Hunter and Farmer · Sales Team Types
Hunter and Farmer
What are hunters and farmers?
- Separating new-business and account-growth roles
- Combine the roles and people drift to the easier one
- Evaluation and training must be designed separately
Adopting this split changes the scorecard before it changes the org chart. People who were measured against the same revenue target yesterday are managed on different numbers today. A hunter’s month is filled with dozens of calls and rejections; a farmer’s month is two or three visits and long stretches of silence. The practical value of this framework is that it separates who is judged on activity and who is judged on outcomes. Job-posting experience requirements, the questions asked in weekly meetings, even how training applications sort their target groups all realign along the same dividing line.
In practice, roles are split on three factors: deal cycle, number of touchpoints, and cost of failure. A new account takes 6–12 months from first contact to contract and requires finding the decision maker from scratch, while an existing account's renewal talks wrap up in a month or two with the counterpart already known. Headcount allocation also shifts by stage: for example, 70% hunters when entering a new market and 70% farmers in a mature one. However, role type and customer tier are separate axes. A key account manager (KAM) is not a sub-type of farmer, and even within one account, breaking into a new business unit is better classified as a hunter task.
The most common misunderstanding is treating this as a classification of personality. Companies that assign people using a personality test often hear, six months later, “I got labeled a hunter, so I’ll never get a good account.” Split by the nature of the task someone holds right now, not by temperament, and moves and rotations become possible. Another mistake is separating the roles without writing handover rules. If the account owner changes the moment the contract is signed, customers have to explain themselves twice, and that frustration comes back as churn at the first renewal. Even a simple rule like both people stay involved for the 90 days after signing is what makes the split worth it.
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Jaehyuk ParkHands-on instructor in B2B technical sales and AI-driven sales strategyA long-standing metaphor in sales organization design. It is less the theory of any one scholar than a term that became established in the field. More recently it has evolved into finer role splits such as SDR, AE, and CSM.
Consider a hypothetical case: Company A, an industrial parts distributor with 140 employees and KRW 48 billion (≈ US$35,912,000) in annual revenue. Its top 10 customers generated 82% of revenue, and it had won only 2 new customers in the past year. When one of them announced it would move to in-house procurement, winning new business could no longer wait.
- When the sales director reviewed the past 12 months of orders, new customers accounted for just 3.7% of revenue, and across the 11 sales reps’ weekly schedules, new-customer visits averaged only 1.2 per person.
- When the sales director moved two third-year reps to new business, he made it clear: “Existing-account revenue won’t count toward your reviews this year.” The 27 accounts they had been holding were handed over to four senior reps.
- The 2 new-business reps were given separate targets of 45 new meetings per quarter and a KRW 1.2 billion (≈ US$897,800) pipeline, while the other 9 were given a 95% renewal rate and 8% revenue growth per account.
- The training manager split the first-half sales program in two: cold-call script practice and rejection-handling role-plays for the 2 dedicated new-business reps, and an account planning workshop for the 9 existing account managers.
- New-contract commission was raised 1.5x, and for the first six months incentives were paid on pipeline targets met even without a signed contract, easing the dedicated reps’ anxiety about “two months with nothing to show.”
- Ten months later, new wins rose from 2 to 9 and the share of revenue from new customers climbed from 3.7% to 11.4%, while the 27 transferred accounts held a 96% renewal rate.