The 10 Best Sales Industries for 2026 (Ranked From Worst to BEST)

If you're a sales rep and you're looking for the absolute best sales gig to try and get into in 2026 and this is the right video, I'm going to be breaking down the top 10 best industries to sell in. I'm going to be breaking down the income floor, the income ceiling, what type of sales it is, who's best for it, and if you're a newbie, beginner, advanced, whatever it is, which ones are going to work for you. And then I'm going to tell you about some really cool opportunities that I can see going into 2026. All right, guys. So the absolute worst thing to sell in, in terms of being a sales rep is retail. Retail takes tons of time. There is a really ceiling. There is like a low floor, I suppose, because the floor isn't zero like in a lot of them. But it also doesn't teach you much. So the skill required is almost none. Okay. But I think it can for somebody who is like, wanting to get into sales, who just really doesn't have much of an understanding of how to communicate with people. I think you do learn how to communicate. There are some companies that have very good retail training programs, like some shoe companies and stuff like that, where they get you to try and upsell people into more pairs of shoes, different types of shoes, stuff like that. There's one notably in Australia called Nine west, and they have like the third shoe. And it is a pretty good training regime. However, it's not a massively transferable skill. It's sort of barely considered a sales job, although it does technically ticket. So I would say that if you're looking for great sales in 2026, retail is not a good sales opportunity and nor is it something they should look into. If you're looking to progress in your sales career and actually kind of get into better stuff. Number nine. So the ninth worst, I suppose is door to door, lower ticket stuff. So whether it's magazine sale description, stuff like that, now the skill needed for this is high and the income floor is low and the income ceiling is low as well. The that it takes you to build up the money to be successful in this is really long. And it's like. I suppose the only argument you could make is that it's not bad for newbies who are looking for opportunities where they get the door slammed in their face an awful lot. And there is an element to that which I think is actually really positive. This would be very similar to the next one, which I'll take you through, but it is high volume. You do learn the skill of door knocking, which I think is a positive thing. So that's why it's above retail. However, it's going to be frustrating and it's going to be very, very difficult for you to make significant amounts or even moderate amounts of inc. And so if you're someone who's going to do it for a season and a reason, then I don't think it's terrible. But it's definitely not a good opportunity. All right. The next one which is number eight is like telco in store consumer sales. That's pretty common actually. One of the better sales reps that I've ever known Rode Rode Thielemake, who I've known for a long time. Member of Sales Sniper. We call him the Black Prince of Piff. He actually came from T mobile consumer sales and I'm pretty sure he went into more of the commercial side which is not a bad place to be. Which is why I'm taking consumer plans in particular. It's sort of retail plus, but you can make lot more money than in a traditional retail environment just because the plans and pricing and profit margins on those things are actually a lot higher and so you actually can make decent money. However, it's again, it's not a massively transferable skill. The skill required for is like not high but the income floor is a bit higher so you're going to get like more than minimum wage. Generally speaking, the income ceiling is quite low, especially for the consumer plans. Like you just, you'd struggle to make six figures. The time to money, it takes a while to build that up and especially it can be quite a competitive environment within the store itself. And so really it's best for people that I think might want some security and want to enter into an entry level sales position but want the security of a wage and don't want to do something like a door to door, you know, I mean where you get a lot of experience but you know, you don't really have any sustainable or consistent income to fall back on. So it is a bit of an all or nothing scenario. So that's sort of those in store number seven might be surprising. It's car sales. I don't think car sales is a super good opportunity. Now you can scream at me in the comments and like any industry, someone can crush it in car sales. Absolutely no doubt. Right. However, I would say it's not a massively transferable skill set which I think it's a very common thread throughout. What I think is A good job. I think that, you know, you ascend through the levels of sales rep to get to opportunities that are really, really high income. And, you know, if you're doing 500k a year, which is a great income, don't get me wrong, but that is top, top, top, top, top tier car salesman, right? Just because selling cars itself just isn't that profitable of a venture. It just really isn't. And so there's just not a lot of margin to pay the gu. Also, it's a very commoditized, you know, like you're selling the same thing. So if someone selling the same car for cheaper, like they're not going to buy it off you. And so you end up kind of not gaining some of the skill sets that you would usually get. If you're in an environment where, you know, you get a multiple different type of lead, you have a couple of different ways of selling the product. However, you can definitely make money doing it. The floor is very low, the ceiling is decent, but it's not really high. And so that's why I'm not scoring it that well. The time to money, it is a difficult thing to do. The skill required is pretty high to be good at it, and it can take a while to build that up. And also the location, there's a lot of factors that have a large variable to do whether or not you're going