• At least 80% of businesses need both Hunters & Farmers. Few businesses can expect to prosper with ‘social media’ alone or a combination of ‘social media’ and Hunter or ‘social media’ and Farmer.
• Start-up businesses need Hunters…they may not need to hunt end-use Clients but they need to hunt business-development allies, funding, etc. [Allies, like CONNECTORS]
• Smaller businesses need Hunters. This is a major problem area because smaller businesses have no ‘room for sales slack’. If the 80-20 Rule is a reasonable guide [and I think it is] then Smaller businesses need to hire 5 sales people to get one Hunter. That’s a real burden on Smaller businesses and their Leaders.
• Less than 20% of salespeople are Hunters [some experts say 15%]
• For business development Specialists trump Generalists at least 80% of the time…that’s giving sales Generalists [Hunter Farmer Hybrids] the benefit of the doubt. [I would not seek Generalists.]
• For complex/conceptual sales, a strong Hybrid sales person [Hunter-Farmer Hybrid] will outperform all others [that’s 99.44% pure]. On the other hand, because so few people are strong Hybrids [as in STRENGTHSFINDER strong] it would be unwise to build a sales plan that relies on finding Hybrid business developers. There are exceptions to this 99.44% Rule. For example, when sectors are deregulated, opportunities open up where the best Farmers in the regulated sector can become the very-good Hunters in the unregulated sector. [I would not seek Generalists.]
• For sales of simpler products and services, Hunters will outsell Farmers and Hybrids 99.44% of the time
• Disruptive Technologies and Viral Products: as the saying goes…sometimes rules are made to be broken. But, be really, really, really sure your technology is highly likely to be disruptive and your product is highly likely to be Viral.

As you can see, I am comfortable creating names for Roles…Hunter roles, Farmer roles, etc. I believe it is important to ensure people know exactly what their Roles mean to the organization. Following up on a comment I read about Law Firms and their descriptions of Roles…yes, I would use Role names if I was running a law firm. Maybe I would use ‘Readers’ and ‘Writers’…but before I did that I would work to come up with better descriptions. And I would add at least ‘Talkers’. ‘Talkers’ would be the Role I would want presenting cases to juries…i.e., presenting persuasive verbal communication. I would spend time coming up with a better word than ‘Talkers’… ‘Verbalists’…something more creative.

 

Similarly, we could come up with better words than Hunters, Farmers, & Hybrids for our Sales Roles.

 

After all, Clients are neither ‘prey’ nor ‘livestock’ nor ‘crops’.