Recently, I had extensive discussions with founders of mid-sized B2B SaaS and IT Services companies about introducing a hunter–farmer sales model.
A few founders were convinced that restructuring their sales teams by separating hunters, who focus on new business, from farmers, who manage and grow existing accounts, is the right step to accelerate revenue growth.
I advised them to think this through carefully before moving forward. I was not convinced that this would lead to the desired outcome. I have seen this play out too many times. Founders often think that hiring hunters will fix the new business growth issue, while in reality, the marketing machine is broken.
The underlying logic of the hunter–farmer model is straightforward. By splitting sales roles into two distinct functions, companies aim to create focus and specialisation. Hunters concentrate on acquiring new customers, while farmers focus on retention and expansion. In theory, this should improve both new business acquisition and long-term customer value.
In practice, it often does not.
In my experience, I have rarely seen the model work well in its pure form. More often, it leads to a decline in overall sales performance, lower retention rates, and increasing frustration across teams and clients alike.
There are, of course, exceptions. Larger, more mature businesses with clearly defined and standardised offerings can make this model work. But for small-mid-sized businesses with smaller sales teams, it tends to create more problems than it solves.
The founders I spoke to had sales teams of five to seven people. At that scale, introducing a strict separation between hunters and farmers does not create focus. It introduces complexity and fragmentation across the customer journey.
What typically happens is:
- Fragmentation of the buyer and customer journey due to poor handovers between hunters and farmers.
- Hunters overpromising to close deals, driven by new business targets rather than long-term fit.
- Farmers inheriting clients with misaligned expectations and being set up to fix problems rather than build relationships.
- Misaligned incentives across the team, creating tension between winning and retaining business.
- Expensive hunters becoming frustrated when there is a lack of quality leads.
- Expensive hunters wasting time qualifying poor-quality opportunities instead of focusing on closing high-value deals.
- Customers experiencing a disjointed buying and delivery journey, eroding trust.
- Loss of customer insight across the lifecycle due to split ownership between hunters and farmers.
When performance drops, the common reaction is to replace the hunters. New hires are brought in, expectations reset, and the cycle repeats. The underlying structural issue, however, remains unchanged.
The starting point is often wrong.
The assumption is that hiring hunters will solve a growth problem. In many cases, the real issue lies elsewhere: inconsistent lead generation, weak qualification, and the absence of a repeatable and proven sales process.
Introducing a hunter–farmer structure into an environment where the fundamentals are not in place does not fix the problem; it amplifies it.
At the same time, the nature of B2B sales has evolved. The notion of the “lone wolf” hunter driving growth on their own is becoming increasingly outdated, particularly in complex sales environments with higher contract values and longer sales cycles. Buyers are better informed and come into the process much better prepared, expecting a consistent, well-managed buying experience. That requires coordination across functions, not separation into silos.
The more effective approach is to start with the sales motion itself.
Before making decisions about roles and structure, founders need to establish how their business consistently generates leads, qualifies opportunities, converts them into customers, and retains and expands those relationships over time. This needs to be proven and repeatable.
Only then does it make sense to design the team around that motion.
In well-functioning organisations, sales is not an individual activity but a coordinated effort. The salesperson acts less as a lone closer and more as a conductor, bringing in the right people at the right time, whether from pre-sales, product, legal, delivery or even the founder, to support the process. This creates a coherent experience for the customer and significantly reduces the risk of misalignment between what is sold and what is delivered.
Such a well-orchestrated process, following proven and repeated sales motions, helps overcome the risks of misaligned goals within the sales team in a hunter-farmer model that can alienate your customers and erode trust. A shared incentive system, consisting of individual and team incentives, will facilitate such collaboration and alignment.
One of the biggest challenges I found in even these well-functioning teams is the amount of quality leads entering the sales funnel. That is why founders often think that hiring hunters will fix the new business growth issue, while in reality, the marketing machine is broken. You need systems that generate quality leads, regardless of the sales approach.
Without a reliable flow of qualified opportunities, no sales structure will deliver the desired outcome.
Before introducing a hunter-farmer sales model, founders should ensure that they have a proven, repeatable sales motion across the entire buyer and customer journey. Only then should they consider how best to structure the team to support it. Otherwise, they risk adding complexity without solving the underlying problem.