Hunter-Farmer Spectrum
When you wake up in the morning and refresh yourself in the mirror, you're not likely to ask yourself whether you are a hunter, a farmer, or slightly to the left of middle on the spectrum. After a cup of coffee, your emotions kick in and guide you in making decisions and planning for your goals, just as you do on any other day. Whether you fit nicely into the hunter or farmer buckets, or have strong attributes as a lone wolf, relationship builder, or challenger salesperson, you will be a better, stronger, and more successful seller when you understand these traits.
Imagine you want to make a significant physical change, such as losing weight through a combination of diet and exercise. After conducting thorough research, you create new meal plans, commit to visiting the gym (or even upgrading to a club membership), and set milestones to encourage yourself. These include the obvious calorie counting, weight numbers, and perhaps body mass index (BMI), along with other relevant metrics. You may have a particular goal that can be measured by wearing new clothes that fit a smaller waistline, or even by adding new wardrobe items you previously denied yourself because you lost your way from youth to middle age. Imagine trimming your daily intake from 2500 calories to 2000 or fewer —about a 20% reduction. You can keep your coffee drinks, but you have to reduce the alcohol, especially at night, dramatically. You challenge yourself to achieve your goal by a specific calendar date, or even a popular holiday, and meet or exceed internal expectations. This method is old school, before the rising demand for Ozempic medicine took the weight-loss category by storm. In some ways, weight loss achieved through diet and exercise is comparable to sales training achieved through homework and seminars rather than leveraging artificial intelligence. In both cases, there are significant accelerators to achieve similar results.
The purpose of using the weight loss challenge is to reflect on how you can make internal changes to your position on the hunter-farmer spectrum. And as much as you think losing weight is a physical challenge, it is much more about the mental commitment to a goal. So, let's examine a few simple steps to shift your behavior and create a path to performing at any point on the spectrum.