Why Your Prospecting Needs Farmers & Hunter-Gatherers

Whether you're running a sales team or a group of fundraisers, your prospecting activities deserve to be split into different roles based on how you intend to engage.

A brief history lesson:

• Farming started 10,000 years ago

• Hunting-gathering has been around for millions of years

• We've shifted greatly to farming because it's a more stable food source

Back to business.

How do these concepts translate?

• Farming is the cultivation of your existing customers (domesticated cows), including those that have lapsed or churned (dormant crops), in the attempt to have them return or grow

• Hunting-gathering is the pursuit of new customers in the wild, which may yield a big customer (an elk), a bunch of small customers (a handful of berries), or a long-term recurring customer (a mountain goat to domesticate)

Note that if you're a nonprofit, swap "donor" for "customer" above, and probably avoid calling your donors "domesticated cows".

Just like our modern day communities depend on both farming and hunter-gathering, so does your pipeline.

Here's how to align these roles:

• Farmers are focused on getting as much value from your existing set of crops and animals, along with treating this activity with a medium- to long-term focus

• Hunter-gatherers are aligned to goals that you have in the short- to medium-term to ensure that you're growing sustainably and filling gaps that you have

Also, it's important to appreciate the skills, tools, and personas of farmers and hunter-gatherers are different, even though they're aligned to the same overall goal to feed your organization.

So, why are you expecting one person to play both roles and use the same set of tools?

We'll revisit that question in a future newsletter.

TLDR: Appreciate that prospecting needs both farmers and hunter-gatherers. Don't expect those to be the same person. Give them the right tools.