Let’s take a closer look at the two primary sales archetypes, the Hunter, and the Farmer.
You reap what you sow:
The sage advice, you reap what you sow, has been around for a long time. It’s in the Bible and everything.
But we tend to ignore it.
Because it’s slow, hard, and boring.
Plant, tend, plow, fertilize, weed, repeat.
In sales, boring means slow sales.
And unfortunately, slow sales are frowned upon by management.
The stigma:
If you interview for a sales position, at least here in the United States, you’ll be gently guided towards the idea of the Hunter and the Farmer.
Hunters roam the land in search of big game. Big game in sales means large deals.
And for the record, I’m in favor of large deals. Antelope over mice all day long.
The thinking goes like this; hunters are independent, vigilant, and can quickly build rapport. But there’s a problem. Sometimes Hunters leave their prey in a bloody heap.
Remember Dances with Wolves? I sure as hell do.
Lieutenant John Dunbar (Kevin Costner) writes in his journal, “The field was proof enough that it was a people without value and without soul, with no regard for Sioux rights.
“The wagon tracks leading the way left little doubt, and my heart sank, as I knew it could only be white hunters.
“Voices that had been joyous were now as silent as the dead buffalo left to rot, killed only for their tongues and the price of their hides.”
I know that’s heavy stuff when you are in SaaS business development, but stick with me.
Contrast that Hunter with the mighty Farmer.
Farmers sow seeds, apply fertilizer, and keep the pests at bay. They feed the masses, and for their efforts, their contribution is constantly underestimated.
Seems like noble work to me.
But most sales managers still want those Hunters.
At one point in my career, if you’d have called me a Farmer, I might have punched you in the face.
It was like calling someone “yella” in the old west.
Of course, management isn’t totally blind. They will begrudgingly admit that Farmers are somewhat useful for running established accounts.
Customer Success and Relationship Management positions leverage the Farmer archetype, hiring people who are highly organized and customer oriented… but only successful once someone else has laid down the groundwork. Only after someone else has inked the deal. The Hunter.
But what about the planting and the growing part? If you’re following the Farmer sales analogy, isn’t that kind of important? What about finding fertile ground, matching climate with crops, and establishing a market for their produce?
What most sales managers fail to recognize is that farming is not just done at the harvest.
That would be impossible.
“Can you imagine “cramming” on the farm?” Stephen Covey asks, in First Things First. “Can you imagine forgetting to plant in the spring, flaking out all summer, and hitting it hard in the fall—ripping the soil up, throwing in the seeds, watering, cultivating—and expecting to get a bountiful harvest overnight?”
Well, can ya?
That’s what I thought!
You can’t cram. It takes a consistent effort.
Farmers know that their future is shaped by their present. Their current inputs will provide their future outputs.
We can all agree that is good advice. But like a lot of advice, we like it for someone else.
This farming thing, well, it just sounds too slow. It’s not explosive enough.
We promised explosive growth to the board!
Larry Ellison, billionaire founder of Oracle and established future seer came to this same conclusion back in the 90s, so I’m not far behind him. He said, “The salespeople we hired in Europe were very professional and service-oriented. The European management team’s strategy was to build long-term relationships with our customers and do business with them on a regular basis. This European ‘farming’ strategy was in stark contrast to the U.S. sales organization’s ‘hunting’ strategy. U.S. salespeople tried to sell the largest possible transaction to a given customer and then move on to the next customer and the next deal. It took me until 1991 to figure out that the U.S. hunting strategy was both shortsighted and unsustainable.”
Sales teams are pressed into the hunting architype, and then management wonders why we get the boom bust cycle. They get the end of quarter surge; hunters track down deals and gorge on their kill… err… their bonus. But they come back in the next day bloated and back to their bad habits.
Ellison’s comparison between the U.S. and Europe had me wondering; is this infatuation with the Hunter salesperson a strange carry over from the old west? I think maybe it is.
God, we are dumb sometimes.
In reality, the Farming strategy should be in vogue. More now than ever before. Companies have an increasing emphasis on ARR, Annual Recurring Revenues.
Sounds like farming to me!
Plant, tend, plow, fertilize, weed, repeat.
The problem with Hunters:
The vision is a stark one. A field scattered with the dead and rotting carcasses of Tatanka. The mighty buffalo.
