Hunters, Farmers, & Order Takers

 (or why your marketing costs are too high)

By Scott Gordon, The Chief Revenue Officer​

It’s safe to say I’ve interviewed, hired, and fired hundreds of salespeople over my career and worked alongside hundreds more. During those 20+ years of selling and managing sales teams, I’ve found that folks who pursue sales as their avocation fall into three distinct buckets:

1. Hunters
2. Farmers
3. Order Takers
   
   

If you’ve been in or around sales for any length of time, these designations should not be news to you, yet I’m constantly surprised by how many of my clients have built sales organizations predominately populated by third tier salespeople – aka ‘The Order Takers’.

The number one symptom of an order taker based sales culture is a stubbornly high cost of customer acquisition. This is where a company spends reams of money on things like Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, print, mailers, billboards, email lists, call center agents, etc. The primary beneficiary of this arrangement is the salesperson who, for very little effort, is provided with a calendar full of appointments to go out and close.

Unfortunately for the organization in question, each one of these appointments carries with it a high cost, so pressure to close (and requisite training and accountability) are of paramount importance to achieve a respectable ROI on marketing spend. These are the Glengarry leads and coffee is for closers!

My point isn’t – don’t market because it’s too expensive, but rather to work through a process of grooming order takers to become hunters because hunters provide you with your lowest cost business (especially if you pay a referral fee to referring clients), followed by farmers, and in dead last, order takers (who, as a rule, squander far more leads than they close).

The conundrum here is that hunters are a very rare breed. They are unfazed by rejection, driven to succeed, and love the thrill of the chase. Sadly, they are in very short supply and can basically work wherever they want because every V.P of Sales is fighting over them.

Farmers generally end up where they are in one of two ways:

1. They are order takers who learned to work referral business
2. They are hunters ‘retired in place’ and working on their golf game
   
   

This is good news, because with a regimented process in place (see my blog on sales people and process), you can actually convert order takers to farmers, and while some of them will never be hunters, good farmers are highly profitable and productive employees with considerably lower customer acquisition costs. You can also keep hunters from devolving into farmers (or worse, order takers).

My general approach to grooming farmers is to work through formalized customer referral programs where the order takers proactively drive the program. These programs can be set up in a number of fashions, but the key is that referrals become a sales driven activity, and there’s more to it than loading a ‘referral app’ on their iPhones.

Such a process will accomplish three goals:

1. It will take your best order taker ‘closers’ to the next level so you will get more (and more profitable) business out of them
2. It will cause the pretenders to leave because they now actually have to work
3. You will be able to attract new sales talent with your extra leads (since farmers rely on them less, and hunters not at all)
   
   

Thus, you will spend more time grooming top performers and less time training, coaching, and intervening with posers and pretenders whose only qualification for closing deals is the ability to show up to an appointment on time and fill out paperwork.

As you begin to separate the wheat from the chaff, try to up the quality of your sales candidates during the interview process. While I personally listen for many cues during an interview, my #1, numero uno pet peeve/turnoff is when a candidate asks:

“How many leads will you provide me and where do you get them?”

I refuse to answer this question. Why? I know I have a serial order taker on my hands. I’d be best served ending the interview as quickly as possible to get to the next candidate. I’ll only hire a person who asks this question if I have leads coming out of my ears and am desperate to find a body to fill the vacancy. Otherwise, forget it! They are a dime a dozen and not worth the dime or your time.

Real salespeople don’t ask for leads because they know how to prospect. To them, leads are gravy and are probably inferior to the quality interactions they create on their own with their particular set of skills. Truly remarkable sales professionals won’t want your leads because the ones they generate are so much better – e.g. close at a higher rate with less effort.

Let’s get back to our farmers. Earlier I mentioned that these can be ‘grown’ from order takers, yet just like most order takers will never become farmers, the same is true of farmers becoming hunters.
However, there are top grading strategies that you can use to add a hunter element to a farmer’s activities. They are centered around these concepts:

1. Networking – get out in the world and meet people, preferably buyers and influencers
2. Object of Interest – blogs, podcasts, webinars, ebooks, etc are all ways for salespeople to build their brand and become sought after
3. Tradeshows and associations – not from a booth, but working the floor, events, and parties
   
   

For example, training farmers to network in organizations like BNI or Chamber of Commerce will open them up to warm introductions and referrals and is a lot easier than getting them to cold call. Again, not every farmer will feel comfortable putting themselves out there, but it may not matter to your organization if they are a productive member of the team.

From this progression of formalized sales activities and programs, it is possible to groom an order taker into a hunter, all the while lowering your customer acquisition costs as you go. You will shed the posers and order takers (further lowering carrying costs for under performers) and organically grow your business by leaps and bounds as you consistently top grade your sales talent.
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And all those extra marketing dollars you’re spending today? Maybe you’ll get to keep a few more of those for yourself.