Career Advice

© Copyright 2007 The HR Chally Group
Are you in sales and want to make it a successful long-term career? Are you interested in sales and want to know if you can make it financially and personally rewarding?
New research from industrial/organizational psychologists at Wright State University1 suggests that the answer might depend upon the match between your natural sales talents and skills and the demands of your sales role. At a very basic level, there are two kinds of professional salespeople: new business developers, often called hunters or rainmakers; and account managers, often called farmers.
The two roles require very different skills for long-term success. Picking the role in which you can excel in could be critical to achieving your personal and financial goals.
How important is picking the right sales role? Look at the odds:
1. Nearly 65% of salespeople who fail could have succeeded in a sales role that matched their skills.
2. Only 19% of effective hunters are just as effective at maintaining their customers over the long term, a skill critical to the success of farmers.
3. Less than 15% of good farmers are comfortable doing cold calls, an essential task of successful hunters.
4. Overall, about 50% of the failure rate in sales positions is due to putting a natural hunter in a farmer's job, or vice versa.
Traditionally, predicting sales success has proven more difficult than predicting success in other occupations. However, HR Chally's experience, acquired over 30 years and including data on more than 200,000 salespeople, establishes two very important points. Recruiting managers should always try to determine if a candidate is a good match for a particular role, not if he/she will be a good sales representative in general. Yet most selection tests simply cannot spot the different skills that will count in each role.
By leveraging Chally's database of assessment results and performance, the researchers were able to develop two scales that predicted success in hunter and farmer sales roles. All the applicants were tested on two short scales developed specifically for Selling Power's Career Builder job board.
The researchers thus confirmed that, especially for highly professional and specialized sales positions, you can predict success more accurately by looking for skills specific to different sales roles.
The lesson for salespeople is simple: people who make good hunters do not necessarily make good farmers.
Much of this makes sense, intuitively. To sell successfully, you need to match your natural strengths to the right type of sales job rather than trying to become something you aren't. But how can you really know whether you are a natural hunter or farmer?
Just take the free Sales Hunter-Farmer Test to find out which of these two very common sales roles are best for you. The Test takes only five or ten minutes, and your results will be e-mailed to you automatically.
* 1 Research conducted by Corey E. Miller, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Wright State University, with Esteban Tristan, M.S., and Megan K. Leasher, Ph.D.

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