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Welcome everybody back to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest running sales training podcast in podcast history.
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My name is Brian Neal.
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I m Bill Kasky, and I ve got nothing funny today.
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We ve had nothing funny for 15 years, Bill, just to ask the audience.
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15 years, we ve been coming up with these little rants.
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Those of you who are anti-rant, this is your episode because we got nothing to talk about.
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We re going right into it.
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Well, usually what we do is we plan out the episode.
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Then we basically say, Brian, you got anything?
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Got anything funny?
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Got anything for the rant?
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And he ll always say, no.
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But today, and it s my turn, so I m taking full responsibility.
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I ve got nothing.
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I ve been very bored.
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out of football season, sit around like, what do people do?
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Like, you know, most people who don t work Saturdays and Sundays like I do in the fall.
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Just watch the Oscars and take pictures of people who wear dresses.
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Well, God forbid I do any work around the house to help my wife out with anything.
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I just watch her fold the clothes.
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Go clean your toolbox.
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Go clean that toolbox.
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Get it organized.
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Toolbox?
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I don t have any tools.
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I don t use tools.
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I don t do anything.
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I ve got, I ve got a tool toolbox.
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It s on wheels.
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It s got, you know, drawers.
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And I mean, it s one of those, I don t know what it is, water loose or whatever.
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And, and if you open the top, it s just like a, it s a, it s a mess.
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It s like scary mess.
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There s just hammers, nails, and screws.
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Why is that?
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I m terrible at that stuff.
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It is interesting though, isn t that people really get excited about certain things that you don t get excited about?
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Yeah.
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Like my friends that do, would do woodworking or something.
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Uh huh.
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I m like, Oh my God, like, you know, I had to make a cutting board in seventh grade.
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I was still traumatized by it.
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And I got a C plus, I made a fish and I cut his lips off and it was like, looks like a big open mouth fit.
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My parents still have it actually.
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Isn t that funny?
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See, I m 53, that would have been 13, 40 years.
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I ll take a picture when I m on my parents.
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Nope.
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You didn t need a name.
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It was a C plus.
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That s what, oh God, it s funny.
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I got another story, but we don t have time.
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Three minute, three minute mark.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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So those of you who thought you were getting out of the ramp, sorry, topic, here we go.
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Ready?
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Hunter versus farmer.
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Hunter versus farmer.
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This is a big debate.
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Hunter versus farmer.
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And so we re just going to have you do a little self-reflection and see what you think you re made of.
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Are you a hunter?
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Are you a farmer?
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If you re a sales leader listening to this, which a lot of you are, should my team be mostly hunters, mostly farmers?
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If you re a sales leader, which a lot of you are, you come to me and Bill often and say, I don t have any hunters, man.
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I don t have any hunters on my team.
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Why?
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What s the problem?
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Which side of the fence do you land on?
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We re going to talk about that today on the Advanced Selling Podcast.
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Hunters versus farmers.
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OK.
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Here s my first question.
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Why don t you define hunter for me and for the listener?
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Yeah, perfect.
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So I would define this as my own.
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This is B Neal s own definition.
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A hunter is someone who is intrinsically motivated to go find new accounts, new logos, and new contracts and gets an emotional charge from that.
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They get an emotional charge from the signing of something new, a contract or a deal that didn t exist before.
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There are people who get motivated by saying, I found that.
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That s here because of me.
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That s a hunter.
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They then tend to drop and run.
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They don t want to stay with the deal.
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They don t want to stay through implementation.
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They don t want anything to do with it.
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They just roll onto the next one.
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That, to me, is a purebred hunter.
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Isn t the structure of a lot of companies set up so they can cut and run?
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I mean, they re not running away from anything.
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No.
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But isn t the structure usually like, yeah, you did your job.
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Now let us take it from here.
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Client success, account management.
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Isn t that the way the structure sometimes is?
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Sometimes.
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I don t know that it always is.
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And then you have incentive comp plans that pay you over time.
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And so then if that s where my money is, and the AM s screwing it all up, I m going to jump back in and save it.
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So that s my definition.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, I like that.
