Use caseSize a market
Measure how many buyers in your exact market have the need, how often they buy and what they spend, segment by segment, so the bottom-up model rests on primary inputs you can defend line by line.
Published category figures rarely match the market a plan targets, so the inputs come from the buyers inside the team's own definition.
The team pins down who counts as a buyer, which products are in scope and which regions and company sizes are included, because every later number inherits that boundary.
Pulse fields a survey that asks buyers in each segment whether they have the need, how often they purchase and what they spent last time, the three rates a bottom-up model multiplies.
Recruitment reaches the people around the purchase as well as the buyers, such as distributors who see order volumes and consultants who specify products, each one screened, which fills gaps a buyer-only sample leaves in a trade market.
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GrowwThe model is the team's own; the study supplies what goes into it and checks the assumptions it rests on.
Incidence, purchase frequency and spend per segment go into the team's model beside population or company counts from official statistics, which gives a bottom-up figure to compare with the top-down one.
The assumptions that move the model most, such as how often buyers switch supplier or who signs off a purchase, are asked about directly, so each one rests on what buyers reported and not on a planning guess.
Buyers explain how they buy today, from a framework contract to a card payment, which tells the team how much of the addressable market is realistically open to it and what it would take to win share.
Understand how people use a category, what they think about it and what shapes their choices.
The usage and attitudes template
Run this studyMarket sizing estimates how large a market is and how much of it a business can realistically serve and win. It usually distinguishes the total addressable market, the serviceable addressable market reachable with the product and channels, and the serviceable obtainable market the business can capture. Top-down approaches start from large published figures and narrow them; bottom-up approaches multiply the number of target customers by expected purchase per customer. Using both, and comparing them, tests the estimate. Secondary data from government statistics, industry associations and company filings provides the frame, and primary research fills the gaps: surveys estimate incidence, usage and spending, and interviews test assumptions about how buyers decide. Good sizing documents every assumption, presents a range with the drivers of uncertainty, discounts stated purchase intent, and is updated once real sales data arrives. For a new category with no sales history, estimates rest on analogies with similar products and conservative adoption curves.
A few very large buyers can drag a spend average far from the typical one. The transcripts show what each outlier said they bought and why, so the analyst can decide whether to cap them or model them as a segment of their own.
Whether someone counts as a buyer depends on the definition written before fieldwork. Screening in a small group who fall just outside it shows the team whether the boundary leaves out people who would buy, before every number inherits it.
A board cares about a market's direction as much as its size. The moderator asks each buyer whether they expect to spend more or less next year, and what is driving it, so the growth assumption arrives with the reasons buyers gave.