Mutual action plans (MAPs): definition, challenges and benefits

B2B purchasing today is anything but a piece of cake: the number of parties involved is growing, their specialization is increasing, and the solutions available on the market are multiplying.

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As a result, 77% of B2B buyers say their last purchase was very complex or difficult.

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Faced with this growing complexity, salespeople need to make it as easy as possible for their prospects to buy, guiding them step by step towards closing.

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And there's a powerful tool for doing just that: the mutual action plan.

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It's a collaborative document shared by a sales team with its prospects to mutually co-construct the solution to their needs.

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The benefits of the mutual action plan are manifold:

• For your prospects: you build a smoother, more intuitive buying experience.
• For sales: you increase your sales performance and retain control of your deals.
• For sales managers and Heads of Sales: you create repeatable, high-performance sales processes.
• For VP Sales: increase the reliability of your forecasts.
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Imagine a CRM in which you know the closing date of every deal with certainty. Imagine each of your prospects telling you about their company's buying process and the decision-makers involved.

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You'd save precious hours spent today on opportunities that don't convert. You'd be able to devote yourself fully to the most promising deals, and take them through to closing. Your sales pipeline would (finally) become predictable, and your forecasts more reliable.

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But this dream is not out of reach for B2B sales teams, thanks to a tool whose potential is vastly underestimated: the mutual action plan. This document enables you to build a smooth, intuitive buying experience for your prospects.

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And the results speak for themselves: according to Harvard, making the buying experience easier for your prospects increases your chances of closing by 62% compared with your competitors.

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What is a mutual action plan?

Why use a mutual action plan in sales?

These are the questions we answer in this article.

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What is a Mutual Action Plan?

The best way to understand what a Mutual Action Plan is is to refer to its acronym: MAP 🗺️.

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It's a document shared by a sales team with its prospects that "maps" the purchasing process and determines how the participants plan to work together to co-construct the solution.

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The purpose of the mutual action plan is to enable the buyer to solve a pressing problem and the sales team to acquire a new customer.

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Also known as mutual success plan, mutually agreed action plan, mutual evaluation plan, go-live plan, joint execution plan or close plan, the mutual action plan answers 2 questions:

• Who is in charge of what during the purchasing process?
• What are the deadlines to which each party commits?
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A mutual action plan contains the key stages, the actions to be carried out, the people in charge of them and the deadlines for implementing your solution with your buyer. Each participant is empowered and involved in the progress of the deal.

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So far, so simple. But the key to the success of a mutual action plan lies elsewhere. It's a powerful tool because it materializes the collaboration between sales and prospects that otherwise exists only virtually. It "captures" everyone's contributions and brings everyone on board towards a mutually beneficial solution.

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Once in place, the mutual action plan makes the buying process more transparent. It allows you to coordinate with your prospects on deal priorities and timelines.

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In other words, it unifies your prospect's buying process with your own sales process. You can precisely identify areas of overlap and divergence between your organizations, and build a common roadmap to the sale. A roadmap that, from the outset, eliminates the hazards that could derail your deal!

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Why use a mutual action plan as a sales tool?

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The benefits of a mutual action plan are manifold:

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• For your prospects: you build a smoother, more transparent buying experience that allows them to engage serenely with you. Better still, you make it easier for them to buy!

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• For you as a salesperson: (i) You increase your sales performance and keep a close eye on the progress of your deals. (ii) You keep competitors at bay thanks to a more collaborative and engaging sales cycle.

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• For sales managers and Heads of Sales: (i) Create repeatable, high-performance sales processes. (ii) Make your pipeline reviews more effective.

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• For VP Sales: you increase the predictability of your sales pipeline and improve the reliability of your forecasts.
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How does all this work in practice? Here are our answers.

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Reason n°1: Collaborate more effectively with your prospects
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The mutual action plan will only be useful to you if you use it to bring out a collaborative process with your prospects. You will then move from a "transactional" sales approach, where the solution is "pushed" to prospects, to a partnership approach, where the solution is co-constructed with your prospects.

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The mutual action plan reverses the sales logic and puts you in your prospects' shoes. It's no longer a question of "selling", but of "guiding your prospects in their purchase".

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What do your buyers need to understand the benefits of your solution, to evaluate and validate their purchase, to ensure that they will derive maximum long-term value from it?

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By making your prospects' concerns your priority, you include them in the construction of the solution and engage them more effectively. You also give them guarantees that engender mutual trust, which is essential to the act of buying.

