Whole-Market Audience Model
Build influence among buyers, users, teammates, and recommenders
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 96%
Treat the addressable audience as an ecosystem rather than a list of budget holders. Include formal buyers, hands-on users, their colleagues, people who can recommend the product, and people whose sentiment affects internal adoption. Serve that larger market through useful content, community, and low-friction product experiences long before a procurement event occurs. Individual users can then introduce a tool, demonstrate its value, and spread it through a team until purchasing becomes the rational next step. A large audience also becomes a strategic asset that enables media distribution, partnerships, word of mouth, category leadership, and other forms of leverage that may not be foreseeable when the investment begins.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain
Core principles
- 01Markets contain more influential people than formal decision makers
- 02Users can introduce products before a purchase decision occurs
- 03Team sentiment shapes organizational adoption
- 04Audience creates leverage beyond direct attribution
- 05Help people before they become customers
How to run it
- 1
Map the influence ecosystem
List everyone who buys, uses, evaluates, recommends, or discusses products in the category.
Pro tip Include junior practitioners who lack budget but can initiate adoption.
Watch out Do not equate organizational title with actual influence.
- 2
Solve pre-purchase problems
Create content, education, or community resources that help market participants before they need the product.
Pro tip Choose problems closely related to customer success without making every interaction a sales pitch.
Watch out A broad audience unrelated to the product’s market creates reach without strategic leverage.
- 3
Lower the adoption threshold
Let an individual experience useful product value before requiring organization-wide approval or budget.
Pro tip Design a free or low-friction entry point that naturally produces shareable work.
Watch out Security and governance requirements still need appropriate safeguards.
- 4
Encourage team propagation
Make it easy for the first user to share results, invite colleagues, and demonstrate value internally.
Pro tip Observe how successful users describe the product to their teammates.
Watch out Do not assume adoption will spread merely because signup is free.
- 5
Compound audience leverage
Use accumulated reach for partnerships, owned media, category education, launches, and positive word of mouth.
Pro tip Evaluate strategic leverage as well as directly attributed revenue.
Watch out Short-term attribution standards can prematurely kill a valuable long-term asset.
In the wild
One person within Kieran Flanagan’s team began using Loom for their own work. The product then moved from person to person and spread across HubSpot before becoming an organizational purchase discussion.
→ Individual utility created bottom-up team adoption and commercial opportunity.
Common mistakes
Targeting decision makers only
This ignores the users and teammates who discover products, create sentiment, and shape the eventual purchase.
Demanding immediate payback
Large audience assets can require years before their full partnership, media, and category advantages become visible.
Building an unrelated audience
Reach is less defensible when the audience has no connection to the product, category, or customer’s success.
Is it for you?
Best for
B2B and product-led companies whose products can spread through teams, communities, or professional networks.
Not ideal for
Businesses with a tiny fixed buyer pool, no meaningful user influence, and no plausible benefit from broader market attention.
From the transcript
“My team decides 90% of what we do, right? And what we use, what we buy, how we spend our money.”
“You can uh help people with problems long before they ever use your products.”
“think about all of the people who not only use your product, but also think about the people who could recommend your product to their…”
From the episode
How Rationality F’s up your B2B Strategy