A little ditty about Mutual Action Plans (MAPs) and their positive impact on Buyer Experience

A few months ago, I wrote: What is Buyer Experience as a Differentiator?

TL;DR - There are more solutions with the same functionality in every category than ever before and, as a result, the most successful Sales Leaders focus on creating a differentiating buying experience.

You do not need to be Elon Musk to create a differentiating buying experience, all you have to do is remove friction for your buyers. This is not to say, though, that buying experience design is easy or that it won't help turn your company into a rocket ship ????

The above picture outlines the modern B2B buying journey, according to Gartner research. Pretty straightforward, right?

Today’s B2B buying groups are made up of, on average, 5.4 people (Source: The Corporate Executive Board). Note elsewhere this number is cited as high as 10.2 people.

Regardless of their exact size, large buying groups create conflict and buying dysfunction that leads to a host of other problems: decreased momentum, inaccurate forecasting, missed targets, postponed launch dates, increased frustration, and lost deals and abandoned projects.

Depending on the complexity of your sale, getting to the first yes (perhaps after winning an evaluation) can come many months before closing a deal. And in this period between hearing yes and potentially closing, various risks and inefficiencies are introduced.

Enter the Mutual Action Plan.

What is a Mutual Action Plan?

Some call them Mutual Success Plans, others Close Plans, Joint Engagement Plans, Go-Live Plans, etc... no doubt there are other names for the same general concept.

Whatever you call them, and I’ll stick with Mutual Action Plan, I think the following definition from The Ultimate Guide to Mutual Action Plans (How to Use MAPs to Transform Your Sales Process) is best - a Mutual Action Plan is “a document that helps the sales team and a prospective customer work together to find a mutually beneficial solution.”

Like a shared to-do list that holds stakeholders from both sides accountable, a well-crafted Mutual Action Plan is something you draft in collaboration with your buyers. It includes everything that needs to be done, by whom, and by when in order to close a deal and help buyers realize their compelling reason(s) to buy.

Used correctly, MAPs create a dialog that allows you to:

1. Identify hidden buying influencers (ie. Jane is assigned the action of confirming budget and gets back to you saying, “I can’t confirm the budget by EOM without running this first by John from Accounting.”)
2. Create a trusting relationship with your prospects (ie. Less nagging, more transparency and obvious concern for prospect’s timeline/results)
3. More confidently forecast your business (ie. See what needs to happen for a deal to come in and benchmark it against the buying group’s engagement and accountability throughout the sales cycle)

“Reviewing the timeline line by line with their VP immediately kicked the sales cycle into a different gear as he realized how much there was to get done to hit his dates.” – Adam Heher, Director of Sales, Cloudability

In my experience, if a buyer engages with the MAP approach, it is a strong positive signal. But if a buyer does not engage with this approach, the deal is not necessarily dead in the water.?If someone is opposed to the general idea of the MAP, it's a cue to ask some more questions (ie. “You said you need a solution in place by X date to hit Y goal and that our solution is your preferred choice, a plan like this will help us work together to keep everything on track and identify and address potential barriers, why don’t we want to use this? Is there something I'm not understanding right?”)

Why are MAPs important (and what do they impact)?

In addition to many other benefits, some of which I describe above, MAPs help sales teams:

1. Close More Deals
2. Shorten Sales Cycles
3. More accurately forecast (specifically close dates)
4. Deliver a better buying experience

Close More Deals

MAPs improve your win rates because they help you better understand your buyer’s process and they make it easier to identify blockers. While every MAP might be unique, the general framework is repeatable and can help your team more consistently follow your sales process.

Shorten Sales Cycles

MAPs shorten sales cycles by helping you guide and manage the process of buying your product or service as if it were a project. When everyone is rowing in the same direction in pursuit of agreed-upon, written-down goals, you stop "checking in," and you become more of a partner to the buying group, constantly working together to check off the next milestone.

More accurately forecast (specifically close dates)

If you know what needs to get done before a deal comes in, and if there is a mutually agreed-upon timeline, you can more confidently say what deals will in fact come in and, perhaps more importantly, when.

Deliver a better buying experience

“No buyer will argue with clear expectations” – Tana McDermott, Vice President, Inside Sales at Workiva

In large buying groups, your buyers might decide that they need your product or service, but they might not know how to procure it without your guidance.

When a buyer sponsors an initiative, they are putting their reputation on the line. Anything you can do to help them keep the initiative on track creates a more trusting, differentiated, and better buying experience that ultimately leads to happier, more successful customers. This one's win-win.

Real-World resources

• The Ultimate Guide to Mutual Action Plans (How to Use MAPs to Transform Your Sales Process)
• MAP Template (Created by DealPoint)
• Coach Your Teams to Sell with Mutual Close Plans

Parts of this post were inspired by Tom Williams's Sales Hacker article (linked above) and by content from The Challenger Customer .