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Practical tip #1:

A mutual action plan must be truly interactive to work. If it's used unilaterally by sales teams - which is regularly the case in practice - your efforts will be in vain.

To check that you're handling mutual action plans correctly, take the last 5 and compare them. How different are they? To be effective, a mutual action plan must reflect your prospects' detailed buying process. Each mutual action plan must bear the stamp of your prospects' unique contributions.

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Practical tip #2:

Share your mutual action plan in a collaborative format such as Google Docs or Google Sheets, but never as a PDF. This will make it easy for your prospects to adapt it to their buying process, while allowing you to stay on top of it.

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Reason n°2: make your prospects' buying experience easier

B2B buyers don't have it easy: purchasing is increasingly carried out remotely (1), the number of solutions available on the market is constantly increasing (2), and the number of people involved in the purchasing processes continues to climb (3).

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The result: as the B2B buying process becomes increasingly fragmented and complex, your prospects become more risk-averse, and more difficult to engage.

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The Mutual Action Plan solves some of this complexity by outlining a clear decision-making process that includes the constraints of both buyers and sellers. By providing an objective evaluation grid, you streamline and simplify the buying process for your prospects.

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At the same time, don't underestimate the personal risk taken by your prospects. Their reputation within the company could be damaged if they make the wrong purchase. The mutual action plan is designed to de-risk their decision by providing greater transparency and visibility. As a result, your buyers will be more inclined to "stick their necks out" alongside you.

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Practical tip:

Don't assume that your prospects are familiar with the purchasing process in their own company. In fact, it's highly likely that you know it better than they do, because you've already sold your solution to similar companies.

By mapping the process with them, and helping them to identify areas of risk, you position yourself as their "trusted advisor". Assuming this responsibility is essential if they are to project themselves into the act of buying. As an added bonus, you make the buying experience much easier for your prospects, putting the chances of closing on your side.

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Reason n°3: differentiate yourself from your competitors

According to Salesforce, 80% of buyers consider their buying experience to be as important as the product they buy (4). Your ability to differentiate yourself through your sales process (and not just your product) therefore becomes a crucial issue in winning your deals.

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Here's how the Mutual Action Plan helps you build a superior buying experience to your competitors:

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The collaboration it engenders enables you to build a more personalized and compelling buying journey. You create a framework conducive to the mutual trust your prospects need to buy.
The transparency and visibility of your mutual action plan makes the experience smoother and more intuitive for your prospects.

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The result: when your prospects come to compare different competing solutions, they'll be more likely to choose yours, because you've made it easier for them to decide.

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Practical tip:

Use the special relationship you've built up with your prospects to put the subject of competition on the table. Not to extract information from them, but to help them weigh up every option open to them.

A precise understanding of how your prospects perceive your competitors, coupled with an in-depth knowledge of your competitive environment, will enable you to more accurately determine your chances of closer. This will enable you to adapt the effort you invest in your prospects: speeding up if you're in a strong position, or on the contrary, reducing the time invested on a deal where you know that your competitor objectively responds better than you to the need expressed by your prospects.

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Reason n°4: improve your sales performance

The mutual action plan, insofar as it is a mapping of the buying process, enables you to identify your prospects' constraints right from the start, as well as the people involved in the deal. In this way, you can anticipate areas of risk and work on deal-blockers before they become deal-breakers.

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By highlighting the obstacles to closing, the mutual action plan also helps you identify deals that are not viable. You can then qualify or disqualify them more efficiently, so that you can focus solely on the most promising opportunities.

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The icing on the cake: the mutual action plan also helps you to increase your ACV (annual contract value) or your average basket, depending on your business model.

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On average, a B2B buyer who considers that the information he received from his seller helped him in his purchase is 3x more likely to increase the value of his purchase (5).

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Practical tip:

Mutual action plans are a goldmine for analyzing the quality of your sales pipeline, and it would be a mistake to rely solely on your CRM during pipeline reviews.

By giving you access to a reading of the deal through the prism of the prospect, mutual action plans bring potential deal-breakers to the surface. Managers spend less time gathering information (reporting) and have concrete elements to coach sales with actionable advice:

• "Have you asked Mrs. Y to bring a technical contact into the loop? At this stage of the deal it's becoming urgent to validate the tech implementation."
• "I see you haven't scheduled any legal validation of the deal with Mr X. Did you get his confirmation that our standard documentation is acceptable to him?"
• "In your interactions with Company Z, at no point do I see the purchasing department getting involved. Given the size of Company Z and the amount of the deal, this is surprising. Have you checked with your contacts that it won't intervene?"

