Winning over industrial buyers

Selling is never easy, but hardware comes with a very different barrier to adoption than selling software. For these buyers, the stakes surrounding a hardware purchase are high, which means long sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, and a lot of hesitation. To break through, you’ll need to make sure your sales approach addresses their fears upfront.

Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh is a Managing Director of investments at Overlay Capital. We sat down with her to discuss why these buyers are so difficult to crack, and how you can earn their trust. 

Why selling to industrial clients is so hard

Industrial clients like recyclers, manufacturers, utilities, and data center operators operate under a completely distinct risk profile – these are businesses that simply can't afford to take material risk during new technology adoption. 

Beyond risk, adoption of novel hardware has a different cost profile, because you generally can't test hardware for free the way you might test a new software tool. There’s also integration complexity, because while one person can try out a piece of software and become your internal champion, selling hardware means you have to convince dozens of stakeholders all at once.

Six ways to sell to industrial buyers

1. Understand their problems, and solve them
A solution can be real, useful, and still not matter enough to the buyer. Industrial customers do not buy because something is clever or incrementally better. They buy when the problem is already painful, already budgeted for, and large enough to justify the internal disruption of adopting something new.

The best way to get your foot in the door is to find a specific budget item your target customer already has, then show how your technology can solve that problem better, faster, or cheaper. If buyers can't figure out what your product would replace – or why they'd need it in the first place – it's nearly impossible to get them interested, let alone secure long-term contracts or offtake agreements.

2. Build the right bench
To understand what your customer is already paying for and show the advantage your solution offers, you need someone on your team – or close to your business – who knows their industry inside and out.

The right hire will make your timeline to delivery much faster, but you’ll need to look for people with very niche expertise: experience selling this specific hardware to this specific type of client. This will make sense for your business because in the beginning, you should be focused on winning in one niche category before expanding into anything else.

If someone with this exact expertise doesn’t exist, perhaps because what you’re doing is First of a Kind, look for people who have sold in an adjacent category, ideally to the same operators, and will understand how they make their purchasing decisions. 

3. Highlight your reliability 
A stable supply chain, a reliable manufacturing process, and a price that won’t fluctuate are all things larger industrial buyers will pay a premium for.

But reliability, in this context, means operational trust. These customers aren’t just buying a piece of hardware or a material, they’re taking on the risk of integrating your solution into a live system. That means they’re thinking about uptime, consistency of output, how quickly issues get resolved, and whether you’ll still be there to support them in a few years.

For example, when tariffs created volatility in the market, domestic manufacturers were willing to pay more for domestically recycled aluminum because it was reliably available at a predictable price.

Ultimately, buyers will often choose the solution they trust over the one that is marginally better on paper. If your product works, but introduces uncertainty into their operations, adoption will be slow. If it reduces risk and feels dependable, they will move much faster.

4. Focus on integration as well as innovation
You’ll need to make installing your hardware simple for your buyers, so that very little has to change on their end. They should understand your value proposition immediately and see exactly how it fits into their workflow. If it feels like extra work or requires them to change their process, they'll lose interest.

To make integration as easy as possible, you may have to own that process, even if that puts the burden or cost on your company. You could also design the product in a way that intentionally makes integration easy, for instance by making your system mobile so you can bring it to them when needed. 

If that’s not an option, try to communicate that the behavior change is insignificant compared to the payoff they’ll receive. As a last resort, you can admit that it will be hard, but worth it, but this delayed gratification is harder to get people excited about.

 5. Start small 
Unpaid pilots can give you valuable insights and prove your technology works. But they don’t prove your business model, and they rarely translate into contracts at a pace that works for a venture-backed company. Part of this is psychological. Industrial buyers don’t want to be first, as there’s simply too much unpriced or unknown risk. But it’s amazing how many are willing to be second once that risk is known. 

What buyers are really looking for is proof that your solution works in a real, comparable environment. Demos and theoretical models won't work for this. They need something they can point to and say, “This worked for someone like us.”

That’s why getting your first contract matters so much more than running pilots. The first contract creates a blueprint: it shows how the economics work, that integration is possible, and that someone else was willing to take the initial risk. From there, the conversation changes. You’re no longer asking them to take a leap; you’re showing them a path that’s already trodden.

6. Consider switching to a service model
In this volatile market, buyers' needs are adapting quickly. Maybe you sold a customer a system that works perfectly, but then their needs shift slightly, and instead of adapting with an add-on or new approach, you lose them.

This is the problem when the deal ends at the purchase: you have no control over the technology’s performance or if they'll ever buy again. However, if you move to a fee-for-service model, you have oversight of the technology and remain in communication with the buyer as their needs evolve. That might mean you sell the hardware outright with a service plan attached, or shift to a leasing/usage-pricing model where customers buy the output, not the system.

This also brings advantages for the customer – it's cheaper up front, because it's a monthly fee rather than an upfront cost, and easier, because they don't have to worry about maintenance or carry the risk of it performing poorly. Ultimately, all equipment has to be serviced, and if it's cheaper with you than with other providers, why wouldn’t they stick with you?

A service model is not just easier for the customer financially; it also aligns incentives. If you sell output, uptime, or ongoing service, your incentives stay tied to performance. That often makes adoption easier because the customer feels that you are sharing the risk rather than offloading it onto them.

Elizabeth Blankenship-Singh is a Managing Director of Investments at Overlay Capital, where she invests in companies at the intersection of industrial systems, energy, and material supply chains. Her work focuses on hardware and infrastructure businesses as they move from early commercialization to broader market adoption, including investments in recycling, advanced materials, and energy systems such as nuclear fusion.