WIM's 2.0 (Weekly Individual Meetings) in Chicago

In this week's Sales Management blog, I want to touch again on WIM’s (Weekly Individual Meetings).

I’ll call it WIM’s 2.0.

I came up with the concept of the WIM, and the idea of having a weekly individual meeting with each salesperson, 15 years ago. A meeting that was set in time and scheduled. It was meant to be very interactive with that individual salesperson, and not a team meeting. I really started working on that 15 years ago, when it was originally designed as an accountability exercise. Basically, ‘what's the cookbook?’ What behavior did they do during the week that you’re tracking? Let's talk about what happened or didn't happen when it came to their cookbook and hitting those goals.

Over time, though, it kind of evolved into what can actually happen in the WIMs.

There are a few versions of the WIM.
One could be strictly accountability, but I also encourage that there be a certain kind of specific WIMs.
It might even be your regular cadence to cover accountability for the first five or 10 minutes. Get through that, and then get into some pipeline review or debriefing a call or doing some pre-call strategy. 
I don't want to get too much into the meeting, and I definitely want to start with accountability, but think about your WIMS going into next year. How can you evolve them? What are the improvements that you’ll need to make? Are you doing enough accountability? Because here's the flip side I see. Over time, people's WIMs become ‘no accountability’ and it's basically "Let's look at the pipeline."

I don't want you to do that because as a manager, one of your key values to create in your salespeople is accountability. Being able to see what the behavior is that they're doing on an ongoing basis. The behavior is what you track, not the results, as your primary leading indicator. I don't want you to lose sight of accountability, but going into next year, what might you be able to enhance? What might you be able to add around pipeline or some kind of debriefing or just overall conversations around accounts?