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Another question I would have is, are the same skills that allow somebody to be a great hunter also the same skills that allow them to be a great account manager or relationship builder or relationship furtherer?
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Are the skills the same?
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Because I m not sure they are.
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I don t think they are, no.
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And I think this, um,
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When I gave you my definition, and it s funny because I never really like you get asked that, but I ve never really said it the way I just said it to you.
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I think it comes back from the intrinsic wiring.
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It s that motivation.
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Because a lot of people are intrinsically wired to keep long term steady relationships, and they don t want the volatility of new in and out.
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They actually feel safety and security around a human or a company or a relation.
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And so then that then on both sides, I think leads to very, very different behaviors that you observe in a hunter versus a farmer.
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Do you ever have clients that have a business development team that s hunt, they re the hunters, they re the ones that are kind of opening the door, but then they have a sales team that should also be out hunting, but they don t because they think, why would I do that?
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Business development is bringing, that happens a lot.
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How about all of them?
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And so the question is, back to your definition, is were they ever hunters in the first place?
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I m talking about the stealth team now.
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Or did they put themselves in that position?
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If you re in sales, you have to hunt because we don t have a marketing team that s throwing leads your way, or a BDR team.
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So you re going to have to do it.
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And then my question is, top it all off, is does it matter how I hunt?
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Because in the old world, it s a cold outreach networking, belly button to belly button, face to face, calling people up, taking them to lunch.
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Today, is it podcasting?
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And is it video shows?
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Am I inviting my potential clients onto my podcast or onto my YouTube channel so that I m developing those relationships and I m going about it in an entirely frickin  different way?
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Yeah.
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Because there s a lot of account manager who would be able to do that.
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I would say, well, that s not right.
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I can do that.
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Yeah.
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Yeah. 100%.
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Yeah.
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Yes, the ability to put someone s self out there, so to speak, right?
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As a hunter s mentality.
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To an audience or to the mass.
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To an audience, yes, absolutely.
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And then there s people.
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Now, let s go to the other side of that.
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I feel like, and I know some of these people, there are some people that have massively large followings on LinkedIn.
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Let s use that as an example, that I know personally.
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And because I know them personally, I know a little bit about their business.
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And their business is not strong.
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because they can t close.
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So they can t get ink on paper or whatever the case is.
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So there s a balance to that.
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I think in those two things.
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And to me, though, the hunter mentality is the is someone s ability to get it all the way through.
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That s right.
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And then yes, then I do think
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that there are hunters that are still doing it an old way.
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They re still trying to do what you re talking about when they could be using different leverage point.
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That s when someone gets good dangerous.
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That s correct.
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That s correct.
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Good dangerous.
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When they use modern ways to get in front of people and can finish a deal all the way to a close and get a deal over.
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That s correct.
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That s a valuable person inside the company, because if that person leaves, and this is for CEOs and VPs of sales, if you have three hunters serving up business for 25 account managers, that s a terrible model, because one of them is going to leave, or one of them is going to get sick, or one of them is going to take a six-month sabbatical.
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whatever, and now everything stops.
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So if I m an owner and I have put all my faith and effort into these hunters, that s a danger zone, man.
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It s like having three clients for 100% of your business.
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You don t ever want that because you ve not spread your risk out.
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That s really, really great.
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And, and I think for the, on the ownership side too, and, or a CEO or a CRO, uh, when you get that higher level, um, you also have to ask yourself, can, and should I require or draw, uh, create a system where the people who would be farmers are taught to hunt within that system within the, yeah.
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Hunt within a patch of grass or hunt within that, uh, dare I say, ecosystem.
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Uh,
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I just did.
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DRAC ecosystem.
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I did.
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Should I teach them and require that?
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Because that s a skill too, that I think is unique.
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To be able to get into a client, let s say I got into Patterson Dental.
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And I m into one area is there s a skill that it takes to navigate through a big, huge company like that.
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Versus I m just going to deal with who I deal
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deal with, because they re my main point of contact.
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You hear that all the time in the camp.
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Well, my main point of contact is Bill Gatsby.
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I m like, who else do you talk to there?
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Well, he s my main point of contact.
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I m like, there s 14,000 people that work there.