These are snippets of discussion that emanate from mutual action plan reviews.

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Reason n°5: control your deadlines and accelerate your deal

The planned deployment date is a key element of your mutual action plan. If it has been properly constructed, this date is set at the initiative of your prospects. It's the deadline you have to work towards, and helps you orchestrate all the stages of the deal.

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By setting this deadline, and all the milestones in between to reach it, you secure the progress of your deal.

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Controlling the deadlines of your sales cycle is all the more important as the B2B buying process becomes increasingly complex: a B2B deal now involves between 6 and 10 buyers, each of whom relies on 4-5 different sources of information to reach a decision. What's more, 95% of these buyers have to reconsider their position when they receive new information (6).

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In practice, reaching a consensus has become more time-consuming, and your sales cycle is fraught with pitfalls. The mutual action plan should enable you to anticipate areas of risk to increase the velocity of your deal.

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And because anticipation isn't always enough, the mutual action plan also creates urgency when a deadline is at risk. It makes the consequences of missing a deadline visible to all participants. This gives you solid arguments for mobilizing participants to get the deal back on track, or for escalating the problem to decision-makers.

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Practical tip:

To set your deal deadlines as precisely as possible, draw up a backward schedule with your prospects. Start with the deployment date, and plan all the steps required to get there. This method is effective in producing a schedule that accurately reflects your prospect's constraints. Your prospect's adoption of this schedule is essential, as he or she is the one who will have to carry it through to the buying company. So make sure you make him the main author of the roadmap, by integrating his contributions.

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Reason n°6: make your sales pipeline predictable and your forecasts more reliable

Whether you're a salesperson, Account Executive, sales manager, Head of Sales or VP Sales, the predictability of your sales pipeline is at the heart of your concerns. On an individual basis, it largely determines your variable compensation and career advancement. On a company-wide scale, accurate sales forecasting is essential to the efficient allocation of resources.

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The mutual action plan, because it reflects what has been mutually agreed with your prospects, delivers precise insights into your chances of closing your deal, and if so, by when.

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In this sense, the mutual action plan gives you more precise information than your CRM, which is often limited to the deal's pipeline stage and the number of contacts with your prospect. The mutual action plan, on the other hand, looks inside the deal and tells you who has been involved (purchasing, business, tech. teams; champion vs. economic buyer), which points have already been discussed with them and which still need to be clarified, the velocity between each milestone, and so on.

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Thanks to this information, your sales pipeline becomes more predictable, and you avoid the cold sweats associated with deals that "slip" at the end of the quarter. In turn, your forecasts also gain in accuracy and reliability.

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Practical tip:

The pipeline review is the ideal time to test the reliability of your sales forecasts.

Mutual action plans enable you to check the progress of the team's deals on the basis of objective elements that depend on concrete actions by prospects and no longer on the intuition of sales (whether we like it or not, we're biased).

You'll be able to readjust your forecasts and adjust your team's efforts in line with your objectives. If you want to go far, look after your horse (or your team, in this case).

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As you can see, the mutual action plan is a formidable tool in B2B sales, but one that's tricky to handle in practice if you want to derive maximum benefit from it.

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Unfortunately, too few B2B sales teams use it.

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And when they do, even fewer manage to make it a truly collaborative and interactive tool with their prospects. The mutual action plan then only serves to validate a step in the CRM and ends up at the bottom of the drawer (or rather, in the repository of your deal). RIP.

At Katalyz, we've created a mutual action plan that unleashes the full potential of this tool.

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A solution that helps B2B sales teams "close" their complex deals through a more collaborative and engaging buying experience. And this for all participants in the deal, from the first call through to customer onboarding.

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^{(1) 80% of B2B sales interactions will take place on digital channels by 2025.
Source: Gartner}

^{(2) Competition is growing in B2B markets, particularly in the SaaS sector: whereas a SaaS company had to contend with fewer than 3 competitors in 2012, it now fights an average of 9 competitors to reach closing.}

^{Source: BMC}

^{(3) The number of people involved in a B2B purchase rose from 5.4 to 6.8 on average between 2015 and 2017.}

^{Source : Harvard}

^{(4) Salesforce}

^{(5) Gartner}

^{(6) Gartner}