Hunters vs. Farmers: The Different Sales Personas

In the last post I made the case that most of the sales literature out there doesn’t apply to Small Wholesale Producers. But there is one rather hackneyed sales concept that I think actually has a lot of truth to it — namely, that there are two major personality types when it comes to salespeople: Hunters and Farmers.

Hunters
These are the gunners, the types who like to go out looking for new business. They’re highly independent and self-driven. They love nothing more than the thrill of the chase. They want to close as many leads as possible, the bigger the lead the better. They’re usually less interested in the nuts and bolts of onboarding new customers and looking after them once they’re up and running. Generally speaking, these are more the Business Development type.

Farmers
These types like tending to existing customers, and growing them into the highest-yielding accounts they can be. Farmers are more detail-oriented, more motivated by perfecting the customer’s experience, more attuned to the little touches that keep customers loyal to a brand. They are content just looking after their own books of business, and not especially motivated by going after new leads. Generally speaking, these are more the Account Manager type.

Naturally, individual salespeople will have their own unique mix of these characteristics. It’s not like you have to be either one or the other, but broadly speaking, those are the two main personas, and individuals will usually lean in the direction of one or the other.

Enterprise sales organizations hire different personality types for different roles. Small Wholesale Producers hardly have the resources to do this. Usually it’s one or two reps wearing all the hats: staying on top of existing customers for reorders, targeting new leads, converting them into customers, holding these new customers’ hands until they’re in the habit of ordering consistently, doing product demos, managing broker and distributor relationships, sometimes even helping to collect payments from delinquent customers. All that and then some.

Nevertheless, I find it very useful to think of sales work as consisting of two different sets of tasks, each requiring a different set of skills. Striking the right balance between them is name of the game.

Hunter Tasks (aka Targeting New Customers)

It is essential for any wholesale business to continuously target new customers, not just for the increased revenue, but also because it is the nature of the wholesale beast that a significant percentage of your existing accounts will vanish over time, often for reasons that are totally beyond your control. You’ll need to have new accounts waiting in the wings to replace them.

Hunter tasks center around gathering new leads, pitching to them, and securing that first order.

Farmer Tasks (aka Growing Existing Customers)

You could close fifty new accounts today, but it wouldn’t do you much good if they didn’t reorder. Indeed, one-off orders are one of the more draining aspects of running a wholesale business, since so much work goes into selling into a new store and onboarding that customer.

For a wholesale business to achieve a stable revenue stream, it needs a steady backlog of satisfied, repeat customers.

Farmer tasks center around a two-pronged effort that is aimed at getting your retailers to:

1. remember you, enjoy ordering from you, and get in the rhythm of placing reorders well before they’re out of stock;
2. give your product the best possible presence on their shelves so that they have no reason to doubt your product’s performance.

Nailing these two things will win over your retail partners for the long haul, while maximizing profitability for both parties.

The Plan for Upcoming Posts

The next series of posts will go into some depth about all these different tasks and how best to juggle them, given that in our industry there isn’t the division of labor that there is in larger sales organizations. We’ll start with Hunter Tasks, then turn our attention to Farmer Tasks, then bring it all together with an actionable game plan for keeping all these tasks straight.

One critical point I want to emphasize here at the outset of this series is the importance of maintaining a healthy balance between hunting tasks and farming tasks. When a sales team has a lopsided focus on one or the other, the whole business may experience an imbalance of new versus existing customers. Maybe the business is having difficulty expanding its customer base because reps are reluctant to go after new accounts. Or maybe the leaky bucket analogy applies, where lots of new accounts are being added, but just as many are leaking out the bottom due to lack of focus on customer support.

The goal for any sales rep should be to achieve the optimal balance between their hunter and farmer efforts, given the needs of their company. The goal for sales directors should be to make those needs clear, and steer the team towards striking that balance.