There is a moment in most hiring conversations for a customer-facing or sales role where the question comes up, sometimes explicitly, sometimes not: hunter or farmer? Often the answer is hunter - because it feels like the aggressive-growth move, the decisive option, the thing a leadership team can point to and say, "this is how we'll grow the business."

I have spent time in and around both roles during my career, and I understand how the hunter becomes the default. A high-performing hunter is genuinely something to behold. The confidence and relentlessness, the read on a room, the ability to turn a conversation into a signature.

These are real skills and businesses need them.

But I think the reflex to opt for the hunter, almost as a badge of ambition, quietly underrates what a strong farmer can deliver. For me, this reflex can end up costing a business more than it realises.

Why hunters are easier to value

It's not hard to see why the instinct runs that way. A hunter's win is visible, dated, and easy to attribute - a signature on a page, a number on a slide. Sales forecasts and growth targets get built around it, and hiring a hunter is easy to portray as an action that will ‘pay for itself’ in time.

None of that is unreasonable on its own terms. But the gap between hunter and farmer is less about which role creates more value, and more about a measurement problem dressed up as a strategic decision.

New business is easy to measure. Retention, expansion, and the slow accumulation of trust are not, so they tend to get valued less, even if they are worth more.

What the farmer actually delivers

I saw this play out earlier in my career. I joined a CEM as the first dedicated commercial resource for a key new customer - a good relationship already existed at ownership level, but day-to-day the account was being handled reactively by production, with an escalation route to senior management. My objective was to take responsibility for the relationship and build it.

Over the next four years, the business's overall revenue roughly doubled. That one account grew more than six-fold in the same period and became a larger share of the business - at a significantly greater margin.

That margin point matters more than the revenue figure.

Winning the account initially meant accepting thinner margin than the business would have liked - a familiar trade-off. What changed that was not relationship-building in the soft sense. It was becoming genuinely fluent in the customer's business: the people, the products, how they operated, material costs and availability, what was genuinely important to them.

That fluency meant that when a price correction was needed, we were able to justify it with evidence rather than simply ask for it. And because trust was already established, such increases were more readily accepted. If a business has confidence that its account management function will grow and develop the account over time, it can make more informed decisions on entry margin.

There is a second, less visible payoff to strong farming: the farmer becomes the business's sensor network.

They know what the customer actually needs, not just what the RFQ said. They can be the first to spot where the business's promises and its real delivery capability diverge - and that feedback, if it's heard, makes the whole organisation better at what it does. None of that shows up on a sales dashboard, which is exactly why it tends to go unrewarded.

Trust Earned

One thing built more trust in that relationship than anything else: owning mistakes honestly. Not just admitting fault but pairing it with a credible remedy - "this one's on us, and here's what we're doing about it." Anyone can look competent when things are going well. What gets remembered is what happens when they do not.

The real payoff of that habit is what it can earn you later. A supplier with a genuine track record of owning its mistakes has standing, when the situation is reversed, to say "this one isn't on us" - and to be believed, rather than that landing as deflection. Pairing diagnosis with a way forward, regardless of whose fault it was, is what makes a relationship genuinely two-way rather than one where the supplier is permanently on the back foot.

A hunter rarely gets the chance to build this. They are often not still in the room when the mistake surfaces.

The double-edged sword

Here's the part I often keep to myself, partly because it's an unpopular thing to say to a business leader who has already decided what they need.

When growth stalls, hiring a hunter is the visible, decisive, external fix. It's much less palatable to confront the possibility that the real constraint is delivery - that the business cannot yet reliably do what it's already promising. That's a slower, more uncomfortable problem to face, because it challenges decisions already made, not just the pipeline.

And if that is genuinely the issue, the hunter isn't just an ineffective solution - they can easily become a casualty of it.

A hunter sells promises. If the business itself doesn't have clarity on what it can reliably deliver, the hunter is either selling blind or constantly hedging what they can commit to - and either way, the confidence that makes them effective is blunted. Every gap between promise and delivery becomes their problem retroactively, pulling them into firefighting they are neither suited to nor rewarded for. Often, a hunter's reputation is their pipeline - and repeated exposure to delivery failures erodes it personally, not just organisationally.

So, the fix ends up costing twice: the underlying capability problem still isn't solved, and a good hunter's credibility and effectiveness are degraded in the process.

The real argument

None of this is about which role matters more. It's about how growth gets measured and rewarded - visibly, immediately, and individually for the hunter; invisibly, slowly, and collectively for the farmer. Businesses that only fund and celebrate the former should not be surprised when they can't work out why growth doesn't stick, or why a new hire in a "closer" role doesn't fix what was never actually a sales problem.

The pattern is familiar: good opportunities are won, delivery struggles to keep pace, and the commercial hire takes the blame for a problem that was never purely commercial.

Before writing the next job spec for a hunter, it might be worth asking a harder question first: is this actually a sales problem, or is it a delivery problem wearing a sales problem's clothes?