Hunter and Farmer Was Never Really a Sales Model

Hunter and farmer had a good run. I think it’s time for a new paradigm.

A few years back I was brought in to work out why one salesperson was outperforming eleven others, all senior, all with 20-plus years in the field. She wasn’t a hunter. She’d come up through account management and crossed into sales. On paper she shouldn’t have stood a chance against a room full of career hunters. She beat all of them, most years, by a wide margin.

That shouldn’t be possible if hunter and farmer are actually two different jobs. It’s only possible if they were never really different jobs to begin with.

For decades, sales has been split into two roles. The hunter opens new doors and wins new logos. The farmer inherits the account once it’s won and keeps it alive. It’s a tidy story. It’s also the wrong one, and I think it’s quietly costing companies revenue.

The old model was never really a model

The old version was simple: you’re a hunter, go sell. Very little training behind it, very little coaching, very little structure. Marketing did its own thing. Sales did its own thing. If you were a hunter, the job stopped at the close. If you were a farmer, the job was whatever came after, and how well you did it depended entirely on you, because nobody was watching either half closely enough to develop it properly.

That’s the part that gets missed when people defend the split. It was never really a model for developing salespeople. It was a way of avoiding the work of developing them.

It was never really a model for developing salespeople. It was a way of avoiding the work of developing them.

In twelve years of sales consulting, the pattern I keep running into isn’t lazy salespeople, it’s misalignment. Marketing, sales, account management, the board, all pulling in different directions with no one owning the full picture. Most sales managers were promoted because they were good sales people, not because anyone taught them to coach, and we know that skill doesn’t automatically transfer. None of this is a controversial observation on its own. What’s controversial is the fix.

Here’s the fix: stop thinking about the salesperson’s job as a single point in the cycle, and start thinking about it as the whole cycle. Inbound response, outbound prospecting, discovery, the pitch, the close, onboarding, account management, cross-sell, upsell, referrals, renewal. One lifecycle, start to finish. I’m not saying one person has to do all of it. I’m saying different people do different parts of it as a team, instead of two separate teams handing off a relationship and calling that a strategy.

Most companies plan to be around for the long term. Revenue is one of the most important things they do. So why treat it as a short term motion, chopped into disconnected handoffs? Because the board wants short term numbers to report, mostly. That pressure is real, but it’s also exactly why the handoff model keeps producing the same result: nobody owns the whole thing, so nobody is accountable for the whole thing.

I’m not the only one seeing it. At a Korn Ferry event in Singapore recently, a room of around 40 sales leaders, half of them responsible for teams of over 2,000 salespeople, landed on the same conclusion without much pushback: the old model is done, something new is coming, and that’s a good thing for the industry, not a threat to it.

The overlap has always run both ways

If your job is new business, you’re already doing farmer work and just not calling it that. Lead generation is farming, because you’re building trust before there’s a deal on the table. Thought leadership is farming, because you’re staying visible and credible long before someone’s ready to buy. A client who stays with you longer than their contract requires is farming, paying you back.

The old model trained hunters to close and move on. The deal signs, attention shifts to the next target, the relationship goes cold the moment it stops mattering for this quarter’s number.

Nurture is the opposite instinct, and it pays off on a longer clock. A prospect who isn’t ready today might be ready next year, and the only reason they call you instead of a competitor is that you never stopped showing up. That’s a hunter doing farmer work months before the deal exists, and it’s often the actual reason the deal closes at all. Buyers mostly know what they want. When they’re ready, they ask someone they already trust, not whoever pitched hardest eighteen months ago.

It runs the other way too, and this is the part that gets missed most. Good farming isn’t just retention, it’s new business wearing a different coat. Content and relationship depth are what drive cross-sell and upsell. A client who trusts you enough to expand their spend is a farmer generating a hunter’s revenue. Get the relationship right and referrals follow, which means the farmer just opened a door the hunter never walked through.

