Sales Personalities- Hunters and Farmers
It is sometimes said that there are two types of sales personalities, the hunter and the farmer. The hunter is the sales agent who is motivated by the thrill of the hunt. This is an individual who thrives on the quick turnover. It’s all or nothing, right now, close and move on. When a sales manager is building a team, individuals like this get offered spots on the team. But there is another type of producer: farmers. These are individuals who excel at building relationships, keeping in touch, nurturing leads. Many mangers build their teams by enlisting as many hunters as they can. But there is some evidence that a sales team can benefit from hiring farmers as well. Farmers are more suited to keeping in touch with leads who are slower to close and building interest in your company over time. Farmer type sales agents can tend to the crops over time, and harvest when the time is right.
Let’s say you already have some hunters and some farmers on your sales team. You are in a prime position to benefit from lead management software. You can make use of rules-based distribution to get the right leads to the right person. When a new lead comes in, let your hunter take a crack at it. If it is not a quick close, it’s no problem. It is easy to create a distribution program that re-distributes the leads that are not quick closers from the hunters to the farmers. Let the farmer nurture the lead, building the relationship and converting them when the time comes. Here’s some more information on how Leads360 lead distribution works.
On the other hand, let’s say that you’re not buying the hunter and farmer analogy. In your experience, the only producers are the hunters. You aren’t making space for the slower soft-selling farmers. You can still benefit from lead management software. Using a lead management solution, it’s easy to nurture leads automatically by creating drip marketing campaigns. Additionally, Leads360 ongoing best practices research and analysis has revealed the optimal six call contact strategy. What these tools do is they give hunters an out of the box, easy to adopt nurture strategy that has been proven to close more deals. A hunter will never think like a farmer, but lead management software, with drip marketing emails and lead prioritization takes the thinking out of it. Prospects will be contacted strategically through automated emails and sales agents will be prompted to place periodic follow up calls at optimal intervals.
The two types of sales personalities, hunters and farmers, can both see increased conversion rates with the adoption of lead management software. And sales managers will have tools to respond to the strengths of his various sales agents to get the right lead to the right person at the right time.
