Are you using “Hunters” vs “Farmers” as terms to describe your sales team members? Traditionally “Hunters” focus on going after new business accounts while “Farmers” work to maintain and grow your existing customers. Join me as I share my concerns for you using these antiquated terms…and how this could be hurting your long term sales and competitive success!
Hi, Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team.
Do you refer to the different sales members of your team as hunters versus farmers? A lot of my customers use that language and it bothers me. The challenge I see is we talk about hunters being those going after new companies, finding new organizations to sell to, with the idea the farmers are assumed to take care of existing customers. But look how passive the word farmer is. I think we're communicating the wrong message to the people that are handling existing accounts, because I don't care if you're handling an existing territory or if you have new business, your job is still the same. Your job is to generate new business and new revenues to grow the company and keep everybody happy.
For the farmer customer that we use that language, somebody holding an existing territory, their job is still to expect to grow the business and generate new revenues from those existing accounts, by bringing in new products, new applications, new areas of the business that you can impact. But if we keep referring to them as hunters versus farmers, look how it puts it in a passive position for the person handling the existing territory which, in a lot of cases, is the majority of your sales revenues of your whole company.
What can we do to change the terminology we use so we don't refer to them as hunters or farmers, but the idea that every salesperson has the responsibility to grow new business and to build stronger relationships, so we keep that business into the long term? Whether that's new business coming from a new account or whether that's new business coming from an existing customer, that's already buying from us in other areas, still the same dollars, still the same opportunity and still the long term success.
Would love to know what you're doing with this. What terms you use to describe the very various positions in your sales teams and ideas you have that might be better than using terms like farmer versus hunter to describe the different aspects of our sales team. Because the whole goal is, we want to sell more. We want to sell more with a higher profitability and we want to build more loyalty, whether that's to an existing customer or to a new account. We'd love to know how you're handling this and love to know what you've done with it. Would love to answer any of your questions. Thanks for checking out my podcast. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage.