Mutual action plan: how to speed up complex B2B sales

A mutual action plan is a timeline that seller and buyer build together, working backward from the date the customer needs to see the purchase delivering results. It lists the steps up to signature and the start of implementation, with an owner on each side, a date and a status, and it covers the handoffs that tend to stall complex sales: legal review, security assessment, vendor registration with procurement and budget approval. In most of the deals I find stuck after the proposal, the customer is still interested, and nobody agreed with them on what happens between “we liked the proposal” and the signed contract. Proposing that plan, running it without coming across as pressure and using it to manage the pipeline are behaviors of the team and of leadership, and a company builds those behaviors through practice on the quarter’s real deals.

The scene repeats itself in the pipeline reviews I run. The contact approved the proposal in September and promised the contract for October. In October, the customer’s legal team asked for the draft; in November, the security team sent a questionnaire on data handling; in December, procurement said the vendor registration was missing, and the year’s budget closed before that. The salesperson changed the close date four times in the CRM, and the team could have anticipated all three steps in the first meeting and run them in parallel.

What is a mutual action plan?

A mutual action plan (MAP) also goes by joint close plan or buying timeline. It is a document shared between the two companies that describes the customer’s buying process with the seller’s steps fitted into it. The close plan a salesperson keeps to themselves lists what they will do. In a mutual plan, half the rows carry the name of someone at the buying company, who agreed to the date and comes to see the document as the plan for their own project.

Buyer research shows the size of the problem. In Forrester’s The State Of Business Buying, 2024, released in December 2024, 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process, and 89% of purchases involve two or more departments of the buying company. Each additional department brings its own queue, and the buyer leading the purchase knows only some of them.

Why do complex sales stall after the proposal?

Deals that stall between proposal and signature tend to share the same four gaps, and none of them depends on price or on a competitor.

The close date belongs to the seller

The date recorded in the CRM is usually the end of the seller’s quarter, and each week of delay costs the buyer nothing. The customer moves for an event of their own: the start of peak season, the expiry of the contract with the current vendor, the opening of a new site or the closing of the year’s budget.

Control functions enter one at a time

Legal, information security and procurement come in one after another, because the contact only engages the next function when the previous one finishes. Each receives the request without context, as one more contract in the queue, and none of them knows the customer needs the result by March.

On the buyer’s side, nobody owns the next step

The contact assumes procurement will reach out to the vendor, procurement waits for a formal request from the business area and the salesperson waits for “feedback”. Without a name and a date on each step, the deal sits still without anyone having decided to stop it, and the CRM shows “waiting on customer”.

Implementation has no start date

The contract gets signed, and the kickoff happens weeks later because the implementation team was on other projects. The start date also gives meaning to the signature date: a customer who knows that signing late pushes go-live past their peak has a reason to look after their own timeline.

How do you build a mutual action plan backward?

I build the plan in four moves, always starting from the end, because the customer’s result date organizes all the others.

1. Find the date the customer needs the result

During discovery, the salesperson asks what needs to be working and by when, and what happens if it is ready three months later. The second question separates a desired date from a date with consequences. The cost of waiting, which I cover in the article on B2B negotiation with the customer’s ROI, is the argument that holds that date when the plan starts to slip.

2. Subtract implementation and arrive at the signature date

The implementation team states how many weeks it needs. The math includes the time the customer takes to prepare data and people, the year-end break and the periods when the business area cannot stop. The result is the latest signature date that still delivers what the customer asked for, and it becomes the close date in the CRM.

3. List the buyer’s internal steps and documents

The salesperson asks who needs to approve a contract like this one and what each function requires. The table brings together the functions that show up most often in B2B purchases, with the question that anticipates each one and the material your company can have ready before anyone asks.

