Hunter or Farmer?

To make selling a successful, financially and personally rewarding long-term career, depends largely on what kind of sales role the sales person is best suited for. Many sales positions require specific technical training or industry experience and require key behavioural characteristics of the individual salesperson.

There are fundamentally two kinds of professional salespeople: 1. New Business Developers, often called Hunters; and 2. Account Managers, often called Farmers.

The two roles require very different skills and behavioural characteristics for long-term success. Selecting the right person for a specific sales role (round pegs in round holes) that the individual can excel in is critical to achieving both company and personal financial goals and targets.

Our research concludes that:

Only 19% of effective hunters are just as effective at maintaining their customers over the long term, a skill critical to the success of farmers
On the other hand, less than 15% of good farmers are comfortable doing cold calls, an essential task of successful hunters
Overall, about 50% of the failure rate in sales positions is due to putting a natural hunter in a farmer's job, or vice versa. Put bluntly, finding the right person for the sales role that you require performing is CRITICAL.

The lesson when recruiting high performing salespeople is simple. People who make good hunters do not necessarily make good farmers. Indeed, of the top 10% of hunters, fully half would fail in a farmer position. And the reverse is true just as well.

Much of this makes sense, intuitively. To sell successfully, you need to match your natural strengths to the right type of sales job, instead of trying to become something you aren't. But how can you really know whether a person is a natural hunter of farmer?

Psychometric Profiling

Utilising a suite of online Psychometric Profiling tools that have over 40 years of history and which have been extensively validated and proven, Xel Training can provide an extensive, detailed report to help you evaluate behaviours a candidate will bring to a particular sales role. In just 30 minutes you can have:

A Selling Styles Report that examines how the candidate will prospect for new business, make sales presentations and close the sale and/or gain the most appropriate form of commitment
A comprehensive invaluable report about your candidate before an interview (for new recruits or for promoting existing team members), allowing you to target your interview effectively resulting in better quality decisions
A detailed insight into the candidate's temperament, describing their behaviour and how they are likely to behave in the sales role that you have defined
An indication of a ‘working fit’ within the sales team that they will be joining

The System also provides an invaluable insight for sales managers to appraise, manage and develop the individual concerned. It provides practical guidance on managing individuals and sales teams.

In addition, the system will produce a Leadership Styles Report, examining how existing or potential managers will handle four separate management functions:

Motivating
Delegating
Decision making
Dealing with conflict

To receive a full set of sample reports as described above just take the
FREE Hunter-Farmer Assessment which only takes 10 - 15 minutes to complete, and the results will be e-mailed to you automatically.