Which Industries Are The Hardest To Sell Into?
We work with hundreds of customers at GrowthOK that sells to a variety of industries. We work closely with our customers to get feedback on their sales process and results.
The truth is that there isn’t an industry that is easy to sell into. Sales is a grind and requires a lot of hard work, but it’s also extremely rewarding and challenging.
However, there are a few industries that tends to be a lot harder to sell into compared to other industries. This is based on the time it takes to close the deal, reach the decision maker, and achieve a decent response rate.
The industries that we found to be the hardest to sell into are the following:
Government- Government seems to be the hardest industry to sell into for most entrepreneurs and sales people that is selling a product or service made specifically for government and it’s related agencies.
A typical deal takes roughly 6–9 months to close and it takes an average of 3 point of contacts before reaching the decision maker.
In addition to that, the government needs a lot of manual approval from their board of directors and that can take months. Then they need to work with their state’s budgeting team to get a budget to purchase the product or service.
Education — Next up on this list is the education sector. The education sector is somewhat related to the government sector especially with public school and colleges, but it’s just as difficult to sell into education as it is to sell into the government.
Selling into education requires a lot of time and commitment, but it can be truly rewarding especially how your product might be making a strong impact in thousands of students.
The average time for selling into education can take anywhere from 6 months — 1 year. This can be a long and tedious process because teachers and professors need to get approval from their board. Teacher’s contact information can be extremely difficult to find as well. Most teachers don’t like sales emails and don’t like responding to them as well.
SMBs — Third up on this list are SMBs. These include service companies, local restaurants, salons, and many more. It’s very tough to sell to individual business owners.
Most small business owners don’t have the budget to spend on external software or marketing services. This makes it hard to convince the owners to use your product or service.
Most SMB owners also receive a lot of sales call on a daily basis from bigger companies like Yelp and they’re burnt from it.
Healthcare — Lastly, healthcare is one of the most difficult sector to sell into as well. This is due to the all the regulation and compliances that hospitals and private clinics carry.
The up side to selling into healthcare is that once you get their approval, the deal tends to move through faster than the other sectors mentioned above. The hard part is finding out who the decision maker is within the hospital and whether or not your product complies with their requirements.
So what can you do to speed up your sales process?
One of the best ways to improve your process for selling into these industries is by having the correct target and understanding the landscape. Make sure you have an account-based approach to selling into these industries and be sure to follow up.
You also have to remember that government and education don’t tend to work weekends, so you have to hustle hard on the weekdays!
If you’re looking for highly qualified and targeted sales leads along with custom data points, check out GrowthOK
