On hunters and gardeners, and the case for splitting your admissions team in two.

It was Boxing Day, 2010. I was twenty-something, working the floor at Richer Sounds.

I wanted to work in education, but I’d dropped out of university and landed in retail sales. Three years I spent there, wasted time I thought, but by that December I was good — genuinely good — at sales. All the same, that would be the last Christmas I worked retail. One final big day, and I was done.

Boxing Day at a consumer electronics retailer is not a normal working day. The queue forms before the doors open. Customers have been saving up, and the television they’ve been eyeing for months is now finally at a price they can justify. The floor fills up in minutes and remains full until closing. The usual system of reps taking their turn to work browsing customers just collapses, with too many people to serve, too many distractions, too little time to work any charm.

And so we, a group of sales people, commissioned and competitive by nature, agreed to new rules for this one day only. On Boxing Day 2010, we agreed to work as a team.

Stacy, our manager, and Matt, her deputy, would work the queue. Welcoming people in from the cold, asking them what they were after, assuring them they were in the right place. The two Petes shuttled between the showroom and the stockroom, making sure the sets people wanted were waiting behind the till before they arrived. Roger, who’d been with the company longer than any of us, took customers’ hot drinks orders between his anecdotes, keeping the room warm, doing the quiet work of making strangers feel like guests as they waited.

Champ and I worked the tills. In a place like Richer Sounds, that’s where the real margin lives — the warranty, the mounting bracket, the cables. It’s where you need someone who can disarm the customer at the moment of commitment, and turn a single purchase into a complete solution. A specific kind of attention. A specific kind of energy.

By the end of the day, we’d had the best sales day in that branch’s history. The commission — I recall with crystal clarity — was shared equally. We had agreed beforehand that it was fair. A group of sales people, whose entire professional identity was built around individual performance and personal earnings, had voluntarily dismantled the individual model for one day because they could see, clearly, that it would make all of them better off.

I left Richer Sounds shortly after. The hustle had never been for me.

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Truthfully, escaping the hustle never quite worked out. By my early thirties I was the loveless regional sales manager, across the Middle East, for a Fortune 500 tech company. At that level you hit your number or you’re gone, and you can never stop learning because falling behind isn’t an option. I’d had stints teaching EFL — that, I loved — but I kept returning to stretches in commercial sales. It was a career I’d never wanted, but it gave me opportunities I needed. It paid me through my post-grad lit degree.

Then one day, a summer school I’d worked for advertised an opening in their admissions team. That’s education, but the commercial tip of it, I thought. Maybe that’s how I can have my cake.

And when they took me on, I found the purpose I’d been circling for years. Admissions sat at the intersection of everything I knew. My career finally made sense.

Except, something was off.

In every sales role I’d held, the division of labour was assumed. I was responsible for sales — for uncovering opportunity, for converting, for hitting the number. I didn’t handle tech support. I didn’t process orders or chase payments. Someone else did that, and everyone understood why.

Admissions teams don’t work that way. Capable, dedicated people take enquiries, make sales calls, process bookings, handle complaints, update the CRM, chase outstanding payments, and answer the same question for the fourteenth time that week with the same patience they managed on the first. From the inside it doesn’t look wrong, because the organisation does function. The model evolved from small teams doing whatever needed doing, and doing it well enough for long enough that it became the default.

But spend time in such teams and you notice something. People who are good at their jobs but can’t quite put their finger on why the work feels so relentless, why concentration is so hard to sustain, why certain tasks leave them frustrated or faintly drained. Often they assume it’s them — that they need to be more organised, more disciplined, more resilient. But the issue is not them. It’s the design.

Failure doesn’t announce itself, but its effects accumulate. Conversion rates slip. Returner rates drift. Hot leads freeze before anyone follows up. If everything is the responsibility of everyone, no one is responsible, not really.

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The hunter is energised by the new. They are on the phone or in video calls for hours at a stretch, chasing leads, following up opportunities, turning a single enquiry into a fuller relationship with a family. They enjoy speaking to customers. They are target-focused by disposition. Ask a hunter to spend their afternoon processing bookings or updating student records and watch their eyes glaze. They might do it because they are professional and they need the job, but you are wasting them, and they don’t hang around getting wasted for long.

The gardener is something different, equally valuable. They sustain. They find genuine satisfaction in the predictable, the procedural, the detail that hunters find suffocating — a single line corrected on an order, a discount applied to an invoice, a question about arrival times answered with care. The outbound call they might avoid making is not where their value lies. The gardener is the reason a student returns the following year. The gardener is the reason a returning parent recommends you to three more families. In an industry where returning students are one of the most reliable indicators of organisational health, they are indispensable.

But they’re not sales.

The sector has been asking its gardeners to hunt through gritted teeth. Are the numbers where they should be?

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A little while back I took on an admissions team that had been cut back following a difficult period. The team that remained would be stretched, and seemed smaller than necessary for the work required during peak delivery. It was said that seasonal staff would solve the issue. Even though it was obvious particular team members excelled in and could energise particular areas, there was a reluctance to name individual areas of specialism. Flexibility feels like resilience when you’re stretched. And yet: Our CRM was underused or unused. Follow-up was inconsistent if not non-existent. Colleagues who were gifted on the phone were pulled off calls to work through spreadsheets. Colleagues who cringed at telephone outreach were put through power hour.

I asked for recognition that the work itself had always required two fundamentally different orientations, and for permission to build the team around that reality. The hunters: two dedicated sales leads whose job was to hunt — hot leads, the charm offensive, enticing the interested to commit. The gardeners: a CRM and automation specialist, and a welfare and communications coordinator — different functions, same disposition. The gardeners tended what the hunters had won. Clean ownership. Defined handover points.

The output matched — and in key areas exceeded — what the previous, larger team had produced. Not because we worked harder, but because we finally worked in a way that matched who we actually were. Nobody was diminished by becoming a specialist and the owner of their own area.

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Here is the thing I have been sitting with since that Boxing Day in 2010.

We had the best sales day in the branch’s history. And then we went back to competing with each other, because that is what the incentive structure demanded. The commission-sharing, the division of labour, the quiet dignity of Roger fetching hot drinks because that is where his particular gift was most useful that day — it worked. And it was always going to be a one-day thing, because the culture it required could not survive the environment it was embedded in.

That is the part that stayed with me when I moved into education.

I had not gone into sales because I loved sales. I had gone into it by accident and found I was good at it. What I never loved was the individualism — the competition for commission, the swooping in on each other’s customers, the sense that your colleague’s success was, in some small way, your loss. It sat badly with me then, and it sits badly with me now.

Education is different. The people who work in it — even in the commercial functions, even in admissions — are there because they believe in what they are doing. They are not, in the main, there just for the money. They want to be part of something that matters. They want the student to have a good experience. They want the family to feel at home. These are not the motivations of a commission-hungry sales floor.

Which means education has something that Richer Sounds never could have had on a permanent basis: the human conditions for a genuinely collaborative specialist model. The hunters in an education admissions team are not hunting for personal glory. The gardeners are not gardening to protect their patch. They are working toward a shared outcome — an organisation that converts well, retains well, and builds the kind of reputation that brings families back year after year.

Perhaps the reluctance to build that model runs deeper than structure. Unlike marketing, which is a respectable profession, sales turns the nobility of providing education into something transactional, vulgar. Admissions matches our aspirations — to invite, and to admit. The naive conceit beneath it, that to be good is enough to survive, does the rest. That is a question of identity as much as design, and one worth sitting with.

The irony is this: the sector best placed to build truly cohesive, specialist, high-performing commercial teams is the one most reluctant to admit that it needs them.

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