What it is
Serviceable addressable market (SAM) is the portion of a Total Addressable Market a business can realistically reach and serve. For a recruitment desk, TAM is the full revenue opportunity across every workable account in a broad scope. SAM narrows that down using the constraints that actually apply: the verticals and role disciplines you specialise in, the geographies you have candidate networks and local knowledge in, the capacity your desk has to work accounts at all, and the relationships you already hold that make some accounts easier to win than others. TAM asks what the market is worth. SAM asks how much of it is actually yours to work.
A generalist tech TAM across a whole region might run into thousands of companies. The SAM for a two-person desk that only places backend engineers into Series A to B fintechs in one city is a much smaller, much more specific list, and it is the list that actually matters day to day. SAM sits between TAM and SOM (serviceable obtainable market), which narrows further to what you could realistically win over the next year or so given current pipeline and win rates.
TAM says the market is big enough. SAM says how much of it is actually yours to work.
Why it matters
TAM tells you whether a market is big enough to be worth mapping. SAM tells you how much of that market a given desk can actually work, which is the number that should drive headcount planning, quota-setting and the decision to open a new vertical or geography. A target set against TAM is usually unrealistic, because it assumes capacity and reach the desk does not have. A target set against SAM is a plan you can staff.
The common failure is skipping the step. Agencies size a market once, at TAM level, and then let every consultant chase whatever fits the broad description, without ever drawing the tighter boundary that reflects real specialism and capacity. The result is BD effort spread across accounts the desk was never going to win, while a genuinely winnable adjacent niche, well inside the real SAM, goes unworked because nobody drew the line explicitly.
How boilr handles it
In boilr, the ICP already encodes the verticals, geography and role types that draw the boundary of a SAM. Because your AI sales employee maintains a live, enriched catalogue of every company matching that ICP, the SAM is not a slide built once and filed away. It stays current as your agency's specialism sharpens, as a desk's capacity changes, and as companies inside that scope form, raise and grow.
That scope lives in the Company Brain alongside the ICP it was drawn from, so it reflects the desk's actual reach rather than one consultant's private sense of who is worth calling. As placements accumulate, the picture of which accounts inside your SAM actually convert gets sharper too, which is what lets an agency decide with real evidence whether a vertical or region is worth adding capacity to, rather than guessing from a TAM figure that was never narrowed down.