That account manager I mentioned at the start? She was already doing both, every day, without a label for it. She wasn’t unusually gifted. She just wasn’t boxed into half a job.

What replaces the label

Not another label. A single list of the traits and skills every salesperson gets assessed against, because the work doesn’t split cleanly into two people, and the assessment shouldn’t either.

Some are behavioural traits, harder to shift, things you manage around rather than train away: drive, people-centric, resilience, resourcefulness, care, consistency, patience, coach-ability, curiosity, discipline. Some are learnable skills: prospecting, discovery, pitching, objection handling, negotiation, closing, account planning, content creation, CRM discipline, time management, product knowledge, technical knowledge, back-office knowledge, cross-sell and up sell execution, referral generation. Twenty-five items in total. Every salesperson gets scored against all of it, not half.

Here’s how it actually runs. Self, manager, and peers each score the person across all 25 items, role-blind, before anyone discusses what their role should be. That gives you an honest baseline instead of one shaped by an assumption about what type of salesperson they already are.

Only then does the role come in. Everyone has a blend, some weighting toward new business, some toward account growth, and each of the 25 items matters more or less depending on that blend. Apply the weighting to the baseline and you get something specific: not “you’re a 6 out of 10,” but “here’s what actually matters for your role, and here’s exactly where you’re short against it.”

Run it across a team and you can plot people on two axes, new-business capability and account-growth capability, both built from the same 25 items, just weighted differently. Someone strong on new-business and weak on account-growth opens doors and then leaves the account to run itself. Someone strong on account-growth and weak on new-business grows what’s there but never adds pipeline. Someone weak on both isn’t a type, they’re underdeveloped, and that’s exactly where the coaching plan should start. Someone strong on both is a full-cycle owner covering lead to renewal without a handoff, and that’s the target for everyone, not a personality some people are born with.

That’s the whole shift. A label tells you what someone is. A capability map tells you what to develop next, and gives you a ranked, specific place to start instead of a vague sense that someone should “do more prospecting” or “look after clients better.”

Why this is possible now

None of this was practical to run properly before. Being able to map, and manage the full process, lead to renewal, and then assess your teams, e.g. Scoring 25 traits across a team, weighting by role, running a genuine 360 instead of one manager’s gut feel, then turning that into a ranked coaching plan and actually executing it, that was a lot to think about, never mind managing by hand.

It’s not any more. We can assess what’s meant to happen in the process, and get the right people in place with real precision, define what a role actually needs instead of assuming it from a job title, and point training and time at the real gap instead of a hunter-or-farmer guess. Coach someone against the job as it actually exists, not the job an outdated label assumed it was, and they get better faster.

Lead to renewal is everyone’s job

Lead to renewal was never just a sales cycle. It’s marketing, back office, the C-suite, sales, account management, content, all touching it at different points, usually without anyone seeing the whole picture at once. That’s exactly why it’s never been managed properly. Nobody could see across all of it, so nobody was accountable for all of it.

For the first time, it can be mapped end to end. And once you can see it, you can manage it. That’s the real shift here. Not a new label. The ability to see the whole cycle and run it as one thing instead of a chain of separate handoffs.

Do that well and the change shows up everywhere at once: clients who don’t fall through the gap between departments, teams who can see how their piece connects to the outcome, pipeline and renewals visible on the same map instead of living in two different people’s heads. Retention gets cheaper than acquisition, the way it’s supposed to be, instead of a slogan nobody actually built the structure to deliver on.

Keep your clients. Charge the right rate for the work. Everything else follows from that.

Hunter and farmer had a good run. I think it’s time for a new paradigm.

If you run a sales team, or you’re the CFO signing off on how it’s structured, I’d ask this: could you tell me right now, for each person on your team, whether they’re a hunter or a farmer, and would that answer actually help you coach them? If the honest answer is no, the label was never doing the job you thought it was. If you want to work out what your team actually looks like across the full cycle, start a conversation with 1000Steps.