Sales leaders in IT staffing are facing a familiar challenge in a very different selling environment: How do you create enough activity to drive growth without turning sales management into a numbers game?

That question was at the center of a recent TechServe Sales Roundtable discussion facilitated by Brad Rosen, Founder of StrivePath Partners. The conversation revealed that while firms continue to track calls, meetings, and other traditional sales activities, many are rethinking how those metrics are used.

The emerging lesson: the goal isn’t simply more activity. It’s creating a clearer connection between activity, conversion and results.

Move Beyond Arbitrary KPIs

Meeting targets remain common, with some firms aiming for roughly 10 meetings per salesperson per week. But participants acknowledged that consistently achieving that volume has become more difficult, particularly as hybrid work has changed how buyers interact with salespeople.

More importantly, meeting volume alone doesn’t tell you much.

A salesperson can hit a meeting target and still fail to generate meaningful pipeline. Conversely, an experienced salesperson may need fewer meetings to produce the same—or better—results.

That is why several sales leaders are becoming more sophisticated about conversion tracking. Rather than simply asking, How many calls did you make?, they are looking at the full progression:

Outreach → Meetings → Requirements → Opportunities → Placements → Gross Margin

Some firms are tracking conversion rates by individual salesperson and account, while others are evaluating sales performance based on the gross margin generated relative to the investment in the salesperson.

The objective is to understand the activity required to produce a desired business outcome—and then use that information to establish realistic expectations.

Explain the “Why” Behind the Number

One of the strongest themes from the discussion was the importance of helping salespeople understand why a KPI exists.

Rosen emphasized that activity expectations become much more meaningful when a salesperson can see how the numbers connect to their own success.

Instead of telling someone they need a certain number of meetings every week, managers can work backward:

If your goal is a certain level of commission or gross margin, how many placements will that require? Based on your historical conversion rate, how many requirements do you need? And how many quality meetings typically generate those requirements?

Suddenly, the KPI isn’t an arbitrary management mandate. It becomes a roadmap.

That distinction matters for retention as well. Reps who spend week after week chasing activity goals without understanding how those activities translate into opportunity can quickly become frustrated or burned out.

Not All Meetings Are Created Equal

Sales leaders are also putting more emphasis on the quality of meetings, not simply whether they happened.

A meaningful client conversation should reveal something useful. What is happening inside the organization? Where is transformation occurring? Which competitors are present? What hiring challenges are emerging? Where could the staffing firm bring additional value?

That creates a different standard for sales activity.

The question shifts from:

Did you get the meeting?

to:

Did the meeting move the relationship forward?

This is especially important in a market where buyers have no shortage of staffing firms seeking their attention. Filling a calendar with introductory calls may satisfy an activity metric, but it doesn’t necessarily create pipeline.

Account Planning Should Be Collaborative

Another consistent theme was the value of detailed account planning.

Rather than handing salespeople a list of accounts and expecting them to “go sell,” several leaders described collaborative planning processes in which managers and reps build the strategy together.

That can mean identifying specific contacts within an organization, understanding the value proposition for each audience, reviewing historical account activity, identifying untapped business units and establishing clear next steps.

The process does more than improve the account plan. It gives the salesperson ownership of it.

When reps participate in developing the strategy, they are more likely to understand why they are pursuing particular contacts and what they are trying to accomplish.

For existing clients, account planning can also uncover a question staffing firms sometimes overlook:

How much of the available business are we actually capturing?

Revenue growth is important, but so are vendor position, market share within the account, relationships across departments and opportunities to move into a stronger position with the client.

Hunting and Farming Require Different Playbooks

The discussion also highlighted an ongoing question for staffing firms: Should salespeople be responsible for both landing new logos and expanding existing accounts?

There was no universal answer.

Some firms deliberately separate the roles. Others expect salespeople to do both, while allowing individuals to lean toward the work that best fits their strengths.

What was clear is that new-logo hunting and account expansion are fundamentally different sales motions.

Existing account growth tends to rely heavily on relationships, referrals, regular cadence conversations and identifying additional opportunities within the organization.

New-logo selling requires more prospecting, differentiation, creativity and persistence to break through an increasingly crowded marketplace.

Those differences should influence everything from KPIs to account planning to compensation.

Some organizations, for example, provide stronger incentives for opening a new account, with those incentives declining as the account matures and ongoing account management takes over. The structure rewards the difficult work of landing new business while still supporting long-term account growth.

Today’s Sales Environment Requires More Touchpoints

There was broad agreement on another reality: there is no magic tactic for generating meetings.

Calls still matter. So do email, LinkedIn, referrals, networking, lunches, coffee meetings and thoughtful follow-up campaigns.

The answer is increasingly multi-channel persistence.

Post-pandemic selling has made this more complicated. Virtual meetings make initial conversations easier in some respects, but they can also eliminate the informal interactions that historically helped relationships develop.

As a result, getting the second meeting may be as important as getting the first.

Strong sales organizations are coaching reps to think beyond the initial appointment and build deliberate follow-up strategies that keep the conversation moving.

AI Can Help—But It Doesn’t Replace Sales Discipline

AI is beginning to play a larger role in this process as firms use technology to analyze conversion data, identify prospects and increase sales capacity.

The opportunity isn’t simply to use AI to generate more activity.

Its greater value may be helping leaders understand which activities actually produce results.

Better data can help managers identify differences between reps, accounts and sales motions. It can also create more individualized expectations rather than forcing every salesperson into the same activity model.

As AI gives salespeople greater capacity, however, leaders should resist the temptation to simply increase every KPI. More capacity only creates value if it results in more productive activity.

Build a Sales System Around Outcomes

Perhaps the most important takeaway from the discussion was that there is no single formula for sales performance.

An experienced account manager with deep relationships shouldn’t necessarily be managed exactly like a junior salesperson building a book from scratch. A new-logo hunter shouldn’t necessarily have the same metrics as someone responsible for expanding a major client.

The better approach is to understand what success looks like for each role and work backward.

Track conversion rates. Understand account potential. Establish meaningful activity expectations. Build account plans collaboratively. Measure the quality of conversations as well as their quantity.

And most importantly, make sure salespeople understand how the work they are being asked to do connects to the results they want to achieve.

Because the most effective KPI isn’t simply a number a salesperson is expected to hit.

It’s a number they understand—and believe will get them where they want to go.

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