Before you split the team into hunters and farmers, look at what that model actually costs.
Don’t fix it by splitting the roles. The hunters and farmers sales model is the most common advice you’ll get, and in my experience it produces lower customer retention, more service complaints, and sales turnover in the 30 to 50 percent range instead of the 10 to 20 percent you should expect. The real problem is almost never that your people can’t hunt. It’s that nothing in your expectations, your training, your comp plan, or your calendar requires them to.
Every owner I work with asks some version of this question. The team takes beautiful care of existing accounts and almost never brings in anybody new, and the advice they’ve usually already heard is to divide the group: hunters go find new business, farmers keep it. It sounds tidy. Here’s why I dislike it.
What the handoff does to your customer
Think back to the first time your parents left you somewhere that wasn’t with a close relative. School, day camp, a babysitter. You probably felt a little abandoned, and it felt bad.
That’s what a handoff does to a customer. Your hunter spent weeks building trust and commitment, and the moment the deal is signed, he’s gone, because he has to go sell someone else to make a living. The message the customer receives is that they weren’t all that important after all.
Owners tell me their handoff is clean and their customers don’t feel that way. They do. Buyer’s remorse is a powerful emotion, and the handoff brings it on early, often before the first delivery. And your account manager usually can’t undo it, because they rarely have the quantity or quality of contact the original salesperson had. In a lot of these setups the hunter is face-to-face and the account manager is a voice on the phone.
The service problems that follow
“But your salesperson promised…” is the constant refrain after a handoff, because sales and service are separate and not accountable to each other. A service manager once told me: “The salesperson’s job is to sell the fantasy. The service person’s job is to sell reality.”
That disconnect gets much harder to sustain when the original salesperson stays in the account. People don’t make promises they can’t keep when they know they’ll have to look the customer in the eye afterward.
And the turnover nobody prices in
Healthy annual sales turnover runs about 10 to 20 percent. Below that, you may be carrying underperformers too long. Above it, you’re burning money churning salespeople.
Companies running the hunters and farmers model typically land in the 30 to 50 percent range, sometimes worse. I know of a Fortune 500 company that hit 82 percent in a single year with that structure. Both halves leave, for different reasons.
Hunters burn out. A constant diet of prospecting wears people down, and the two things that make the job satisfying are taken away from them: they never see the fruit of their work, because the relationship belongs to someone else, and referrals and testimonials never reach them, because by the time an account is happy enough to give one, the farmer owns it.
Farmers leave too, which surprises people. Selling without prospecting sounds like the gravy train, but the farmer’s income ceiling is low, because growth lives in the hunter’s territory. Meanwhile every service problem created during the handoff lands in the farmer’s lap. They get disenchanted, and they go find something better.
What’s actually wrong on your team
In my experience there is very little trait difference between a hunter and a farmer. The difference is training and culture.
So look at the four things that actually decide whether anybody prospects. Does each rep have a new-business number of their own, separate from total revenue? Is prospecting time protected on the calendar, or does account work eat it every single week? Does your comp plan pay meaningfully more for a new logo than for a renewal? And does your sales manager review new-business pipeline every week, or only total pipeline, where a good book of business hides the fact that nothing new is coming?
A rep with a comfortable book, no new-business number, no protected time, and a commission plan that pays the same either way is behaving rationally. You’d do the same thing.
What to change
Give every rep a new-business target and work backward to the activity that supports it. Protect the prospecting block and defend it when a customer emergency lands on that day, which is the moment everyone finds out whether it’s real. Give them a defined target list rather than “go find some customers,” because a blank page is where prospecting goes to die. Pay differently for new business. Train the skill instead of assuming it, since most account managers haven’t prospected seriously in years and are rusty, not incapable. And have your manager inspect new-logo activity weekly.
The goal is an all-around salesperson who can win an account, keep it, and grow it. That’s a valuable person, and it’s a training and culture decision, not a personality type you have to go hire.
If you’re not sure whether your problem is skill, structure, compensation, or management, that’s exactly what the Navigator’s Sales Diagnostic is for: a free 45-minute conversation about how your sales organization is built, and what to fix first. Learn more and schedule yours here!
Questions owners ask about this
So there’s never a reason to separate the roles?
Rarely, and usually only at real scale or with genuinely different buying processes for new versus existing business. For a company your size, the costs almost always outweigh the tidiness.
What if I have a rep who truly can’t prospect?
Some people won’t, which is different from can’t. Give the expectation, the training, the list, and the time, then manage to the result. If nothing changes after a fair run, you have a different decision to make.
Should I just hire a hunter?
If your current team won’t prospect because your system doesn’t require it, a new hire will meet the same system and adapt to it. Fix the system first, then hire into it.
How long before this shows up in results?
Prospecting activity changes in weeks; pipeline in a quarter; revenue on your normal sales cycle. Watch activity first, and hold your nerve.
