# Hunter vs farmer on a small sales team: do you need both?

https://salesbond.app/blog/hunter-vs-farmer-sales-small-team/
Published: 2026-10-02 · Updated: 2026-10-25

A team of three to ten reps does not usually need separate hunters and farmers. It needs two things the hunter vs farmer debate skips: a separate count for new deals and for existing-customer deals, and a rule for how much of each rep’s week goes to hunting. With those two in place one rep can do both jobs without the customer base quietly eating the prospecting. Without them a dedicated hunter will not save you either, because the same customers will find her.

The farming half gets easier when the biggest accounts each have a page of their own, and [a one-page account plan for your top five customers](https://salesbond.app/blog/key-account-plan-small-sales-team/) is the version we use.

## The Friday when nobody had called a new prospect

Noor runs sales at a company that sells scheduling software to dental clinics. Four reps, a quarterly target, a Pipedrive account that is tidy enough. On a Friday in September she opened the activities list for the week, filtered it to calls and emails marked done, and started counting the ones that went to someone who was not a customer yet.

She got to eleven. Four people, five days.

The rest of the week was in the same list, and none of it was idle. Caleb had spent two days moving a 30-clinic group onto a new plan. Ines had answered a billing question that turned into a seat-count discussion that turned into a renewal, done early, which is good. Dev had been on three onboarding calls for a customer who signed in August. Everyone was busy, everyone was helping customers, and the top of the pipeline had not moved since the previous Friday.

The thing to notice is that nobody chose this. No rep decided to stop prospecting. A customer emailed, the rep answered, the answer took forty minutes, and a cold call that had no fixed slot slid to Monday. Repeat that a dozen times and you get Noor’s eleven.

## Two jobs, one calendar

Hunting and farming are different jobs with different rhythms, which is why the hunter vs farmer model exists. Hunting is finding people who have never heard of you and getting them to a first conversation. Farming is keeping the people who already pay and selling them more. The classic answer is to hire a different kind of person for each.

On a small team the two jobs do not live in two people. They live in one calendar, and they compete unfairly. Customer work arrives on its own, with a name and a deadline attached. Prospecting never arrives; you have to go and start it, and nothing bad happens today if you don’t. So the calendar fills with the the job that asks, and the job that doesn’t ask starves.

We think this is the real hunter vs farmer problem for a team of three to ten, and it is not a personality problem. Caleb is a good hunter. He just answered his email first.

## What the hunter vs farmer guides say, and why they assume a bigger team

Most of what ranks for “hunter vs farmer sales” is about hiring: the traits of each profile, the interview questions, which compensation plan fits which role. That advice is written for a company that can afford a person per job. At twenty reps, splitting them into hunters and account managers is a sensible org design, and the pages that explain it are fine.

At five reps the split costs you something those pages do not mention. One of five people becomes the hunter, so prospecting has a single point of failure: a holiday or a resignation, and the pipeline for next quarter is empty. The other four stop prospecting entirely, and the skill goes with it. Six months later the team can renew anything and open nothing, and the hunter is the only one who remembers how a cold call starts.

The hybrid rep is not a compromise you settle for until you can afford the real thing. For a small team it is the better design, as long as the hunting half is protected by a rule rather than by good intentions. The rest of this article is that rule, and how to see in Pipedrive whether it holds.

## Protect hunting time: a simple weekly split

Pick a share of the week that belongs to new deals and treat it as booked. Our default for a mixed team is two mornings a week per rep: two of the ten half-days, a fifth of the week. It is a default to argue with, not a benchmark we can source. Young company with a small base? Three mornings. A base of 200 accounts with renewals every month? Two is still right; the renewals are the reason the share has to be defended at all.

The split is about when as much as how much. Prospecting at 4 p.m. on Friday, after the customer queue is empty, is a plan to prospect never. Put the hunting block at the start of the day, before the inbox is open, and make it the same two days for the whole team, so a customer who emails at 9:30 on a Tuesday gets an answer at noon and everyone knows that is the deal.

Then say it out loud at the Monday meeting, in one sentence: “Tuesday and Thursday mornings are new business; customer requests wait until noon unless it is an outage.” Reps need permission to make a customer wait two hours. Without it they will not, and they are right not to, because nobody told them the prospecting matters more. One way to fill those mornings is to [work a short list of target accounts](https://salesbond.app/blog/target-account-selling-pipedrive/).

Two exceptions are worth writing down. A customer threatening to leave gets handled now, inside the hunting block, because a lost account is a hole no amount of hunting fills quickly. And a rep who is behind on new-deal count two weeks running gets a third block, taken from customer work, until the count recovers. Everything else waits. We came at the same problem from the activity side in [sales activity metrics for a small team](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-activity-metrics-small-team/), if you want the numbers that go with the habit.

![Week calendar with Tuesday and Thursday mornings locked for new business and all other blocks left for customers](https://salesbond.app/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/hunter-vs-farmer-sales-small-team-2.png)

## Measure each job separately

A single pipeline number hides the Friday Noor found. Renewals and upsells carry value, so “pipeline is up” can be true in a week with zero new conversations. The fix is to count the two jobs on separate lines and look at both every week.

The first line is new-deal pipeline, and it answers one question: did we find anyone new this week? It is made of the deals created this week with the Deal type field set to New business, plus the activities logged on them. This is the counter the weekly split protects. Watch it as a count of deals rather than their value; we made that case in [the weekly new-deal target per rep](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipeline-generation-target-rep-new-deals-week/) and won’t repeat it here.

