Editor’s Note: This is part one a three-part series on building a successful sales team.
Here’s a question for you: What are some descriptions for the types of salespeople organizations look to hire? What comes to mind? Frequent answers include hunters, farmers, finders, minders, and rainmakers.
The hunters/finders/rainmakers are perceived to be skilled in connecting with new opportunities and closing new business. The farmers/minders are perceived to be skilled in keeping existing customers happy, and sometimes uncovering new revenue opportunities in the existing customer base. In other words, those who can find new revenue, and those who can protect and maybe grow existing revenue.
When building a sales team, here is where the challenge comes in: Many business leaders seem able to find people who can take care of the existing customer base. What is difficult is finding the salesperson who can find the new opportunity. What’s behind this apparent dilemma is the belief that hunters are a small subset within the salesperson universe. The belief is that a hunter’s skills are advanced; they’re not afraid to reach out, and rejection does not slow them down.
In old school sales prospecting this was true. However, in today’s ultra-connected world the ability to find and connect is unlimited. What is most important today is the ability to make the connection a personal one. And in this case, many hunters could probably learn some lessons from the farmers.
Great farmers are successful because they nurture relationships. They connect with clients and build relationships with them. Long-term clients become long-term because of the trust that is built. Great farmers listen and generously provide help and solutions. The client feels safer with a great farmer who takes care of them.
Many hunters operate differently. They look to sow their presence as far and wide as possible. The connections are usually surface level at best. The hunter tries to assess opportunity as quickly as possible, and if there appears to be none, they move on.
However, the great hunters — those who are the best of the best in new business development — do not operate in this way. They are not prospectors; they are relationship builders. Think of them as super farmers. Great hunters have a web of relationships that are strategically built. The relationships span the marketplace at large. They include current clients, past clients, desired clients, and industry influencers. They also include peers within their own company and across complimentary firms in the marketplace. Each relationship has some depth and is at least “business personal.”
When a great hunter goes prospecting they make the connection through people. They know who they want to reach, and they find a way to get with that person through a warm introduction. Instead of overtly selling, they pick up the phone, call someone they know, and arrange an independent validation of who they are. This independent validation or warm introduction pre-establishes at least a minimal level of trust. “Jerry recommended him, so I’ll at least take the call.”
If you are looking to hire great salespeople, hire candidates who are pre-disposed to comfortably connecting and building trust. Identify the individuals with the skills and personality traits that enable them to connect with people. Build the sales team around this core characteristic.
With this group of salespeople you don’t need to designate between hunters and farmers. Rather, you can build the team around factors such as industry expertise or product or service expertise. In this way each member of the team leverages unique knowledge they have by focusing on relationships where that knowledge would be most valued.
The bottom line — a sales team built with individuals inclined to connecting and building relationships has the greatest probability of widespread success. You can teach product knowledge. People can develop industry expertise. These learnings have so much more power when the person learning focuses on relationships first in order to succeed.
Ken Cook is the co-founder of How to Who and co-author of “How to WHO: Selling Personified,” a book and program on building business through relationships. Learn more at www.howtowho.com.
