Born to Hunt, or Built to Hunt?

Sep 4, 2026

Born to Hunt, or Built to Hunt?
September Sales Newsletter
Every sales floor has one: the rep who doesn’t wait for leads to land in the queue. They’re the
first to pick up the phone after a “no,” the one who turns a stalled LinkedIn message into a
discovery call, the one who treats an empty pipeline like a personal insult. We call them Hunters.
And every sales leader, at some point, asks the same question: can you develop one, or do you
just have to find one?
The honest answer is both — but not in equal measure, and not in the way most people assume.
What “Hunter” actually means
Before we settle nature versus nurture, it’s worth being precise about what we’re training for.
Hunting isn’t a personality — it’s a behavior pattern: initiating contact with no inbound signal,
tolerating a high ratio of rejection to reward, and staying in motion without being told to.
Farmers and closers do brilliant work, but they’re optimizing a different variable — depth with
an existing relationship rather than volume against the unknown. A Hunter’s job is to
manufacture opportunity where none currently exists.
The part you can’t fully install
Some raw material does seem to walk in the door or not. Comfort with rejection is the big one —
the ability to hear “not interested” fifty times in a week and still dial the fifty-first number with a
level voice. So is a certain restlessness: a low tolerance for idle time, a need to see the scoreboard
move. You can coach technique around these traits, but you’re mostly coaching around a wiring
that’s already there. Someone who is deeply conflict-averse or who needs consistent external
validation will burn out fast in a pure-hunting role, no matter how good the script is. That’s not a
character flaw — it just means their ceiling is somewhere else on the team, and forcing the fit
helps no one.
The part that is absolutely trainable
Here’s the good news, and it’s the bigger half of the equation: almost everything that separates a
mediocre hunter from a great one is skill, not temperament. Territory and account mapping.
Writing an opener that earns thirty seconds instead of a delete. Asking the qualifying question
that surfaces real pain instead of polite interest. Building a prospecting cadence disciplined
enough to survive a bad week. Reading a “not right now” correctly instead of walking away from
a real opportunity too early. None of that is innate — it’s repetition, feedback, and pattern
recognition, exactly like it is in any other trained skill. A rep with average natural grit but
excellent technique will consistently out-produce a “natural” who never sharpens their approach.
So which is it?
Think of it as a stack, not a switch. Temperament sets the floor for how much rejection someone
can absorb before it costs you the relationship or the rep. Skill determines how efficiently that
resilience converts into pipeline. You can’t train temperament into someone who fundamentally
doesn’t have it — but you can absolutely train a person with the right wiring into a far better
hunter than they currently are. Most reps are leaving production on the table not because they
lack grit, but because nobody ever taught them the mechanics.
This month’s action item
September is pipeline-building season — the numbers we put in the funnel now are the deals
we’re closing in Q4. So this month, do an honest self-audit: is your hunting gap a will problem or
a skill problem? If it’s skill, that’s the good news — it’s fixable, starting this week. Pick one
mechanic (your opener, your qualifying questions, your follow-up cadence) and drill it
deliberately for the next two weeks. If it’s will, talk to your manager about where your real
strengths sit on the team — there’s no prize for forcing a role that fights your nature.
Hunters aren’t born finished. They’re built — on a foundation that has to already be there.
See you at the October kickoff.

Written by: Hans Hansson
[email protected]
Hans Hansson is the President of Starboard Commercial Real Estate. Hans has been an active broker for over 35 years in the San Francisco Bay Area and specializes in office leasing and investments. If you have any questions or comments, please email [email protected] or call him at (415) 765-6897. You may also check out his website, https://www.hanshansson.com