medical/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 "cost" centres.
What do you think?
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.
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.
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.
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.