
Ask HN: What industry/dept. is easiest to sell to? - newusertoday
medical&#x2F;Government seems to be the worst place to sell the product as it involves lot of regulatory hurdles and long sale cycles for a small software companies.
I find marketing dept. are easiest to sell to as they are always looking for novel solutions and are not considered &quot;cost&quot; centres.
What do you think?
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jwilliams
Marketing has a large discretionary budget in many organizations - usually the
largest (discretionary) in many organizations. So that makes it a good target.

Sales will throw money at anything with a clear ROI. If you can reliably say
it'll make salespeople 1% more effective, then that's an easy decision. If you
look at Chorus.ai / Gong.io / VoiceOps - these are new sales tools that have
really burst into the market.

That said, as a result of this, there is a lot of tech in both of those
domains. Your customers will have a lot of tech and be bombarded with a lot of
options. Is is very noisy and confusing. So it gets harder to get above that
noise and stand out. Particularly in the early days.

So even in those cases, I think starting out in a niche can make sense (A
niche of startups can be a good one for a bunch of reasons). Simplifies your
approach to the market.

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jamesmishra
The easier a market is to sell to, the more crowded the market will become --
barring other factors that restrict the number of players in the market (e.g.
the cost of building factories, regulations, etc).

Marketing budgets are huge, but the barrier to entry for creating another SaaS
marketing tool is low.

If you yourself are looking to start a company, the easiest thing to do is
figure out what advantages you have that other companies don't have.

If you have a proprietary advantage in a crowded market, then don't worry
about the competition and focus on telling your story to your customers.

But I would avoid entering markets that have low barriers to entry and where
you don't have a proprietary advantage, simply because you want to avoid
markets with high barriers to entry.

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jackgolding
I agree, marketing and startups - so many startups made selling to startups
(see [https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/startups-selling-to-
other-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/11/startups-selling-to-other-
startups-a-house-of-cards/))

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slackoverflower
We started our sales automation SaaS product a couple years ago when the
market was relatively young. Today it is super saturated. Would not advise
people to get into this market, we just got super lucky and got big.

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joezydeco
Law firms. Every single cost center is passed on to the client.

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itamarst
The one you know best.