“Killed only for their tongues and the price of their hides.”
And that is who we want on our team? Working with our customers?
Don’t get me wrong, there are hunters that do it right. They cherish the land and use every bit of the animal.
Steve Rinella and Meat Eater, Inc. are doing their part to show people the way.
The problem with hunters in your business is, if you do it the right way, the way Rinella advocates, it is not built to scale.
Rinella advocates for outdoor adventure, wild food, and conservation. If you watch his show, and I do, a good chunk of the hunts come back empty. Just a walk in the woods. Backpacking with a rifle. And that’s how it is with hunting, and how it should be.
It’s why even Rinella doesn’t employ the hunting mindset with his business.
In the same way that you’d be hard pressed to feed your family with those few solitary tomato starts growing out back, you can’t feed the nation, or your thriving business, with the altruistic mounting climbing pursuit of Alaska Dall Sheep.
So, the problem with the hunter architype in sales is, at scale, its hides and tongues. And that makes the ARR a little tricky.
Plus, people try to avoid predators if they can. And that is why customers get so turned off by the aggressive Hunters you are deploying. They are trying to pick up the trail of their next big kill, but everyone can smell the last one on their breath.
Rainier Cherries, a hero origin story:
I don’t know what the margins are on Rainier Cherries, but it should be something close to a bazillion percent.
Developed in 1952 at Washington State University by Harold Fogle (hero!), and named after Mount Rainier, The Rainier Cherry is the undefeated, nearly uncontested, people’s champion of Cherries. And maybe fruit.
Definitely stone fruit. That’s not even a contest.
The Rainier Cherry is a hybrid, a mix between Van and Bing red cherries varietals, and it’s grown on Mazzard stock.
It was created in the pacific northwest and grows best in the pacific northwest. Smart, right? Washington is the largest producer and it’s why I’ll never leave this fabulous state.
A Rainier Cherry tree takes three to five years to start producing fruit. That whole time, it needs proper care and feeding.
It took Fogle eight years to go from his first cross breed of the Van and Bing to releasing the Rainier Cherry.
Eight years.
No magic beans, one hit wonders, or explosive growth. He was busy doing the work to cultivate a superior product for an open and willing marketplace.
The successful farmer will pay special attention to what they plant, where they plant it, and how they get the crop to their buyers once it’s ready for market.
And that gives you a clue as to how this Farming racket can work.
The bumper crop:
But let me guess.
Your boss still wants (insert rocket ship emoji) growth. And you still need to catch your quarterly run line. If you don’t, little Timmy won’t have all he wants at Christmas.
I hear you loud and clear.
That pressure has you wanting to bail on the farm and roam the open plains in search of Tatanka.
Hunting takes skill. It takes ability. But it also takes a lot of luck. Inputs don’t necessarily equate to outputs.
What you need is a bumper crop.
In agriculture, a bumper crop is when you’ve yielded an unusually productive harvest.
In business, and sales in particular, it’s not all that different.
And while I can’t guarantee that you’ll have one this quarter, I can (almost) guarantee that you’ll have one. Someday. If you keep tending to the fields. If you keep doing the work.
The largest deals I ever worked on came from Farming. Building on what we’d done in the past, with established customers and relationships.
What great customer is just going to sign with the new guy anyhow? You might want to steer clear of that stanky deal, I can almost smell the desperation from here.
The best marketers and entrepreneurs are Farmers. The best salespeople are too. Heck, you can apply the Farmer archetype to all sorts of businesses.
The minor leagues in baseball are called the “Farm System.” They are growing ballplayers before taking them to market.
If you drive through central Washington, you’ll see the massive turbines and spinning blades of windmills. A wind farm.
Go a bit further and you’ll see the data centers they help power. Data farms for Amazon and Microsoft.
We want to grow our business this way as well.
It’s time we reassess the roles we play. Hunters have had their moment, but it’s time to ditch the old trope.
The sage advice, you reap what you sow, has been around for a long time.
But we tend to ignore it.
Because it’s slow, hard, and boring.
And because it puts us on the hook to be consistent, caring, and accountable.
It’s time to start Farming.
Plant, tend, plow, fertilize, weed, repeat.
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