SBI recently spoke with the team at Ryder, a Fortune 500 company in the commercial fleet management and supply chain solutions business with nearly $9 billion in annual revenue. The topic of conversation was implementing a hunter-farmer sales organizational structure.
Why A Hunter-Farmer Sales Model?
The first question to consider is why move to a hunter-farmer sales model?
“We really spent some time looking at the way that our customers buy, how they value relationships, how we expand business with them, and what challenges we were experiencing with retention,” explained sales leadership. Based on this research, they determined that the hunter-farmer model would best serve the needs of the customers.
The team also looked at the goals and objectives of the business. At Ryder, they have a very clear goal of growth, so they needed an org design that would support growth through both gross sales and net sales. And finally, the team considered their sellers. Over time, many of them had naturally developed into either hunters or farmers. The reality was that some had developed larger account bases, while others developed smaller account bases with more new names. Ultimately, the decision to move to this model was easy, as it almost had developed naturally.
Filling the New Roles
When we asked the Ryder team about shifting to this new model, they replied by explaining how the approached hiring efforts: “We did not hire a bunch. However, we did take a look at new positions that we were adding for the new year, additional headcount, and decided which would be positioned as hunter roles, and which would be positioned as farmer roles.” For the majority of the team in question, the sales leader filled roles by taking the current team and filtering them in the proper place.
In order to do this, leadership assessed team members against the new job profile to determine who should be in which role. They started from the foundation up. They looked at the current job descriptions or profiles and modified those to fit profiles reflective of a hunter or farmer. Once these profiles were built, they were able to go to the assessment that Ryder performs of their sales team. They had performed these assessments in the last year or so, and continue to do so for every new seller they add.
Ryder also reflected on the input from sales managers. This was important because these are the folks working with the sellers every day. They are able to add firsthand experience and knowledge to use in addition to the information given by the assessment. By taking these steps, the team was able to easily see where each seller fit into the new sales model.
Adjusting the Sales Compensation Plan
The final topic is sales compensation. How did the team make the necessary adjustments? They explained, “Once we had the positions defined, we first sat down and discussed the level of difficulty for both, quota attainments and the number of people in each role.” They were then able to align this with the expectations of the business and the skill sets of the people.
Finally, the team took a small part of its sales team, those with the most tenure and success, and integrated them in the process from the very beginning. Getting input from the sellers directly allowed the leadership team to understand how it would be interpreted in the field. These frank conversations that leadership was able to have with their sellers enhanced the rollout dramatically. It allowed for effective change management right off the bat.
Learnings Along the Way
Though the change was natural, it doesn’t mean it was necessarily easy.
Conceptually, this organizational structure isn't too complex. However, it was really important for the leadership team to understand what being a hunter or a farmer meant for their industry. For example, they needed to reduce the number of accounts that some hunters had from 13 down to 5, and this was difficult. They had to weed through the opinions of why they shouldn’t or couldn’t do this. Though they were successful in creating the positions they needed, and formulating them in the way they wanted, it was more challenging than expected.
Additionally, Ryder recommends always starting with the customer. You have to know how they do business and what they value from your sales team in order to gauge the impact of organizational redesign from the customer’s perspective. It’s the only way the new model is successful.
