Sales farmers are critical to any business looking to have customer relationships that grow beyond transactional.  Farmers attend to all those critical things that grow your customers into partners who recognize the value that you bring them.  The problem occurs when farmers get too comfortable with or reactive to a partner's needs.  If all their time is taken up farming by servicing their key accounts, how do they have time to be hunters​ and find new business?

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Too often, companies will either push their farmers into hunting, or add hunters to either supplement or replace the farmers.  In the first scenario, farmers are often taken outside their comfort zone when pushed to hunt without being given the tools or opportunity to develop the skills that hunting requires.  Even when they are successful at hunting, farmers who become hunters often put down their ploughs and stop farming entirely. This opens up opportunities for problems to occur, customer dissatisfaction to fester, and provides the momentum for your competition to get their foot in the door.  Bringing in hunters to supplement your sales force can be an effective alternative, but it is expensive and can complicate your sales channel.  Hunters also bring an entirely new dynamic to the channel that can be disruptive if not prepared for.

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CLEAR Solutions can work with your sales force, whether they are farmers or hunters.  We will help them to adopt an opportunistic attitude, stressing wide and deep customer penetration.  The key is to use the attributes that make them successful at either hunting or farming to their advantage.  Farmers are motivated by customer appreciation and loyalty.  They grow accounts by cultivating real relationships and clear lines of communication.  The skills that they have mastered and the relationships that they have built can be turned inwards at their key accounts.  They can look for opportunities to find new applications for your existing products and services and fuel your NPD pipeline for the future.  Your customers will also look for opportunities to give you business as they have developed strong bonds of trust with the farmers turned hunters within the account.  Hunters can be shown how to be more opportunistic as well.  We can help them develop penetration strategies that move the account deeper.  Hunters enjoy the rush of campaigns and moving towards the close.  This desire and the skills and experience that they have developed can be harnessed into a powerful engine for growth at the account level.  New business is important, but the easiest and often most profitable new business to get is where you already have business.  

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Contact us today to arrange a free phone/video consultation to discuss how we can help you with innovative, practical, and cost effective solutions for developing your sales force into a team that hunts and farms opportunistically, and any other challenges and opportunities that you are facing.