk through where you are.
Most people think of garlic as an ingredient — a bit player. But gardeners know better. Garlic is strategic.
You plant it in the cold. It grows invisibly for months. You tend to it, give it space, and trust the process.
Come summer, you don’t just get a single clove. You get an entire head. More value than what you put in.
This, my fellow marketers, is Account-Based Marketing.
ABM isn’t about scale. It’s about precision.
It starts with deliberate targeting — like choosing the right spot in the garden.
Then comes months of nurture:
Personalisation
Warm-up content
One-to-few messaging
Stakeholder mapping
Patience
No drama. No noise. Just carefully placed, high-potential growth.
Garlic (and ABM) rewards the long game.
You don’t plant garlic and expect a crop in four weeks.
You commit. You invest. You wait for the right season to lift the whole thing out of the ground. And when you do?
You’ve built something robust, healthy, and multipliable. One clove becomes ten! Just like one engaged account becomes a customer, a case study, an advocate, and a source of referrals.
In a world of “spray and pray,”
ABM is garlic.
A little under the radar.
A little quiet.
But utterly effective.
Next up in the series: What potatoes and hidden pipeline have in common.
I get it. You’ve got a product you love. A value prop you believe in. A market you want to win. But here’s the truth that marketers and gardeners alike learn the hard way:
You can’t force things to grow where they don’t belong.
In the garden, I’ve planted things in the wrong spot just because I liked the idea of it — a sun-loving herb in the shade, a delicate flower in poor soil. No matter how much I wanted it, the conditions just weren’t right. And surprise: it didn’t grow.
It’s the same in pipeline strategy. You can’t just aim your campaign at a sexy vertical or a splashy region and expect traction, because you want it.
You have to work with what the environment gives you.
Enter: TAM — Total Addressable Market
Too often, teams waste resources chasing leads in all directions — like trying to catch butterflies with a slingshot.
But effective marketers? They plant the flowers.
They attract the right buyers by understanding:
Who actually needs what we’re offering
Where the pain points are real and urgent
Which segments are ready, reachable, and viable
How to speak their language at just the right moment
This isn’t passive. Far from it! It’s precise.
It’s positioning with purpose.
When you align your targeting with your TAM, your messaging lands more softly, your funnel flows more freely, and yes, those elusive butterflies come to you.
Plant strategically. Watch what grows.
Great gardening is a mix of ambition and humility. You plant with intention, but you adjust based on where things take root.
The same goes for pipeline. Don’t waste your time (or budget) trying to force growth in barren soil.
Find where the traction already exists.And feed it.
Next up in the series: Why garlic is the ultimate ABM strategy.
Ever planted something just because you wanted it — not because the conditions were right?
I have. And I’ve watched it wither, no matter how much care I gave it.
It’s the same with pipeline. You can chase that “perfect” lead all you like — the logo you’re desperate to land — but if the ground isn’t right, it won’t grow.
Great gardeners — and great marketers — learn to observe: 🌱 Where things naturally thrive 🌞 Where the light and timing are right 🌾 Where there’s real potential, not just personal preference
Lead generation isn’t about forcing growth. It’s about spotting the conditions where growth is already trying to happen — and nurturing that.
You may love artichokes. But if courgettes are exploding across the garden, that’s your sign.
You can feed it, water it, support it with string and sticks — but you cannot force it to ripen faster. If you pick it too early? It’s hard, bitter, and gets binned. Too late? It splits and rots on the vine.
Sound familiar?
Good leads are the same. They need nurture, warmth, and patience. Send the pitch too soon, and you burn the opportunity. Wait too long, and it’s gone — or someone else has picked it.
In marketing and in gardening, the trick is knowing:
What signals tell you it’s time to harvest How to support growth without smothering it And how to deal with a glut when all your hard work matures at once
You want sustainable pipeline? Treat it like a tomato — not a turnip.
I can plant the seed, tend the soil, and know when to harvest. I can cast a line in the right waters. And if the stakes are high enough — I can hit a target from horseback at full gallop.
You don’t survive the wild — or the revenue rollercoaster — by hunting alone. You need to know how to feed yourself for the long haul.
That’s true for pipeline. That’s true for life.
This is where the series really begins: 🌱 Pipeline & Life Lessons from the Allotment B2B growth strategies, inspired by mud, muscle, and marrow-deep marketing.
Next up: what tomatoes can teach you about timing, nurture, and conversion rates.
But here’s a fact that’s hard to ignore: In the late 1700s, American mountain men died from “rabbit starvation.” Surviving only on lean meat — no fat, no carbs, no variety — their bodies gave out.
What’s the parallel? A diet of only hunting new leads is just as unsustainable.
You need gatherers too. You need farmers. You need a well-balanced go-to-market engine that cultivates, nurtures, and sustains.
A healthy pipeline is like survival in the wild: 🥕 You farm 🐟 You fish 🍎 You forage 🐇 And yes, you hunt
And me? I’m the farmer. I can fish. I can shoot from horseback. Let’s just say I’m zombie-apocalypse ready — and so is the pipeline.
This is the first in a new series: 🪓 Lessons in Pipeline from the Allotment Follow along for more field-tested strategies with a backwoods edge.
Okay, children, sit down, and Grandma X is going to tell you a story. Once upon a time, we had to look up companies (and people) in printed telephone books. Businesses were listed in the Yellow Pages, arranged by type of business, and then the listings were in alphabetical order. So if you were, say, a print shop, you might have thought it was really clever to call yourself AAA Printing. That way, when someone looked up “Print Shop” in the Yellow Pages, you would be first. Great.
So, let’s say print shops, XYZ Printing and AAA Printing, are both located near a university. This university’s master’s students need to deliver their thesis in five hard copies bound in magenta. XYZ creates a website with their location, directions on how to get there, their services and prices, and in the months of May and June, a lead magnet that they have a special on magenta hard covers and if you deliver the text by Tuesday, they can have it ready by Thursday. AAA decides not to bother and only has a standard Google listing with their name, address, and telephone number. Are you still with me? The old search was “town + print shop,” so both would pop up, and you could call. Now we say to Chat, “find me a place close by that I can get my master’s thesis printed and bound.”
Guess which print shop pops up? And why? How do I ensure Chat finds me? Well we have to do the work to help answer the question.
