It’s really easy to chase the shiny, metal object when picking the company that you want to work for. Hearing the buzz words like AI, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, etc gets us all pretty excited (and maybe a bit scared, skynet), but what does any of it actually mean in the context of that companies product? If you can’t break down, in a very simple way, what issue your company’s product is actually solving and clearly paint an ROI picture, then good luck convincing a CFO to buy your product.
That’s why I like boring industries. Industries whose products have traditionally been hosted on-premise or managed in some legacy manner and are moving to the cloud. There are a ton of examples of industries like this, such as telephony, data center, and cyber-security. Below are 3 reasons why you should bet on boring companies (especially as a salesperson).
- Product Market Fit
- When you work for companies that are carving out a new space, you have to convince your buyer that there is a need for your product. When you work for companies that exist in a large, legacy industry, all you have to do is convince them that your modern product is better than their old product. I’ve worked in both, the latter is MUCH easier.
- Budget
- It’s hard to explain the ROI of a product to a CFO if they don’t use something similar to that product today. No line item in the budget exists for that product, and you have to convince the CFO that this additional line item cost will save them money / make them more efficient (very hard). When you sell modern products in a legacy industry, the company you are selling to is most likely already using a product in your industry so they have a line item for it. Your product is a line item swap which makes the cost easy to stomach, and pretty much every CFO understands the ROI of migrating from an on-premise/legacy solution to a modern solution in the cloud.
- Building a Career (More Sales Related)
- Being an expert in a legacy industry that is going through cloud transformation is great for your career. While industry knowledge isn’t the end all be all in building a successful sales career, it certainly doesn’t hurt and competitors will always try and recruit you away simply because of where you work.
I mentioned industries migrating to the cloud a few times as what to look for when choosing a company to work for, but cloud migration isn’t the only thing when looking for big, legacy industries. A great example is the corporate travel space, which has been dominated by travel agents for decades but is now being disrupted by companies like TripActions who are cutting out the travel agents by providing corporations with a consumer-grade travel booking experience. In general, what you want to look for are legacy industries that are modernizing. If you have any questions about which industries to bet on, send me a note!