Startups are taught from day one to hire hunters, not farmers.

It’s one of the first things a founder hears when they enter the world of venture-backed scale: You need a sales leader who can hunt. Farmers (those who are great at nurturing and expanding existing relationships) can come later, once there’s something to farm. But in the early days, you need new logos. New customers. Momentum.

What Makes a Hunter?

Let’s first acknowledge that on the surface, a “hunter” looks like a dream hire. They’ve got the trophies:

  • Consistently exceed quota
  • Add net-new customers
  • Expand footprint within accounts
  • Land enterprise logos
  • Make the President’s Club (repeatedly)

These are the hallmarks of a high-performing seller. But those metrics alone don’t reveal how those outcomes were achieved, or under what conditions. And that’s where the trouble starts.

But here’s the problem almost no one talks about: there are two species of hunters, and most founders don’t know which one they’re hiring.

There are hunters who can hunt in the wild.

And there are hunters who can only hunt in the zoo.

Hunting in the Zoo vs. Hunting in the Wild

Imagine you’re at Salesforce, AWS, Cisco, Okta, Samsara, or Snowflake. You’re handed a territory with brand recognition, inbound interest, mature playbooks, and budgeted buyers who already believe in your category. You walk into meetings where prospects are pre-educated and predisposed to buy. The marketing team is generating demand. The analyst community has validated your positioning. The competitive landscape is well understood, and your product is enterprise-ready.

That’s the zoo.

It’s not an insult. It’s a testament to how well those companies have built their category. But selling in the zoo is about harvesting the fruit of someone else’s category creation. You’re operating in a known map, with marked trails and labeled animal enclosures.

Now contrast that with a startup. 

The category might not exist yet. Budgets aren’t earmarked. Prospects are skeptical or simply unaware. The product might not yet meet enterprise requirements. And there’s no brand halo to give you credibility—you’re building that trust from scratch.

That’s the wild.

The Zoo Hunter in the Wild

So here’s what happens: you hire a “hunter” from a name-brand company. Their resume is flawless. Their references are excellent. But a few months in, you wonder why they aren’t closing any deals.

It’s not that your hire isn’t talented. It’s that they don’t know how to hunt in the wild.

They’ve never had to:

  • Prospect without a warm brand to open doors
  • Create urgency in a category with no budget line item
  • Navigate FUD seeded by powerful incumbents
  • Win against inertia and “wait and see” postures
  • Sell a product that’s still evolving with each customer

In other words, they’ve never had to create demand. They’ve only ever captured it.

What Wild Hunters Look Like

Hunters in the wild are different. They’re relentless, but methodical. They don’t rely on scripts—they write them. They thrive on ambiguity and can spot opportunity in a fog. They qualify fast, lose fast, and win big when the match is right. 

Often, these people have:

  • Been early at a startup before Series B
  • Worked in evangelism-heavy categories (e.g., cybersecurity pre-breach acceptance, AI before it went mainstream)
  • Built playbooks from scratch
  • Lived through product gaps and still won

Founders, Ask the Right Interview Questions

If you’re a founder, here’s what you need to do before hiring your next sales leader.

Don’t just ask about quota attainment. Ask:

  1. What was the state of the company when you joined? Was it pre-product/market fit? Was the product still incomplete for some segments?
  2. Did you sell into a category that had to be created or evangelized? Or was the company already a leader by the time you started?
  3. How did you prioritize where to spend your time? What frameworks did you use to identify early adopters versus tire-kickers?
  4. What was the competitive landscape like? Have you sold in high-stakes scenarios without clear category leaders?
  5. How did you handle repeated objections, long sales cycles, or high uncertainty? Have you actually had to grind?

Look for stories of building, not just closing. Look for scrappy, not just polished.

Conclusion

At Next47, we believe in backing extraordinary founders building category-defining companies. But we also know that the best product doesn’t sell itself. It takes a sales motion as inventive as the product itself, especially in the wild.

Hiring a zoo-trained seller into a wild market is like asking a safari guide to navigate the Amazon. They might have the right instincts, but they lack the training, tools, and mindset. And your startup can’t afford a mismatch.

So next time you’re hiring your “hunter,” go deeper. Dig into context. Because the difference between a good hire and a great one isn’t their stats—it’s how they earned them.