Sales Mistake No 2: Expecting “farmers” to become “hunters”

You are probably aware of the hunter versus farmer sales model. Farmers have existing accounts to look after; they stay close to them and manage the sales process, hopefully upselling as they go. As their customers grow, so does the sales volume, and everyone is happy.

The hunter on the other hand starts the year with nothing more than a phone book, perhaps a prospect data list, and is left to generate sales pretty much however they can. As the metaphor goes, they have to “hunt” their sales prospects down and cannot rely on sales coming in from ongoing relationships.

Both models have their place. When the economy grows, farmers can rely on their customers to put in the work for them, delivering steady sales growth as their accounts grow in size. Allowing business revenue to come from a static number of “key accounts” does concentrate risk. Eventually customers do leave, go out of business, change their business model, and without a capability for capturing new accounts, they can leave a big hole when they go. How well would you survive your losing your largest customer?

This is not to mention the pressure on margins that dealing with key accounts can create. If your business operates in this territory, you may have had your own sleepless nights when handling contract renewals, it’s not pleasant.

When businesses based on the “farmer” model find that their sales are falling, and in times of recession they generally do, the usual response is to tell the farmers to get out there and start to hunt some new accounts. As logic goes, you can’t fault it, except… good hunters do not make good farmers. In fact, getting good farmers to do any kind of hunting is very nearly impossible. If you’ve tried managing this process you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you are a farmer yourself, you’ll also recognise your own discomfort with hunting activity.

This also operates in telephone sales environments. Expecting staff handling inbound customer services or sales enquiries to suddenly start making a hundred outbound prospecting calls a day is a recipe for failure.

Why is this? Farmers are “reactive” by nature, they respond to inbound enquiries all day long. They tend to take time to consider, are reflective, cover all the angles, they plan and are considered. They wait for things to happen.

Hunters on the other hand are “proactive”. They can’t wait for the phone to start ringing; they’re already on the phone calling away. They don’t stop to reflect or consider, they’re just out there doing it. The most often word used by proactive sellers? “Whoops” they didn’t think of that, they were do busy getting stuck in just doing it.

And the answer is? Our considered view is, don’t base your sales plan on turning hunters into farmers. It just won’t happen. It will take all your management resource to try and make it work, and it still won’t happen. It’s a recipe for failure. Don’t even try it.

Set out to avoid the problem in the first place. Consider which type of sales role you are recruiting for and be certain to recruit proactive sellers into hunter roles, and reactive people into farmer roles. In a sales team, split the two different roles and make sure you have appropriate sellers in the different roles.

If you need more hunter activity from a group of farmers, you may need to recruit additional resource, look to your marketing to generate more inbound enquiries, you may need to find a farmer with a little bit of hunter in them. Good luck!

If you’ve struggled with this and want some more nuanced options, give us a call. Just don’t beat yourself up if your farmers won’t hunt. In our experience, they don’t.