How we map a market before the first email goes out

ON THIS PAGE · 7 SECTIONS

1. 1. Write the ICP as a filter, not a persona
2. 2. Pull every company that passes it
3. 3. Score fit and timing separately
4. 4. Name the buyers inside each account
5. 5. Decide what to send first
6. What you have at the end of week one
7. Questions about market mapping

Most outbound starts with a list someone bought and three emails someone wrote on a Friday. Then the team wonders why replies are low. The list was never the market. It was a slice of a database that happened to match a job title.

Before we send anything for a client, we map the whole market. Every company that could buy, every person inside it who matters and every signal that says now is a good time. It takes about a week. It is also the reason everything after it works.

Here is how we do it, in the order we do it.

1. Write the ICP as a filterRules a database can check, plus the exclusions.
2. Pull every company that passesSeveral sources, deduped on the domain.
3. Score fit and timing separatelyFit decides who. Timing decides when.
4. Name the buyers in each accountTwo or three verified people per account.
5. Send to live signals firstThe signal is the reason for the first email.

1. Write the ICP as a filter, not a persona

A persona says "fast-growing B2B SaaS with a modern sales team". You cannot run that against a database. A filter says:

• B2B software, 50 to 500 employees
• Headquartered in the Nordics, DACH or Benelux
• At least three people in sales, one of them a manager
• Sells to companies, not consumers, with a price point above 10K a year

Every line has to be something a data source can check. If we cannot check it, it goes into the research step later, not into the filter.

We also write the exclusions down. Agencies, resellers, companies in a hiring freeze, existing customers and anyone your sales team is already talking to. Skipping this step is how you end up emailing your own pipeline.

2. Pull every company that passes it

Then we pull everything. Not a sample, not the first thousand rows. We combine a few sources because no single one covers a market well, then dedupe on the company domain.

For a typical European B2B market this is where the numbers get honest. Here is what one of those funnels looked like, with the numbers rounded:

Stage	Accounts	What cut them
Total market	28,421	Industry and geography
ICP match	8,942	Size, model and sales team
High fit	3,182	Tech stack and price point
In-market signal	742	Something happened in the last 30 days

Example market. Your numbers will look different, the shape usually does not.

That last number is the one that matters for the first month. 742 accounts is a market you can actually work properly. 28,421 is a market you can only spam.

Your market is finite. Once you see the real number, you stop wasting it.

3. Score fit and timing separately

This is the step most teams skip. They build one score and sort by it. The problem is that a perfect-fit company with nothing going on ranks above a decent-fit company that just hired a new VP of Sales. The second one is the better first email, every time.

So we keep two scores:

• Fit is stable. It changes when the company changes. Size, model, stack, team.
• Timing moves every week. A funding round, a new sales leader, SDR roles posted, a competitor ripped out, an office opened in a new country.

Fit decides whether an account is in the market at all. Timing decides the order we work through it. Timing beats targeting. Targeting beats copy.

4. Name the buyers inside each account

An account is not a person. For every account that makes the high-fit list we find two or three people: the one who owns the problem, the one who signs and sometimes the one who will actually use the thing.

We verify every email before it goes anywhere near a sending domain. If an address is risky, we leave it out. A smaller list that lands in the inbox beats a bigger one that teaches the mailbox providers to distrust you.

LinkedIn profiles come along for the ride. Email and LinkedIn run as one sequence, so the same buyer never gets two pitches that ignore each other.

5. Decide what to send first

Only now do we write. The first campaigns go to the accounts with a live signal. The signal is the reason for the email. That makes the copy almost write itself:

Short, one problem, one offer, one question. No links in the first touch. The research did the heavy lifting, so the email does not have to.

What you have at the end of week one

• Every account in your market, in one table, with a fit score
• The accounts showing a signal right now, ranked by timing
• Two or three named, verified buyers per high-fit account
• The first campaigns, each one built around a signal

Everything after this, the sending, the replies, the weekly review, runs on top of that map. When the numbers come in, we know exactly which part of the market they came from, so we know where to put next week's volume.

If you want to see what this looks like for your market, feel free to book a call. We will pull a first version of the map on the call.

Questions about market mapping

How long does it take to map a B2B market?

About a week for one ICP in one region. Most of that time goes into the filter, the exclusions and checking the scores by hand on a sample before trusting them.

What is the difference between a TAM and a lead list?

A lead list is whatever a database returned for a job title. A TAM map is every company that fits your filter, scored for fit and timing, with the buyers named. You work a TAM in order. You can only blast a lead list.

How often should the market map be refreshed?

Fit scores change slowly, so a full refresh every quarter is enough. Timing changes every week, so signals are checked continuously and accounts move up or down the queue as they appear.