You Have a Sales Problem: Sales Hunting vs. Sales Farming

Almost every business I work with struggles with revenue growth. Not because they have a bad product or a weak team, but because they’ve never been clear about which sales problem they’re trying to solve. 

Two stories. Same problem. Completely different directions. 

Story 1: The Flaw in Your Net New Sales Strategy

A CEO I had lunch with recently told me about a salesperson on his team who absolutely crushed their quota. Revenue target: $1 million. They hit it. Fast. 

The problem? The goal was meant to be $1 million in net new sales. This salesperson — smart, not wrong — went back to existing customers and sold them more. Easier relationships. Warmer conversations. Faster closes. Done. 

Whose fault was that? Not the salesperson’s. They hit the number. The fault belongs entirely to whoever set the goal without being clear about what kind of revenue they wanted. 

If your net new sales strategy requires fresh prospects, explicitly define it as net new. 

Story 2: Driving Account Management Revenue Growth

The opposite story is just as expensive. 

I worked with a company that had spent a decade focused entirely on net new sales. If you had a $1 million quota, that was $1 million of new customers. That was the culture, the habit, the standard. 

Ten years later, they had 7,000 customers who had never been called back. Not once. No account management. No check-ins. Non “Hey, your machine is over a year old — it needs new seals.” Seven thousand people who had already bought from them, already trusted them, and were sitting there waiting for someone to pick up the phone. 

So, they built an account management process. Two people. Their job: start calling. They used interns to make the first round of calls — simple outreach, nothing fancy. 

Year one: over $1 million in sales from customers they already had. Year two: multiple millions. Within three to four years, account management was accounting for more than 40% of total company revenue. 

And here’s the part worth underlining: parts, seals, consumables, maintenance kits — that’s almost always the highest margin revenue in the business. Not the big equipment sale. The follow-on. The thing nobody was calling about. 

That’s not a sales problem. That’s a revenue problem that was hiding in plain sight for ten years. 

Sales Hunting vs. Farming: Two Different Roles 

When we talk about revenue growth with clients, we always start by separating two fundamentally different activities. 

Hunting is going out and finding new customers. It requires a specific personality — someone who thrives on the chase, loves the challenge of breaking into a new account, and gets energized by the word “no.” Hunters are aggressive, persistent, and wired for the excitement of the new. 

Farming is working with existing customers to deepen the relationship and grow their spend over time. It requires patience, genuine curiosity about the customer’s world, and the ability to think in years rather than quarters. Farmers build the kind of trust that turns a transaction into a fifteen-year relationship, maximizing long-term customer lifetime value. 

Great hunters are rarely great farmers. And great farmers rarely make great hunters. These aren’t just different skills — they’re different ways of being in a sales relationship. Expecting one person to do both well is how you get mediocrity at both. 

Fixing Your Sales Goal Setting and Revenue Growth Strategy 

Fixing this comes down to proper sales goal setting: set independent targets for both. Not a combined revenue target. Separate accountability for net new and for existing account growth. 

Maybe it’s $500K net new and $500K from existing customers. Maybe the split is different depending on where the business is right now. A young company with a thin customer base needs to hunt hard. A mature company with thousands of dormant accounts needs to farm first. That’s fine. What’s not fine is treating them as the same goal and being surprised when your team optimizes for whichever one is easier. 

Write the goals clearly. Net new means net new. Existing account growth means existing account growth. The salesperson who farms their way to a hunting quota isn’t cheating — they’re doing exactly what the goal allowed. 

That’s on you. 

Clarity Drives Revenue Growth 

Most of the sales struggles I see aren’t about talent or effort. They’re about ambiguity. The team doesn’t know which game they’re playing. Or they’re playing one game while the other goes completely unmanaged. 

You almost certainly have both a hunting opportunity and a farming opportunity sitting in your business right now. The question is whether you’ve built the goals, the accountability, and the right people around each one.