The Importance of Hunters and Farmers in SaaS Sales Organizations and Why Partners Could Be Your Best Farmers

In the fast-paced world of SaaS, sales teams play a crucial role in driving revenue, acquiring new customers, and ensuring long-term customer success. To maximize sales efficiency and growth, organizations often structure their teams around two distinct roles: hunters and farmers. Given Board and Investor requirements, hunters dominate SaaS sales teams leaving an interesting part for partners to potentially play as farmers, helping to retain and expand customer relationships. Understanding and leveraging these roles effectively can make the difference between a stagnant company and a high-growth powerhouse.

Hunters: The Growth Drivers

Hunters are the salespeople focused on new business acquisition. They are responsible for identifying, pursuing, and closing new opportunities. Their skill set includes:

• Prospecting and lead generation – Constantly seeking out new clients through cold outreach, networking, and inbound lead conversion.

• Fast-paced sales cycles – Moving deals through the pipeline quickly to bring in new revenue streams.

• Competitive mindset – Thriving in high-energy environments where they can chase targets and exceed quotas.

• Resilience and adaptability – Handling rejection and continuously refining their approach to improve success rates.

In the SaaS industry, where customer acquisition is a major driver of growth, having a strong team of hunters ensures that the pipeline stays full and revenue targets are met.

Farmers: The Retention Champions

Farmers, including internal account managers and external partners, focus on nurturing and growing existing customer relationships. Their role includes:

• Account management – Ensuring customer satisfaction and resolving issues before they escalate.

• Upselling and cross-selling – Identifying opportunities to expand account value through additional features, upgrades, or complementary products.

• Customer success management – Working closely with customers to ensure they achieve the desired outcomes from the SaaS product.

• Building loyalty – Creating long-term relationships that reduce churn and increase lifetime value.

• Leveraging partners – Channel and strategic partners can act as farmers by providing localized support, additional services, and co-selling opportunities that enhance customer relationships.

Recurring revenue and retention are fundamental to SaaS success, and while a company could make investments in additional sales headcount, partners could offload much of the overhead of a farming team while scaling existing customer business more quickly by playing to their account management strengths.

Balancing Hunters and Farmers in Your SaaS Sales Strategy

A successful SaaS sales organization strikes the right balance between hunters and farmers. Some key considerations include:

• Clear role definitions – Ensuring both roles are well-defined to avoid overlap and inefficiencies.

• Seamless handoff process – Transitioning customers smoothly from hunters to farmers and partners to maintain a positive experience.

• Aligned incentives – Structuring compensation plans that reward both acquisition and retention efforts, including partner contributions.

• Technology enablement – Using CRM, automation, and analytics to support both hunters and farmers in their workflows.

Why Partners as your farmers?

• Existing Relationships – Partners work with their customers for long periods of time. Where a hunter gets in and gets out, partners, by their nature of providing broad solutions, work to build long term relationships. In some cases the relationships have been in place for decades.

• Trusted Advisors – Due to the long term relationships, and the broad solutions they provide, partners often are considered the go to people for technology acquisition.

• Aligned Sale Model – Many partners have in depth sales methodologies that include continual outreach and support of their customers.

Conclusion

In the SaaS world, growth isn’t just about acquiring new customers—it’s also about keeping them. Hunters bring in fresh business and drive new revenue, while farmers, and specifically in the form of partners, cultivate those relationships for long-term value. By building a sales organization that effectively leverages both, SaaS companies can achieve sustainable success and a strong competitive edge.

Is your SaaS sales team structured for both acquisition and retention? If not, now is the time to optimize your strategy and leveraging partners for farming is an effective and efficient way to scale your business.