Should sales roles be split between new-logo hunters and expansion farmers?

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

CS and account management roles should be combined so the same trusted person carries upsell and cross-sell, but kept separate from new-logo hunters

CS has fewer customer touch points and has built the trust; bringing in a separate salesperson mid-relationship creates an awkward, high-tension moment

24:45 20Sales: How to Scale Into Enterprise Effectively and the Biggest Mistakes Made When Making the Move From PLG to Enterprise, Why Discovery Today is F***** & The Biggest Lessons on How to Do Sales Team Compensation with Sean Murray, CRO @ Greenhouse

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

Companies should keep a dedicated new-logo hunting organization separate from the customer-facing (CS/account management) organization

Research behind the Challenger Sale shows that when you combine new-logo hunting with customer-facing roles it doesn't work well

Scope: only so long as you have the TAM and greenfield runway to support chasing new logos

25:58 20Sales: How to Scale Into Enterprise Effectively and the Biggest Mistakes Made When Making the Move From PLG to Enterprise, Why Discovery Today is F***** & The Biggest Lessons on How to Do Sales Team Compensation with Sean Murray, CRO @ Greenhouse

Sean Murray · Jan 24, 2024

The CS relationship-builder role and the account management/expansion role should be combined, with data signalling when a customer is ready for upsell or cross-sell

Combining them plus using expansion signals in the data creates a frictionless sales environment inside the customer account rather than an awkward handoff to a separate seller

29:23 20Sales: How to Scale Into Enterprise Effectively and the Biggest Mistakes Made When Making the Move From PLG to Enterprise, Why Discovery Today is F***** & The Biggest Lessons on How to Do Sales Team Compensation with Sean Murray, CRO @ Greenhouse

Carles Reina · Apr 11, 2026

A hunter who isn't well managed creates more damage than opportunity in large accounts

An unstructured hunter attacking each subsidiary of a holding company separately creates pricing and value discrepancies that come back to bite you at renewal

14:08 Hunters need tight management and cs pairing in large accounts

Larry Shurtz · May 10, 2024

Farming is not a real role in the cloud world — every rep is always hunting and farming — so the hunter/farmer problem is really a segmentation question resolved by tight CS-sales interlock

Even reps with only existing customers must find new use cases across the whole bag they sell, so they are hunting; with stacked hands between CS and sales he'd back his team against anyone

33:23 Farming is not a real role everyone always hunts in cloud

Ben Fiechtner · Aug 2, 2024

You avoid hunter-versus-farmer mismatches by choosing segments intelligently — knowing your ICP, narrowing to the accounts you must win, and overstaffing them rather than spreading capacity thin

At Clari, enterprise AEs holding 100 accounts each was never going to work, so they got specific about must-win accounts and overstaffed them, putting capacity where it drives the biggest yield

47:17 Overstaff must win accounts rather than spread capacity thin across segments

Julian Teixeira · Mar 7, 2025

Whether to split hunters and farmers depends on how your customers buy; 1Password started split and is now merging into a hybrid model

Originally 50,000 businesses used the product at under 2% penetration, so a single rep type would favor expansion and neglect outbound; now with a multi-product portfolio customers land and expand, and pushing too hard for large upfront deals was losing new business

22:33 Split depends on how customers buy

Julian Teixeira · Mar 7, 2025

Whether you want a farmer facing another company's hunter depends on context — farmers are more patient, curious and better active listeners, while hunters' fast-twitch urgency can miss things and leave money on the table

Hunters operate in an environment of outrunning competitors for the same deal, which breeds speed at the cost of thoroughness

23:42 Hunter and farmer traits fit different deal contexts