Most B2B golf companies are building their strategy on a distorted view of their market.
Ask anyone who they sell to and they give you a tight answer. “Mid-tier and high-end private clubs.” “18-hole daily fee and semi-private courses.” It sounds defined. It sounds thoughtful.
Then you ask how many of those there are.
That’s when the math starts to fall apart.
Over the past 45 days, I’ve spoken with more than 45 B2B golf companies. Nearly every one of them is operating with a cloudy view of their Total Addressable Market. The problem isn’t strategy. It’s the underlying data.
Here are the four structural reasons golf companies consistently miscalculate their TAM.
1. Course Counts Are Lying to You
Torrey Pines is an iconic golf venue in San Diego, CA. Both of its courses, the South and North, host PGA play every year. But Torrey Pines is one golf facility. It has one booking engine, one clubhouse, one website, one Head Professional. Even though Torrey Pines has two courses, businesses that work with Torrey Pines are working with one business entity, not two.
Golf businesses love to cite course counts when they talk about how many customers they have. Why? Because it’s a more impressive number. But you don’t want inflated numbers when sizing up your market, figuring out account loads, or divvying up territories. There are over 16,000 golf courses in America, but there are under 14,000 green grass golf facilities. In terms of potential customers, that’s a 15% reduction in the number of companies that can buy your product.
You can’t understand how many businesses are in your target market until you properly account for multi-course facilities and adopt a facility-level view of your prospects.
2. Your CRM Is Full of Ghost Courses
Over the past 25 years, over 3,500 golf courses have permanently closed. While play at those facilities no longer exists, their CRM records live on forever. If you had a list of every course that’s been open since the year 2000, 18% of those courses are no longer in operation.
Last week, I crawled a course finder directory from a very reputable magazine in the golf industry. The purpose of this directory is to help consumers like you and me find where to play golf. The only problem is that 320+ of these courses are no longer in operation. If one of the biggest names in golf cannot keep track of which courses are still in business, how can we expect resource-strapped GTM teams to do the same?
I recently received a list of 4,300+ target accounts that were high priority for one of the biggest names in golf. Twenty percent of them were defunct, out of business. After removing duplicate and defunct facilities, their list of 4,400 had shrunk to under 3,000. One of the clubs on their list actually closed in 1999. The sad part is that it turned out they weren’t even using old data. They had recently scraped it off the web from another popular golf directory’s course list.
3. Today’s Prospect Is Yesterday’s Rebrand
A lot of people dream of owning a golf course. And when they finally get one, guess what they love to do? They change the name.
That list of 4,300+ courses recently scraped from the big name in golf? I started to get nervous when I didn’t have a course on their list. It was called Pine Hills Country Club. It took me five minutes to realize that this was the previous name of Trump National Philadelphia, which was acquired in 2009. This is the quality of data that lives on the web for golf course directories.
Let’s take a look at golf courses in West Palm Beach, FL. I know of golf CRMs out there with separate account records for:
The President Country Club
Patriot Golf Course
Banyan Cay Golf Club
Dutchman’s Pipe Club
These are all the same golf club. The same 18 holes, located at the same latitude and longitude. They have changed their name three times in the past 15 years. Four brands and three rebrands in 15 years doesn’t happen with your typical B2B account records. But it happens in golf.
4. You Can’t Filter What You Can’t See
The truth is that no situation is as simple as it seems. I recently talked to someone who is looking to acquire golf clubs in seven specific states. OK, easy, there are 2,563. But wait, they want 18-hole courses. Not 9, not 27, not 36. Eighteen holes. OK, now we’re down to 1,700.
But there’s got to be a driving range. Down to 1,542. And it needs to be in a high-population area. Down to 1,365. And acquiring municipally-owned, military-owned, and university-owned courses is probably off the table. 1,088. Oh, and high-end public courses with green fees over $100 are probably out of their price range.
So now we’re down to 973 targets from the original 2,600. Imagine how much time would have been wasted manually researching the viability of the 2,600 courses instead of the less than 1,000 legitimate opportunities.
So What? This Is Costing You Real Money
Learning your TAM is not just about sizing up your pool of target clubs.
It determines:
- How many reps you hire
- How you carve territories
- How you forecast pipeline
- How you value your company
- How investors evaluate your growth ceiling
When you don’t know who your real prospects are, you waste time. Reps call clubs that have been closed for a decade. They prospect facilities that are duplicates. They chase accounts that were rebranded years ago. They miss legitimate opportunities because they cannot filter properly.
In most industries, market sizing is straightforward. In golf, it is deceptively complex.
That is one of major problems we built Downgrain to solve. Learn more about the data in the Downgrain platform today.