to be successful in this particular avenue. So I'd say it's best for people from a personality perspective. It's best for people who are like, really forthright, very, very confident. Those are the people that are going to do well. Okay, we're getting into number six, and then we're going to go into the last few in a little bit more detail. Okay, so the next one is real estate leasing. So I say leasing specifically because real estate leasing is nowhere near as lucrative as real estate selling. I used to do a lot of stuff with Ryan Sirhan. I worked with him for years. You know, the leasing agents are the ones who usually come in and they're looking for like they're brand new, right? Because it's, you know, it's seen as easier, it is not super lucrative. And it is very, very high admin, very high touch point. You still have to do all of the same things as selling, but you get very few of the benefits. And so the ceiling is low, the floor is low. The skill required is basically the same as selling because you have to go out and get the listings and all that kind of stuff. But you Just can't make as much money. So to me, like, I guess it's best for someone who is coming into an environment, wants to do real estate saf sales, but then needs an entry point they can learn on the job without burning a network. I guess I just don't really see the point in doing it as your only thing. But I guess if it's a scenario where you have to, you know, then do it. Now these are the last five. These are what I consider to be the best opportunities for you to get into sales in 2026 and things that are going to do really, really well and are basically kind of bulletproof industries for the most part, as long as you have a good skill set. So real estate sales, obviously it's probably where you could make the most amount of money. So I think real estate sales probably has the highest ceiling. I don't think there's any salespeople that actually make more money than extremely successful. Like top point one percent real estate agents, like you take someone like a Ryan Sirhan or a Frederick Eklund or any of those guys and they're making probably eight figures a year. So it's got the crazy high ceiling because if you can get into really luxury real estate, you know, the sale isn't selling the house, the sale is getting the listing. So it is best for people who are great at networking and get their social energy from going out there and networking. There is Nowhere near a 9 to 5. And so like the trade off here is that you are working weekends, you have to have a BMW, you have to wear a suit, right? And like it's a fantastic opportunity, but it is the 1% making 99% of the income, okay? And that's because it is a hustler's world. If you are a successful real estate agent, you are a straight hustler, hard worker. It doesn't necessarily mean that you are a skilled salesperson. That's not what it requires. It requires straight hustle. Like people who are successful in high ticket would be comically woeful at being a real estate agent. Now real estate agents could probably transfer into high ticket. I still think high ticket is a better opportunity for most people. But high ticket salespeople like compared to real estate salespeople, they're like opposite end of the spectrum. High ticket rarely do anything. They're very unprofessional. They like suck at follow up referrals, outbound do anything. They seem to be fed leads. Daddy please, daddy please. They are not self reliant at all. And they're little bitches. Whereas real estate agents are usually straight hustlers. But if you get them on a sales call like they're comically stupid out of however, you know, I probably rather that side than the other side to be honest. So again, skill needed is super high to be really good income floor. Super low income ceiling is incredibly high. Time to money takes a very long time to build up to be good at this. And it's best for people who are just absolute savages and just want to work and they're going to power through any scenario. Now the next one is SaaS. SaaS or high or like tech sales. Now SaaS and tech sales, like I have a bit of experience in that. I own a SaaS company. It is not a skill based position, it is a professionalism based position and it is pure like relentless outbound opportunities. You need to be someone who's good at filling out your CRM, you're good at follow up, you're good at getting referrals and you're someone who will chase people. Because you can't mindset a business into getting a software. It's not how it works. And so there are just logistical barriers in the way of actually getting someone to sign a proposal that involves say changing over dialing softwares for example. Like that is a big shift and there's multiple stakeholders. So some high ticket guy who's just like fucking, you know, let me show you a different perspective. Like it's just not going to go down that well. And so it's like the best people in SaaS are people that are like grinders and super organized and professional. You know, those are the ones that do really, really well. And so the skill needed is not high, but the professionalism required is very high. The income floor, you're almost always going to have a good salary. The income ceiling is pretty high, but it's nowhere near as high as something that doesn't have a salary. The time to money is pretty quick because you're usually going to have a salary. But the reason for that is because the comms are relatively low because there's a, the hard cost of the software and stuff like that. So you might get 5%, you know what I mean? Like of like. But you get it over the lifetime. And so it's not like a high ticket deal where you're just getting like bang, a big whack of cash. What you're doing is you're building up a book, right? So you can definitely get to 50, 60k a month for sure, selling software if you're good at it, you know, I mean, but it's going to take time to get there, but usually you're going to be supplemented with a 100k salary or something and who it's best for. This is really best for people who are experienced sales reps who understand