Whatever Happened to Hunting and Farming?
There was a time when every serious sales organisation understood the difference between a hunter and a farmer. The hunter went out and found new business — cold, uncomfortable, disciplined work that required thick skin, sharp instincts, and the ability to hear no repeatedly without losing momentum. The farmer cultivated existing relationships — nurturing accounts, deepening trust, and identifying new opportunities inside clients who already believed in what you did.
Two distinct disciplines. Both essential. Neither optional. Then digital arrived, and the industry decided it had found something better.
What Replaced Them
The promise of digital business development was seductive. Inbound funnels would replace cold outreach. Content would automatically attract the right prospects. Social media would build relationships at scale. Algorithms would identify warm leads before a salesperson ever made contact. The friction of human selling would be engineered away, replaced by a system that converted while you slept.
Some of this was delivered. Most of it produced something that looked like a pipeline and performed like noise — databases full of contacts who never converted, LinkedIn inboxes full of connection requests nobody wanted, automated email sequences that trained recipients to ignore them on arrival.
The hunters retired or retrained. The farmers were replaced by account management software. And an entire generation of business development professionals grew up optimising click-through rates instead of learning how to have a difficult conversation with a prospect who wasn't ready to buy yet.
What Was Actually Lost
"The best salesperson I ever worked with kept a handwritten notebook — one page per prospect, updated after every interaction—no CRM. No automation. A conversion rate that our entire digital pipeline never matched."
Hunting is not cold calling. It is the disciplined identification of the right prospect, at the right moment, approached in the right way — with enough knowledge of their business to make the conversation worth having, and enough persistence to stay present until the timing aligns.
Farming is not account-based management. It is the ongoing investment in a client relationship that goes beyond the current brief — understanding where they're going, what they'll need before they've articulated it, and being present as a strategic partner rather than a supplier waiting for the next purchase order.
At Lighthouse PR, both disciplines remain central to how the agency develops and retains client relationships. New business is pursued with the same rigour and preparation that hunting always demanded. Existing clients are cultivated with the kind of attention that turns a single campaign into a long-term partnership.
These are not revolutionary ideas. They are foundational ones that the industry abandoned in favour of automation and forgot to replace with anything as effective.
Why It Still Matters
No algorithm builds trust. No inbound funnel replaces the conversation that happens when a hunter understands a prospect's problem well enough to articulate it back to them. No CRM system substitutes for the farmer who noticed a client's business was changing six months before the client put it in a brief.
The businesses that are winning new clients and keeping them are the ones that never stopped doing the human work. They just got quieter about it while everyone else was busy optimising their funnels.
Hunting and farming didn't disappear because they stopped working. They disappeared because they were hard. That, of course, is precisely why they worked.
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About the Author
Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.
Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.
About Lighthouse PR
Lighthouse PR is a leading PR agency in Romania that works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of marketing services — always led by senior practitioners.
We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the CCNE, Europe's leading crisis communications network.
Lighthouse PR: Clear. Concise. Convincing.