The performance gap between your top sellers and everyone else has widened to more than 10 times. A staggering 80% of new logo revenue now comes from just 14% of the sales team, a clear sign that something is structurally broken. For decades, sales compensation has relied on a simple binary: reward the “Hunters” who land new logos and the “Farmers” who maintain them. But what if your most valuable players, the ones driving strategic and long-term growth, fit neither category?
The Widening Sales Performance Gap
- Top sellers now outperform the rest of the team by more than 10x.
- Just 14% of sellers are responsible for 80% of new logo revenue.
Source: Data compiled from industry reports by Gartner and others.
In a recent conversation with Amy Osmond Cook, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Fullcast, compensation expert Dan Walter challenged this traditional setup. As a Pay and Total Rewards Futurist, principal consultant at Grahall Partners, LLC, and founder of Equity Compensation Experts, Walter argues that this outdated model is actively failing modern sales organizations.
Walter’s framework introduces a third, crucial sales archetype: the “Rancher.” These consultative relationship builders are the key to unlocking long-term, strategic growth, but only if you build a compensation plan that actually supports them.
The Old Model vs. Modern Reality
The traditional hunter-farmer model creates a short-term focus that causes sales teams to neglect larger, more strategic deals.
For decades, sales compensation has followed a simple script: reward hunters for closing new business and farmers for maintaining existing accounts. This framework worked in simpler times, but it fails in modern B2B sales, where strategic deals require years of cultivation and cross-functional coordination.
The Short-Term Trap of Rewarding Only Hunters
When compensation plans focus exclusively on annual or quarterly revenue targets, they create a critical flaw. Sales representatives become incentivized to chase quick wins while ignoring larger, more complex opportunities that could transform the business.
Walter explains the problem clearly: “If you’re just being paid on revenue this year, you’re gonna focus on the short term pieces.” This myopic focus means that strategic deals requiring two or three years to close get deprioritized or abandoned entirely. The hunter model, while effective at generating immediate revenue, systematically forfeits the most valuable opportunities.
Consider a rep working a deal with a Fortune 500 company. The potential contract could be worth millions, but it requires navigating multiple stakeholders, lengthy procurement processes, and extensive relationship building. Under a traditional hunter compensation structure, that rep faces constant pressure to abandon this strategic pursuit in favor of smaller deals that close within the quarter.
When “Farming” Becomes Passive Account Management
The farmer model isn’t much better. Designed to reward retention and account maintenance, it often fails to incentivize strategic expansion within key accounts. When compensation primarily rewards keeping customers happy rather than growing relationships, it can lead to complacency.
Farmers become reactive rather than proactive. They respond to customer requests but rarely identify new opportunities or anticipate future needs. This passive approach misses critical chances to deepen partnerships and secure more revenue over time. The result is a stable but stagnant account base that competitors can eventually penetrate.
The Rise of the Consultative “Rancher”
Walter’s insight came from an unexpected source: time spent on a cattle ranch in Nebraska. Observing his father-in-law’s work, he realized that ranching required a fundamentally different approach than either hunting or farming.
“My father-in-law was neither a hunter nor a farmer, and he was both. He was a rancher,” Walter explains. “Ranchers have to grow their own food. They grow their own feed. They’re out planting alfalfa, they’re growing calves. They figure out how to cull the herd. They’re doing both jobs.”
This hybrid role represents what modern B2B organizations desperately need but often fail to recognize or reward. Ranchers are consultative problem-solvers who build trust, coordinate internal resources, and commit to long-term goals. They succeed through strategic thinking rather than transactional selling.
The uncomfortable truth is that many of your top performers are likely already ranchers. They are succeeding in spite of your current comp plan, not because of it. Effective sales compensation design requires recognizing this reality and building structures that support these strategic sellers. Understanding this dynamic is essential to sales performance management that drives sustainable growth.
The “Rancher” Archetype Your Untapped Engine for Strategic Growth
Ranchers are strategic coordinators who build long-term value, and your team needs a specific ratio of hunters, farmers, and ranchers to thrive.
Understanding what makes ranchers different is essential for designing compensation plans that attract and retain these valuable players. They are strategic coordinators, patient relationship builders, and internal champions who connect product, marketing, and sales. They think beyond the current quarter and beyond existing products.
What Defines a Rancher? More Than Just a Hybrid Role
Walter describes them as “both building, managing, and planning for the future… like making wild, big investments on prize bulls.” This long-term orientation distinguishes them from hunters focused on immediate wins and farmers focused on maintenance.
Ranchers don’t just sell what’s available today; they help create what the customer will need next. They understand client businesses deeply enough to anticipate future requirements and work with internal teams to develop solutions before customers even ask. This consultative approach builds trust that translates into lasting partnerships and expanded revenue over time.