The second line is existing-customer deals: everything typed Renewal or Expansion, open and won, per rep. It tells you whether the base is being kept and grown. Here value is fine to watch, since a renewal has a known price. If expansion is one lump on that line, try [counting upsells and cross-sells apart](https://salesbond.app/blog/upsell-vs-cross-sell-pipedrive/).

Keep both lines in whatever you look at on Monday and put them next to each other per rep, so Caleb’s forty-minute customer emails and his missing cold calls show up in the same row.

Per rep matters because averages hide the hybrid failure. A team total of fifteen new deals can be one rep doing twelve, and that rep is your accidental hunter. If that is teh team you want, fine, but then say so and change the split for the other three.

A disclosure, since this is the part where tools come up: we build SalesBond, a sales management layer on top of the CRM a team already uses; we started with Pipedrive. Its Sales Dashboard has a Team Performance tab for per-rep execution, if you would rather start the Monday meeting from a per-rep view than from a spreadsheet ( [Check your CRM with SalesBond](https://salesbond.app/)). The two counters work without it, though, and the next section is how to build them.

## Marking it in Pipedrive: deal type, owner, filters

Everything above assumes Pipedrive can tell a new deal from a renewal, and out of the box it cannot; a deal is a deal. The field you need is a custom field on the deal called Deal type, single option, with three values: New business, Renewal, Expansion. Custom fields are created under Personal preferences > Data fields, where you pick the entity and the field type; the field then appears in the deal’s detail view and can be shown as a column in the list view ( [Pipedrive: custom fields](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/custom-fields)). Fill it when the deal is created. An untyped deal counts for nothing on Friday, and on a four-person team that is pressure enough.

Some teams reach for a [second pipeline](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-multiple-pipelines/) instead, one for new business and one for accounts. We prefer the field. One rep is working both kinds of deal, and a rep who has to switch pipelines to see her own week will stop looking at one of them. The field keeps every deal in the same view and lets you split them only when you count.

Deal labels are the tempting shortcut, and they are not the same thing. Labels are colour-coded tags for sorting deals visually in the pipeline, list and detail views, and a deal can carry up to a hundred of them ( [Pipedrive: deal labels](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/deal-labels)). That is exactly why they drift. A label is optional and cumulative and a deal with no label is not an error. A single-option field has one value or none, which is the property a counter needs.

Ownership stays simple. The deal owner is the rep doing the work, whichever type the deal is, and under Pipedrive’s item-owner visibility the owner, followers, admins and parent visibility group members can view and edit it ( [Pipedrive: visibility groups](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/visibility-groups)). Do not hand renewals to a second owner because they are “account work”; that recreates the hunter and farmer split by stealth, and you get the double-proposal problem from [territory planning for a small team](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-territory-planning-small-team/). One owner per organization, and that owner holds its renewals too.

The two counters are two saved filters. In the deals list, open the filter drop-down, add a new filter and set the conditions: Deal type is New business and deal created is this week for the first; Deal type is Renewal or Expansion for the second, using the ANY group so both values qualify ( [Pipedrive: advanced filtering](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/filtering)). Name each filter and set its visibility to Shared, so the Monday meeting looks at the same list on every screen. For activity, Pipedrive stores each activity’s type and the time it was marked done ( [Pipedrive: activities](https://support.pipedrive.com/en/article/activities)), so the week’s done activities on deals of type New business is Noor’s Friday count, and it takes a minute once the field exists.

If you also tag where new deals come from, the [inbound vs outbound comparison](https://salesbond.app/blog/inbound-vs-outbound-sales-small-team/) runs off the same list. Who keeps the Deal type field filled is the ordinary question of [CRM data ownership on a small team](https://salesbond.app/blog/crm-data-ownership-small-sales-team/): the deal owner fills it, whoever runs the Monday meeting checks it. And if your reps work prospects in the Leads inbox before anything becomes a deal, the count starts there; [leads vs deals in Pipedrive](https://salesbond.app/blog/pipedrive-leads-vs-deals/) covers where that line should sit.

## Signs it is time to split the roles

Headcount is the wrong trigger. Ten reps who all hunt and farm inside a protected split can outsell a team that split at six. Split when the work tells you to, not the org chart.

- The weekly split keeps breaking for the same reason. When customer exceptions eat the hunting mornings every week for a quarter, the base has grown past what part-time farmers can hold, and it needs a whole person.
- Renewal and expansion value is a large share of the number and nobody owns its calendar. Renewals have dates; when they start getting missed because everyone was hunting, that is a farming role asking to exist.
- One rep has quietly become the hunter. If the new-deal counter has been one person’s number for three months, make it official, give that rep the hunting target and stop pretending the others prospect.
- You are hiring anyway. When the [capacity plan](https://salesbond.app/blog/sales-capacity-planning-small-team/) says the next hire is due, hiring into a defined role is cheaper than hiring another hybrid and splitting later.

Until one of those shows up, keep the hybrid, keep the two counters, and keep the Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Noor’s team is still four people. The week after that Friday, with the field in place and the mornings blocked, the count was no longer eleven. Nothing about the people had changed.

When the roles do split and accounts move after the win, agree on [what a rep writes down at handoff](https://salesbond.app/blog/closed-won-handoff-pipedrive/), so the new owner does not start the relationship from a blank page.