like how to run proposals, how to run meetings with multiple stakeholders, how to follow up and how to do all those professional things that I think set you know, a high ticket guy apart, you know, a really successful one from not six one now the next one. This is where I think like the number two is, okay, is high ticket. So high ticket is an interesting niche and it's a niche that I've been heavily involved in for a long time. And actually if you guys go into the comments down below, what you'll see is you will see a booking link for committed coaches, which is a high ticket business which is getting over 11,000 book calls per month and has like 3 to 400,000 leads a month and they are in desperate need of reps. It is a good opportunity. It's strong commission structure and if you go down below then you can actually go in there and you can apply. I've been doing some training there for years. I've been involved in them for a long time. It's a quality super high volume, high ticket business which is super rare in the space because most high ticket businesses are sort of high ticket low volume or low ticket high volume. This is a high ticket high volume. And so you get an incredible opportunity to be able to do like outbound for unlimited leads or inbound for unlimited leads. You get a product which is health related, which I think is a real positive and they have plenty of things in place in order to get people better, including some trainings with myself. Okay, all right, so but high ticket, okay, the skill required to be successful in high ticket is high. Now I'll juxtapose that with the professionalism is low. Okay. So like most people aren't doing follow ups and referrals and doing that kind of good stuff. Now if you do that I think that you will outshine everybody. But you do have to be relatively skilled on the phones. And this is the same whether you're selling a high ticket info product or if you're selling something like fitness. I'll give you an example with fitness. The reason why fitness is difficult to sell. However, if you figure it out, you can basically sell anything. So I think it's very much worth doing. It's Where I got my start in sales, what you're doing is you're asking people to stop doing things they enjoy. Replace that with physical pain, ask them to take time out of your day and stop doing things that they enjoy and then from there pay you for the pleasure. So if you can convince someone to do that, you can get them to buy a SaaS product. Right? And most of the top people that I know came from fitness sales. The reason being is a very emotional, difficult sale and you have to grind and then usually the targets that you get are ridiculous and so you have to sort of do a lot of other stuff in the meantime to make it work. So I would say like for something like a committed coaches, which again, you can go down below and you can grab the details. You know, the skill required is not super high because it is crazy high volumes. You actually get an opportunity to kind of, you know, supplement that. But generally speaking for high ticket, the skill set required is relatively high. The income floor is zero. The income ceiling is very high. I would say it's second only to real estate. The time to money is usually pretty quick because a lot of the time, like if you're half decent sales, you can ramp up to a good level quickly because most high ticket sales are basically identical. So if you've done it before you, you can do it again. And it's best for people who are high risk, high reward people. Most people in the high ticket space are like a wantrepreneur and I don't see that in a negative way. I mean like they're just more entrepreneurial people, but they don't necessarily want to start a business which is why it's sort of sold as a biz op a lot of the time. Do you know what I mean? So I think that it's a fantastic option for people who high risk, high reward, want the high ceiling, don't mind the low floor and want to get a true sales skill set. Because I believe that probably high ticket is the most difficult overall medium to sell and it is from a pure skill set perspective the most transferable. Right. If you are very, very good at high ticket consistently in multiple different offers and you learn the skills of professionalism, you can basically crush it in any industry, any company, and you'll be totally fine. Now the number one, the best industry to get into and I'm going to spend some time on this is insurance. Now a lot of people think that insurance is a little bit of like a pyramid scheme or something. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to break down for you exactly how insurance gets paid out, and then you'll understand. So generally speaking, if you sell a policy for $1,000 a year, I'm just gonna use round numbers. You will usually get paid, like, say, 100% of that premium, which means you'll get paid $1,000. Now you'll get paid 60% of that upfront. Okay, let's just say that. So you're gonna get paid $600, and then from there, there's $400. When they reach like the month nine or something like that, then from there, the person above you who's like your manager, okay, will get, say, 130. So there's a difference between the 100 and the 30. So they're gonna get 30, so they're gonna get 300. Whatever. If I'm wrong in the math, whatever, but you guys get it, then it might be like the agent, the full agency might be at 160, okay? So 160%, which is $1,600 of the first year's premium, is paid out by the insurance company in advance, which is why it seems really weird. But the reason for that is because the insurance companies, they know math and they have actuaries. Actuaries are the people that do all of the. The mathing to see if people should be getting, you know, and they don't make mistakes because if they did, insurance wouldn't be profitable. Okay? But what they do is they know the average person has an insurance policy for 12 years. So when you think about it, they're paying out, right? One point, say, six years to get 12. If that person dumps out early, then they claw back the commissions, okay? So