Structuring Your Team for Success
Walter provides specific guidance on team composition: “I would say depending on the business, but generally I would say 10% of those people should be pure hunters, and 15 to 20% of them should be ranchers.”
This structure creates a balanced ecosystem. Hunters generate immediate revenue that funds operations and growth initiatives. Ranchers cultivate strategic accounts and long-term opportunities. The remaining roles are filled by farmers who maintain the existing customer base and support roles, or what Walter calls “ranch hands,” who ensure everyone has the resources they need to succeed.
This balanced approach requires sophisticated operational infrastructure. Understanding the components of a RevOps team helps organizations build the backbone necessary to support all three selling motions effectively.
The Rancher as a Conductor, Not Just a Closer
The most overlooked aspect of the rancher role is their function as organizational coordinators. Walter describes them as “a coach on the field,” orchestrating resources across departments to serve strategic accounts.
“Sometimes that rancher is closing a little bit of business, maintaining a little bit of business, trying to sort of land and expand while they’re also saying, look, if I build this thing out, or if I help our product team build this new product out, two years from now, I can sell this thing that doesn’t exist,” Walter explains.
Ranchers bridge the gap between marketing campaigns and sales execution. They ensure that go-to-market efforts focus on the most valuable opportunities. Traditional compensation structures fail to measure or reward this coordination, yet it may be the most valuable contribution these sellers make.
How to Design a Compensation Plan That Cultivates Top-Performing Ranchers
To cultivate ranchers, you must offer multi-year incentives, grant them autonomy, and provide them with technology that helps them sell, not just report.
Identifying your ranchers is a crucial first step. The next is to build a system that actively cultivates them instead of holding them back.
Look Beyond the Annual Quota With Multi-Year Incentives
Traditional sales compensation operates on annual or quarterly cycles. This timing works for transactional sales but fails strategic sellers working multi-year opportunities.
Walter emphasizes that effective sales compensation design must incorporate longer time horizons: “You might be looking at two and three years, especially a big ticket sales. It might take three years to close that big logo that you’re questing for. If you’re not getting paid for that, there’s no reason for you to go out and close it.”
Organizations should consider multi-year management by objectives, bonuses for landing strategic logos regardless of close timing, or equity-like rewards tied to long-term account success. These structures directly reward the patience and strategic effort that define the rancher approach.
Grant Radical Autonomy (and Hold Them Accountable)
Ranchers need freedom to pursue opportunities as they see fit. Rigid processes and excessive oversight undermine their effectiveness.
Walter references his father-in-law’s philosophy: “Just let me do my job.” This autonomy must come with accountability for outcomes, but the focus should be on results rather than activity metrics.
The compensation plan should create space for ranchers to succeed or fail on their own terms. Micromanagement drives these strategic sellers away. Organizations that trust their ranchers and reward outcomes rather than compliance will attract and retain top talent.
Arm Your Reps With Tools for Selling, Not Just Reporting
Walter makes a critical distinction about sales technology: “We don’t often give our salespeople the tools they need to succeed. We give them the tools we need to make us successful as non-sales people.”
Too often, sales tools prioritize management reporting over seller effectiveness. Walter challenges this approach directly: “It’s often, ‘Well, I need this to work so I can report to the CFO. I need this to work so I can create this thing so I can prove that I’m valuable.’ And it’s like, no, what you need is your salespeople to sell the things that make your organization more successful.”
Ranchers working complex, long-cycle sales need enablement that supports their strategic approach. Tools should reduce friction, not create it. Effective revOps operations automates processes like routing and territory management, freeing ranchers to focus on relationship building and strategic selling rather than administrative tasks.
Final Thoughts
Stop asking if your reps are hunters or farmers. The real question is whether you’re failing to support the ranchers who are already driving your most strategic growth. By failing to recognize and reward them, companies inadvertently discourage the very behaviors that drive sustainable, long-term growth. Strategic deals that could transform your business languish because your compensation structure tells reps to focus elsewhere.
Effective sales compensation design isn’t about choosing between hunters and farmers. It requires building a balanced ecosystem that supports all critical sales motions. This means structuring teams with the right ratio of hunters, ranchers, and farmers while designing incentive plans that reward multi-year strategic efforts alongside quarterly wins.
Recognizing, empowering, and properly compensating your ranchers is the first step toward building a resilient, high-growth sales engine. These consultative sellers already exist within your teams. The question is whether your compensation plan helps them thrive or forces them to work against their natural strengths.
Does your plan-to-pay process reward your most strategic sellers? Companies are consolidating their entire GTM planning process to ensure their compensation strategy aligns perfectly with their growth objectives, just like in the case study of how Qualtrics optimized its entire GTM planning process with Fullcast. It might be time to re-evaluate yours.
