The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople: Fulfillment to Farming

After prospecting, cultivating, proposing and closing, high achieving salespeople pay close attention to fulfillment. Did the customer receive what they expected, and is the product or service you sold them delivering value?

This is the 5th in a 5 part series, with this one being about the importance of the salesperson staying involved and never completely passing an account off after the sale is made.

Over the course of my career, people suggested I was either a hunter or a farmer. Sometimes, I might have been called a whale hunter, or a rainmaker. The truth is, I was all of these.

I loved hunting (for sales), but I knew the best places to hunt were in places I was already familiar with the terrain, and with customers and people I already knew and understood. And yes, I had some "whale" sales, and some "rainmaker" deals, but all of them started as small deals that I grew.

Some might say I was actually farming, but I'd say it was closer to hunting (or fishing) in favorite spots, taking care of those favorite spots, and always looking for potential new favorite spots. A satisfied customer is a highly qualified prospect for future sales.

Many years ago, I bought a Monte Carlo from an auto dealer in my hometown (London, ON). I went there to buy a Thunderbird that I saw in an advertisement, but working as a well oiled tandem, the salesperson and sales manager managed to sell me a car I didn’t go there to buy. Some might say they were great salesmen. I’ll say they were “memorable”, but not in a good way – in fact, 40 years later I can still recall their names. I never bought another thing from them, or referred anyone to them, and would advise anyone that asked me for an opinion to go to someone else to buy a car.

On the other end of the car sales experience spectrum, a few years later I purchased a vehicle from a different dealer. The sales process went OK, but the vehicle had some issues that both the dealer and the manufacturer weren’t all that motivated to resolve. The salesperson that sold me the vehicle was my best advocate, and at one point, he gave me the keys to his demo to take home and keep using until he was certain the problems with my car were fully resolved. The next 5 or 6 cars I purchased were purchased from him, and anytime I was asked for advice from friends about purchasing a car, he was always who I directed people to.

There are many companies that have set up sales systems where prospecting (or hopper filling) is done by one group (perhaps ‘marketing’), cultivation, presentation and closing by others (sales reps), and fulfilment, onboarding and ongoing relationship management by yet others (account managers). In the B2B space, especially if you’re selling to manufacturing customers, this model doesn’t work. Or at least it hasn’t worked for me.

The prospecting (or hopper filling) responsibility and activity should be shared with the marketing department. Successful salespeople like to stay involved with that, because they want high quality prospects and not noise. They understand that the highest quality prospects – the ones that are easiest to close and most willing to recognize value - are usually people that already know and trust them, and that trust was earned on past successful sales.

Fulfillment is a shared responsibility with engineering, customer care, and in-house support, but high achieving salespeople also understand that sales is not a “hunt-kill-eat” cycle, nor is it a pure farming or account management process. It’s both. You can greatly improve your hunting chances by knowing how to farm. Hunting is easy when you don’t have to go too far into new or unknown woods every time.

With the help of a couple of young developers, I am developing a tool that I call “bullseyesales”. It’s a simple tool that helps salespeople “hit the bullseye more often”, taking fewer shots, expending less energy, taking less time, and spending less money on marketing. It’s designed to narrow the focus on to the opportunities that have the highest chance of success - success for the customer and success for the company. It is part of a process that I have led several high achievers through, and I know it works. (

Success is when the customer willingly pays a fair price for the value your product or service delivers and is willing to do so again. To me, that’s sales success. The process doesn’t start with prospecting at one end and end with fulfilment at the other: it’s circular. The best new opportunities usually come from the best past successes, where value is identified, defined, delivered, experienced and appreciated. Every high performing salesperson I know understands this innately, and that’s why they want to be part of the whole process, from prospecting all the way through to fulfillment.

The more dialed in the prospecting activity is, the less time and energy is spent on filtering through noise, which frees up more time to spend cultivating, proposing and closing. The better the customers’ experience with the purchased product or service is (fulfillment), the more dialed in the prospecting activity can be. It is all connected. Breaking it up, or disconnecting the 5 critical activities, forces the salesperson to have to try to make tougher sales, with a lower chance of success, and requires a far higher expenditure of time, energy and money.   

Links to the first 4 blogs in the 5 Activities series:

The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople

The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople: Effective Prospecting

The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople: Cultivating to Close

The 5 Activities of Successful Salespeople: Propose to Close

For additional study and reference:

Entrepreneurial Epiphanies: "the Company with the Best Customers, Wins."

Entrepreneurial Epiphanies: "Relationship Trumps Technology"

If you are interested in knowing more about the bullseyesales tool, check out www.bullseyesales.ca For a conversation and a deeper look into the 5 Activities process, contact Paul@tpi-3.ca