Improving performance requires more than reviewing sales results. It requires a shared understanding of market potential, customer coverage, available opportunities and the effectiveness of go-to-market activities.
Bringing together people from Sales, Marketing, Operations, Services and other relevant functions creates an opportunity to combine different perspectives, challenge assumptions and develop a clearer understanding of the market.
The Market Waterfall Excel Tool provides a structured, visual framework for walking through the progression from Total Addressable Market (TAM) to market coverage, identified opportunities, orders and actual sales. With waterfall charts and performance indicators, it helps participants challenge assumptions, identify improvement opportunities and agree on practical actions.
The objective is not to determine who has the most accurate view of the market. It is to learn together, identify improvement opportunities and develop actions that strengthen market visibility, coverage, conversion and overall performance.
The tool is available in two versions:
Price range: €12.00 through €50.00 Exc. VAT
A Market Waterfall discussion is not simply an exercise in analyzing figures. It is an opportunity to examine how an organization approaches its market and challenge existing assumptions constructively.
Participants may discover that some market segments receive insufficient attention, that opportunities remain unidentified, that customer coverage could be improved or that conversion differs significantly between segments.
The Market Waterfall provides a common structure for examining these questions. It helps teams:
The value is not limited to producing a waterfall chart. It comes from the discussions and decisions that the analysis supports.
See how the Excel workbook helps visualize market potential, coverage, opportunities and performance, and how the different versions can support market reviews.
For the underlying approach, see our Market Waterfall Analysis methodology.
The workbook visualizes how market potential progresses through the successive stages of the Market Waterfall:
Market Waterfall Stage | What It Represents |
Total Market | Total market potential |
Addressable Market | Market that can be served by the company’s solutions |
Covered Market | Market reached through existing sales resources and channels |
Opportunities | Identified commercial opportunities |
Orders | Business secured through customer commitments |
Sales | Business ultimately delivered |
The Sales stage is optional and can be hidden when the analysis focuses on orders.
The framework connects market sizing concepts such as Total Addressable Market (TAM) and Serviceable Available Market (SAM) with market coverage, opportunity identification and conversion performance.
This broader perspective helps teams examine not only the business they win, but also potential business that may not yet be visible to the organization.
The tool provides waterfall charts and automatically calculated metrics, including:
These indicators support discussions about differences between market potential, identified opportunities and achieved results.
The waterfall can be adapted to different business models.
Users can rename stages and, where appropriate, merge steps such as orders and sales for flow-based activities.
This flexibility helps the analysis reflect the organization’s actual commercial processes.
The Full version includes dynamic Excel slicers that allow users to select market segments and time periods.
The analysis can be adapted to dimensions such as geographical regions, product lines, market tiers or other segmentation criteria.
By comparing segments and reviewing changes over time, participants can investigate differences in market coverage, visibility and conversion performance.
An organization’s CRM records the opportunities it knows about. It does not necessarily represent all the business available in the market.
A Market Waterfall discussion can help participants estimate the broader opportunity landscape and investigate gaps between market potential and identified opportunities.
The related Market Visibility methodology provides additional perspectives on improving market understanding and opportunity identification.
Differences between addressable and covered markets may raise questions about customer reach, geographical coverage and the effectiveness of existing sales channels.
The Channel Strategy methodology helps explore the choice and combination of direct, indirect and other routes to market.
For direct sales organizations, Territory Design provides a complementary approach to examining territory potential, customer coverage and resource allocation.
When opportunities are identified but conversion remains below expectations, the discussion may turn toward sales capabilities, opportunity qualification, solution positioning or execution.
The Sales Enablement methodology can support the investigation of improvements in sales processes and capabilities.
A Market Waterfall may also be developed at territory or individual salesperson level, helping participants consider differences in market potential, coverage and conversion. This can provide useful context when discussing performance expectations and Sales Compensation Plans.
Such comparisons should account for differences in territory potential, market conditions and data quality rather than relying on sales results alone.
The analysis may reveal that some segments offer greater improvement potential than others, or that existing solutions do not adequately address market needs.
The Market Mix and Solution Mix frameworks provide complementary perspectives for investigating market priorities and solution positioning.
The Market Share Analysis Tool offers a related approach to examining changes in competitive market performance.
The Single version provides a focused analysis of one market waterfall.
Data is entered directly below the chart, and results and performance indicators are calculated automatically.
It is particularly suited to a specific market, business unit, territory or other defined scope where participants want to examine the overall progression from market potential to orders or sales.
It offers a straightforward way to present and discuss the journey from total market potential to orders or sales, without requiring a complex reporting system.
The Full version includes the complete Single Waterfall functionality, together with an additional Waterfall by Segment analysis.
It is designed for organizations that need to compare multiple market segments, geographical areas, product lines or time periods.
Using structured data and Excel slicers, users can move between detailed segment views and consolidated results.
The Full version is particularly useful when differences between segments or periods are central to the management discussion.
The Market Waterfall workbook is designed to combine available commercial data with informed market estimates.
A practical review can follow these steps:
The workbook structures and visualizes the information provided. It does not automatically discover unidentified opportunities or independently determine the size of the market.
The Single Waterfall allows data to be entered directly below the graph.
Results and performance indicators are calculated automatically, enabling participants to explore different assumptions and review their implications.
The same Excel workbook can be reused for different market analyses or simulations. Simply save a separate copy for each situation, allowing you to preserve previous analyses and revisit them whenever needed.
The waterfall stages can be renamed to reflect the business model being assessed.
The Show Toolbar menu provides access to comments and guidance useful for customizing the tool.
The Waterfall by Segment feature allows you to analyze how market size, coverage, and sales performance evolve across multiple dimensions such as regions, product lines, or market tiers.
A key strength of this functionality is the ability to combine detailed analysis with high-level aggregation. Using Excel slicers, you can explore specific segments or consolidate data dynamically to obtain a global view of performance.
Data for this analysis is entered in the dedicated 2.1. Data by Segment tab.
The structure supports multiple time periods and market segmentation criteria, including:
To ensure data consistency, built-in checks validate numeric inputs and highlight any issues.
The tool includes pre-filled example data to illustrate how segmentation can be structured:
All slicers and structures can be adapted to match your organization’s data and segmentation logic.
Data is consolidated using a pivot table, enabling dynamic aggregation across selected segments and time periods.
You can:
This allows for a clear understanding of how each segment contributes to overall performance.
A key capability of the tool is the ability to hide or display slicers dynamically, enabling different levels of analysis:
For example, you can:
This flexibility supports both operational reviews and strategic decision-making.
After updating data, simply click “Refresh All” to recalculate results.
Branding, trademarks, and references must remain visible
Purchase and use of the application are subject to the applicable General Sales Conditions.
