Developing a Mutual Action Plan (MAP)
Following on from the last blog about qualification and sales methodologies. One thing that I can’t leave out from the “5 things I learnt from the Greatest Sales Company in History” is Developing a Mutual Plan.
When dealing in B2B Sales you need to arrive to the plate with a plan. I always felt that the best sales people I witnessed were the ones that could call a deal months in advance. Then have the deal close on the very day that they called it. Every single one of those individuals were experts in the art of developing a mutual plan.
At the highest level a MAP is a set of actions that outline the purchasing path that you can agree with your customer on. Regardless of the size of your offering or service there are typically a bunch of gates that you need to get through in order to get your sale.
The MAP is known by a lot of different names, including mutual success plan, mutually agreed action plan, go-live plan, joint execution plan, and close plan. Be careful using the term Close Plan or Mutual Close plan with your customers. They may believe you are simply trying to close a deal rather than it being a plan to help achieve their business goals. Better to use Mutual Success plan or Mutual Evaluation plan. It is a critical customer-facing document created, agreed and shared with your customer/prospect during the sales cycle. But regardless of what you call it, it always answers two important questions:
- Who needs to do what?
- When do they need to do it to make this deal happen?
This isn’t something that’s driven solely by the customer or the sales team. In fact, the reason it works so well is that it’s a collaborative effort.
The value of a MAP is that you get to define it and present it to the customer. If you haven’t got one right now there’s no better time to develop one.
What a MAP does for your business is as follows
It helps further qualify a customers intent to purchase. One of the main challenges that typically arises with customers in particular when you are in a competitive situation. Is that they don’t want to talk to you as a vendor or someone else. They don’t want to be sold to. This situation arises all to often and after a lot of hard effort the customer may simply turn around and say that they’ve made a decision.
What a MAP can do is help you overcome this situation by outlining an evaluation criteria as well as a decision making process. The main reasons that customers get defensive about being sold to is that they typically aren’t the experts on your product. Also, they probably haven’t purchased it before.
So a MAP can go along way early in the sales process to developing a trusted advisor status with your customer.
If the customer is pushing back on this approach and still wants to evaluate internally. Then a good middle ground maybe to ask whether you could revisit a MAP if you are selected as the vendor of choice. In this way you still get to work through the main objections that typically arise during any sales deal.
So what does a MAP look like? MAP’s do not have to be complex. They should be simple, and created/maintained in a documented format. They can often take the form of suggested or requested formats from a customer/prospect.
MAPs can be documents or visual diagrams. In the case of a visual plan, you may start with a whiteboard to capture the timeline. This may involve discussing required time for negotiations, contract signatures, project execution, testing, go-live and so on.
Best Practices To Create A Close Plan
| Best Practice #1: | Share with your champion early in the sales cycle (Stage 3) to get their buy-in and participation. Gain agreement on the process and review cadence. Coach your champion to share it with key decision makers and influencers. |
| Best Practice #2: | Identify the power sponsors (the customer/prospect contacts who have the power to approve or veto a major contract deal. |
| Best Practice #3: | Include in the building the business case milestones. |
| Best Practice #4: | Identify the customer/prospect procurement process along with resources required. |
| Best Practice #5: | Identify the approval process. Know who needs to approve the budget. Know who needs to give approval from the business and IT. Ensure budget is approved. |
| Best Practice #6: | If board approval is required, find out when the next board meeting is. |
| Best Practice #7: | Has a reference meeting been identified and scheduled? |
| Best Practice #8: | Be very granular about sales process and buying process milestones. |
| Best Practice # 9 | Upload your plan to the opportunity so your sales team and executives have visibility. |
| Best Practice #10 | Use a template or create your own. |
Example Company ABC and Prospective Customer: Mutual Action Plan
Today’s Date
To contribute to even more successful program management, Company ABC and Your Business agree that the following approach, albeit non-binding, is a reasonable approach to managing the project. Both parties will do their best to make appropriate resources, in terms of people and time, available to meet these milestone objectives. By jointly moving forward through this process, we will be able to:
• Set appropriate expectations,
• Efficiently utilize people’s time,
• Address requirements, fit and value, and
• Maximize speed to market while ensuring highest quality.
We believe this plan will ensure the highest probability of our mutual success and form the foundation for a successful partnership.
| Milestone | Owners | Dates |
| Initial Project Scoping and Detailed Discovery | ||
| Build Demonstration for CFO to share with Executive Committees | ||
| Project Kick-Off: Detailed Discovery Phases | ||
| Finalise Business Case, ROI and Executive Presentation | ||
| Deliver Enterprise Project Plan, Scope, Estimate | ||
| Sign Paperwork for Roll Out |
So as I mentioned earlier in this blog. If you don’t have a MAP or haven’t thought through one. There is no better time now to start off, it takes practice and overtime you’ll get better. Also, if you’re currently using Salesforce as your CRM there are a lot of Appexchange products that will allow you to download and customise this process directly into your CRM.
If you’re just starting out of this, get in to the habit of finishing one meeting with always another one scheduled. Even this little piece of advice can start the wheel turning in your own MAPs.
Moderno Solutions are experts at MAP’s and Salesforce if you’d like to have a discussion about how we can help you. Get in touch!