that's where the risk is. But that's why you can sell something for a thousand dollars, you can only take a hundred, and you will be paid $600. So that's why it looks really weird when people see it. They go, oh, that's a pyramid scheme. It's really not what it is. It's how insurance companies mitigate having to have sales and marketing front ends. So they have IMOs, right? Internet marketing organizations or these other agencies that get 160% of the first year's premium. And then they. It gets paid down throughout some of the people, but nobody's on salary. And so it's like. And the goal is that the more you sell, the more you take, right? And then there's an agency usually at 160. Then there might be, like a middle management layer at 130. Right. The difference being 30 and then you're at a hundred. Right. So it's 30, 30 and 100. So the rep is getting paid the vast majority of that amount. It's just that the people in the upper layers are getting paid a little bit from a lot of different people. Okay. But it's, it's paid sort of like bottom up, like not like top down or like something like that. But the reps are always going to get paid the most for the sale. And that's why the math makes sense. And that's how people can be, you know, selling things that are not that expensive but making a lot of money in commissions. It's because the way that insurance works is it's a very long tail. It's actually not dissimilar to alarm sales. Alarm sales, you can get a lot of commission even though you're installing it for free, but they'll install it for free. Then they sell the contract to the alarm monitoring companies. The alarm monitoring Companies might pay three years up front knowing they're going to get 18 years out of the person. So that's how those work. And people don't really understand how that works. And so it looks weird. Then you add into the fact that any sales job has a distribution curve that looks really similar to like an MBA bench. So Steph Curry, at the week of filming this, you get like 2, nearly 80, a 47 to 49 point game back to back. Okay. I think they only had 100 points. So he's scoring like half the points for the team or on average like a third of the points for the team. He also makes more than basically everybody else combined. It's because he's Steph Curry. So like the distribution curve in sales is very similar to professional sports because it is a pure skill based activity, right? It is hustle and skill. So if you don't hustle and you're not very skilled, you make fuck all money. If you hustle a lot and you're really skilled guild, you make a shitload. And so that's why those two things combined, it just looks weird. So whenever I see that kind of stuff online, I'm always like, well that's not really how that works and I'll happily speak to people about it. I'm sure there are some sketchy ones out there. But I do run an insurance agency with Kaden. It does, we do like final expense and we do like a bunch of other just like general insurance type stuff like general life insurance. If you want to Know more about that. You can go down below. It's called sniper insurance. There's a link, you can book a call. Kaden does these calls. He's a fantastic guy. We don't take on a ton of people because we like to keep it pretty small and niche and just people who actually want to kind of get out after it because we do a lot of training for those guys. Okay, that's for American citizens only. If you come to me, not an American citizen, then don't come to us because you can't go there. You should go to Kamar Community coaches instead. But insurance, one of the reasons why I think it's probably the best opportunity is because more millionaires are made from insurance than any other industry. The main reason being it is 100% recession proof and bulletproof because everybody needs insurance all the time. It is never going anywhere. The skill required to do it is not very high. If you want to make a shitload of money and go into Iuls where you're in that sort of like I know people personally who make 3, $400,000 a month selling that kind of stuff, okay. Which is insanely high amounts of money. So insurance is, you know, around. It's more than high ticket, probably less than what real estate can make. But overall, because you can actually sell your book of business, the overall income potential I think is higher because you actually can start to build it as a business and sell it where it's difficult to do that with other things. The income floor is absolute zero, even negative, because a lot of time you do have to buy leads. So if you're someone who is like, like I've got no money, insurance probably isn't for you. The income ceiling is incredibly high. The time to money I think is relatively quick. If you have any sales acumen and you're willing to work an eight hour a day, you will probably do pretty well. Most people, from what I can see, don't even come close to working 3 hours day in insurance. So if you're willing to do a full day, you'll probably do okay and you can start making a good income pretty quickly. And then it's best for people who like working hard and who want to develop a long term skill set because a lot of these funnel into insurance. You know, retail, door to door telco, car sales, real estate, leasing, real estate sales. How ticket sass? One thing that one that I didn't talk about, that I forgot is medical device and then insurance, right? Like these are things that a lot of people who are at the top of these will end up in insurance because you can make monies in multiple different ways. You can sell a book of business and it really is a completely recession proof way of making money in sales. And so that's why I think going in 20226 is probably the best opportunity. If you like this kind of content guys, and you want this more like long form kind of stuff, then let me know down below in the comment. If you want me to do any a real deep dive into any of these ones in particular, then let me know in the comments and like subscribe. All that kind of good chick is it really helps out the algorithm and I will speak to you soon.