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what is going on everybody we've got nick and arman from 30 minutes to presidents club today we are doing a special mini playbook with our friends from record we're talking about mutual action plans sometimes known as maps and we're going to be talking about a couple different things today one well what is a map or mutual action plan if you've never used one today why is it important because anytime you introduce a new tool or idea to your sales process it better actually move the needle and i do believe that these do then we'll talk about how you make a map how you introduce it to a customer and then how you integrate it and weave it in to the entire buying journey of your sales process let's start however with why it's important when you put together a mutual action plan which is essentially the key steps and stakeholders and deadlines and dates and resources needed to get buyer from hey i'm here today with a problem to hey things are really good and your solution will help with that you put all of that in a place that you and your buyer can look at in one place when you do this it does a couple things one it signals you actually know what you're doing and your buyer wants to be able to trust you and if you can signal that this is not your first rodeo you actually build massive trust with them the other interesting thing that a mutual action plan does is when you and your customer actually go through the mutual action plan you're essentially agreeing to all of the key steps on what it takes to buy your thing so things like access to power a demo with a big group meeting with the legal and compliance team that's super super busy when you put all of that in a mutual action plan and your buyer gives it the thumbs up that is them implicitly agreeing hey we are going to do those things so if you're struggling to do things like get to the ceo or the cxo to get the deal done this can be a tool to help one other thing that i really like about mutual action plans is that they facilitate really clear and open and honest communication between you and your customer what you're doing is you're laying out hey here's the way that other folks have bought before let's have a conversation around how your process compares and contrasts and when you do that it gives the other person an opportunity to voice the concerns and questions that they have so that you can get answers for them as effectively as possible alrighty folks so how do you actually make a mutual action plan it's quite simple but at the same time it's gonna depend for your business so when you take the template that we've provided after this make sure you tweak it for your business so step number one is outline the major things you need to do in your sales cycle in a classic mid-market sales cycle that might be an initial champion discovery a deep dive demo with your champion then you may bring that up to power to get them to sign off and then from there you probably go through a proposal process maybe there's a poc mixed in and then you go through vendor review which often times includes legal insecurity that's step number one step number two once you have those big rocks those big phases layer in micro steps that you can assign dates and owners to and it's important folks that especially for things like legal reviews don't just put legal review as the step because there are multiple mini steps involved so my personal favorite mini step when it gets to those nitty gritty vendor review processes is typically to put people on a redline deadline in legal and what that means is the moment you get the msa or the contract in their hands you put them on a microstep deadline to get you first cuts of redlines back by the end of next week so don't just say oh legal has to be done in four weeks and the next thing you know the first cuts aren't even back in four weeks put them on micro deadlines now this is also describing how you would normally build a close plan which is just an internal version of a mutual action plan nick what is the difference between a closed plan and a mutual action plan well it's the magic letter m armand it is mutual the whole idea behind a mutual action plan is it is built with your mutual success in mind it's not just about getting the deal done it's about getting the customer to the the promised land the dream state the waived magic wand where they are attempting to get and so when i build one of these out i'm not just building it up into the point of hey the contract has been signed i'm actually building it all the way through implementation when the customer is using your thing and seeing success with it and that is a perfect time for us to talk about when do you actually introduce a mutual action plan to a customer the key thing here is way too many people introduce mutual action plans too late in the buying process they oftentimes start maps when it's already a committed deal in vendor review and sure it can help you keep legal and security and procurement on track that is oftentimes where a map is most helpful but the key thing is if the deal went off the rails in the first place it's not going to help you get there so my personal favorite place to start a map is actually right after that first call when i have a champion bought in so if i get a champion who's bought in and they're like i want to buy your thing but i know there are three or four more steps that i have to do before i even get to vendor review that's a great way to be like hey champion um typically what i find is there are a lot of steps to get a deal done it oftentimes includes getting finance involved there's security there's legal would you be opposed to working on a success plan together here and then i'll pull up the template and i'll be like these are the typical steps we see customers go through i'll fill this out with our names but identified a couple people that i think need to be involved in the sales process could you give me a sense of is this aligned with how you all would typically go about making a purchasing decision and now they're collaborating it so that's first contact with customer that's when they first see the mutual action plan and then what you do is you turn your back you throw it in the trash and you never look at it again is that right nick is that what we're talking about next no no no no that is not right armond one thing i want to point out that you did really well when you were introducing it was you used the word typically a couple times what you are not doing here is putting the customer in a box of hey this is a rigid plan that you must follow you're saying hey this is usually this is most of the time this is typically how folks will think about this but i'm open to hearing from you how are you thinking about it this is not meant to be rigid this is meant to open things up for the both of you so what this means is you do not need to reach into the trash can and pull the crumpled up mutual action action plan because both of you have been using this throughout the process so what you need to do is actually weave the mutual action plan into the remainder of the sales process and ideally you pass that over to your implementation team your customer success friends to help finish the job out some best practices that i have for making sure that this thing actually gets used and makes an impact one anytime that you meet with the customer you should carve out some time towards the end of your meeting to reference that document that mutual action plan again one thing that i've done for particularly complex deals is actually had a standing meeting with my champion once a week for 30 minutes where we just go through the mutual action plan what's the status of items are there any blockers to certain things are there any things that we need to add this should be something that you revisit on an ongoing basis the other thing that i think about is you want to make things as easy as possible for your customer so you're going to be in scenarios where the customer emails you and they say uh nick could you please send me a pdf of all of the the reports that your products can put out for my team and you'll reply to the customer and you'll say no problem i attached it to the email here by the way i also put this resource into our mutual action plan document the idea here is you want to train your buyer that anytime they need to look at any resource that you've shared with them they can go to the mutual action plan your job is to do the work for the buyer your job is to handle all of the organization make it as easy as possible for them to buy and speaking of making it as easy as possible for folks to buy armand can you make things easy for our audience here absolutely well guess what we've provided with our wonderful friends at a mutual action plan template that you can use and guess what folks so long as you're not doing a 30 second close or a zippy zippy one call close my guess is there's more than one step involved in your sales cycle and so you can now start your own mutual action plans click in the link on this page right here and you can use it 30 mpc and style and make sure you check it out with our wonderful friends and you should also check out their pretty sweet products on what it looks like to get a sick in-app in mutual action plan too already folks 30 mpc sponsored by we'll catch you guys later peace out