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Exactly.
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And you got one point of contact?
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Like, what are we doing here?
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That s missing, too.
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And that is a, is a fact.
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The factor there is can we use technology to get in front of maybe not 14,000 people, but another hundred.
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Yes.
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So that when they sit around and talk about the future of the company and our name comes up, it comes up in all different angles.
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Like, why aren t we talking to them?
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Absolutely.
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And that s hard to do by making calls and saying, well, who else at your company should I be talking to?
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I mean, you can do that.
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And then another issue here is what role should marketing play in this?
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Because if I have a product that I can advertise on Facebook or LinkedIn and they can download something and I can capture their email address and I send them, the marketing department creates a cadence of emails and sometimes it s video, sometimes it s white paper, sometimes just information, but it s all very helpful.
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It s all very helpful stuff.
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And then the 17th email says, would you like to book a call with one of our specialists?
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And a person books a call, and that whole process is automated to this point.
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Now, when that person books a call, there are 17 emails in.
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I mean, there s not a whole lot of selling that has to happen.
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You don t need to be a hunter to close that.
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Right, right, right, right, right.
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Absolutely.
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Yes.
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To me, these are all systems and structures to put into play.
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That s right.
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I think we do too much as sales leaders.
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We do too much just trusting in the personality type.
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That s right.
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Bill s a hunter.
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He ll take care of it.
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He ll go get them.
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Stay out of his way.
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That s how we treat hunters, right?
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Stay out of Bill s way.
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Stay out of Brian s way.
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He s a hunter.
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Let him go.
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And they bring it back, you know, the okay deals.
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And then on the farmer side, too, then we don t require any of that behavior stuff, or we have no mechanism, stay in touch, like, we ll have you, we just keep, like, poking them with questions.
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We talked to many, anybody else over there?
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No, I haven t had time to, so we had a couple issues.
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Right?
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No, there needs to be a systematic.
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No system.
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So you VPs of sales that are listening.
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Yep.
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The suggestion here is to create some kind of system, a lead generation system, so that it makes it easier on your hunters.
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They re not just relying on their ability to convert a cold call to a meeting, to a proposal.
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Because that s hard.
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It s hard work.
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Not in the, you know, if I m in a prison camp doing, working on the railroad, it s not that kind of hard work, but that s old school.
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But the problem is that, uh, that s such a select few people.
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You could probably take your entire account management and sales team and 90% of them would be good.
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Yes.
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If an inbound call came in and the person was 17 emails in and all they wanted to know was how quickly can we start?
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You don t have to be a genius to close that deal.
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No.
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And yet we don t set our systems up that way.
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That s the problem.
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That s the problem.
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So this is a great examination for you listening today.
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So one is a self-examination to say, where do I, do I get intrinsically motivated to get ink on paper and go find something new?
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Or am I intrinsically motivated for the safety and security of an ongoing relationship?
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That s the first kind of self-reflection.
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And then to examine systems.
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What system do I have in place that leverages my hunters
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That s the thing that s missing, leverages the hunter.
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So that s the video system or an email drip system, and leverages the activity of the account managers that both of those things can fall under the marketing heading.
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Yeah.
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Because then I think the whole question of hunter-gatherer or hunter-farmer, hunter-gatherer, hunter-farmer.
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takes on a different light.
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Cause we re looking at that hunter farmer thing a certain way right now.
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If you start looking at systems and looking at these things we re talking about, it changes the perspective of how you look at that.
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And it may also change the structure too.
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Absolutely.
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That s good.
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I think we solved it, Bill.
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I think we solved the age old hunter farmer debate.
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It s done.
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What was that?
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15 minutes or less?
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Yeah.
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It s been going on for decades in here.
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15 minutes in, we re done.
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We just waited.
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We didn t drop that.
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We ll bill you.
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We ll bill you guys.
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Like we ve been billing you for the last 16 years for the podcast.
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You have to bump it up a little bit.
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Give everybody an invoice.
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Dollar an episode, dollar a download.
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People are going to get bills for $500,000.
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All right.
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I ll see you next time.
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Okay.
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Talk to you soon.
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Bye.