Buyer function	What it usually requires	Question to ask during discovery	What your company has ready
Legal	Draft review, liabilities, confidentiality and jurisdiction	“Does your legal team work from its own contract template or review ours?”	Standard draft and answers to the most negotiated clauses
Security and privacy	Security questionnaire and data processing agreement under the LGPD, Brazil’s data protection law	“Do vendors that access customer data go through a security assessment?”	Security documentation and answers to the most common questionnaire
Procurement	Vendor registration, certificates and, sometimes, competing quotes	“Are we a new vendor for you, and how long does registration take?”	Folder with certificates, articles of incorporation and bank details
Finance	Business case, the year’s budget and payment terms	“Is this investment already in the budget or does it need extra approval?”	Business case with assumptions validated by the customer
IT	Integration, access and architecture	“Who in IT validates the integration, and when are they available?”	Technical documentation and a meeting with presales
Executive team	Final approval, sometimes in a committee with a fixed calendar	“Which meeting will this decision go to, and on what date?”	One-page executive summary

4. Put a name on each side and a date on each row

Each step gets an owner at the buying company, one at your company, a date and a status. The buyer’s owner is a person with a name, and “legal” does not count. A row where the salesperson cannot write that name shows a part of the buying process they do not know yet.

Mutual action plan template

The example is hypothetical and shows the mechanics. A services company wants its customer service team running the new process on March 1, before the year’s demand peak. Implementation takes seven weeks, and the customer has a break from late December through the first week of January, which puts the kickoff on January 11 and the signature no later than December 14.

Step	Buyer owner	Seller owner	Date	Status
Technical integration meeting	IT coordinator	Presales	11/06	Done
Proposal revised with final scope	Customer service manager (champion)	Salesperson	11/13	Done
Business case approved by the controller’s office	Controller	Salesperson	11/20	In progress
Security questionnaire and data agreement approved	Security analyst	Presales	11/27	In progress
Vendor registration approved	Procurement analyst	Finance	11/30	Not started
Draft reviewed by legal	In-house counsel	Legal	12/07	Not started
Contract signature	Operations director	Sales director	12/14	Not started
Kickoff with success criteria recorded	Customer service manager	Implementation manager and CS	01/11	Not started
Team running the new process	Customer service manager	Implementation manager	03/01	Not started

Security, procurement and legal run in parallel from mid-November. Done in sequence, the signature would slip past the break and go-live would land after the peak, which was the reason for the purchase. With that math in the plan, the buyer pushes their own internal functions with an argument of their own. For smaller deals, the same template fits in five rows.

When should you propose a mutual action plan?

The moment comes once discovery has confirmed the problem, the salesperson knows who decides and the customer has stated a date with consequences. In most complex sales, that happens between the second meeting and the proposal, and the plan goes into the proposal as the next-steps section, with dates the customer has already seen. Proposed too early, before the customer agrees they have a problem, the plan sounds presumptuous. Proposed after the proposal went out and the customer went quiet, it lands as a collection notice. The question “and what would implementation look like?” is the most common sign that the buyer already pictures the project running.

How do you present the plan without it feeling like pressure?

Buyers feel pressure when they sense the plan serves the seller’s quarter. Built from their date and in their words, the plan arrives as help for a project they need to deliver inside their own company. That is why the salesperson brings a draft with gaps, asks for corrections and leaves blank the names they do not know.

When a date slips, the salesperson redoes the backward math in front of the customer and shows the effect on the result date, and the decision to pull a step forward or accept the new deadline stays with the buyer.

A buyer who refuses to talk about internal steps is also giving you information: either they have not decided to buy, or they lack access to whoever decides.

Where should the mutual action plan live?

The plan lives in a document both companies can access, such as a shared spreadsheet, a collaborative document or the shared-plan feature some CRMs offer, with the link recorded on the deal. A plan kept in the salesperson’s inbox does not show up in the pipeline meeting or in the handoff.

In the CRM, four fields on the deal are enough for leadership to follow along without opening the document: the customer’s result date, with the event that justifies it; the agreed signature date, which becomes the close date; the buyer’s next step, with owner and date; and the plan status, with the values no plan, draft sent and accepted by the buyer. The salesperson reviews the plan with the champion every two weeks.

How do you use the mutual action plan in pipeline reviews and forecasting?

In the pipeline meeting, the manager opens the plan instead of asking “when does it close?”. The questions become verifiable: which buyer step is late, who at the customer confirmed the signature date and when legal received the draft. “I’ll check” becomes a next step with a date, recorded in the plan.

In forecasting, the rule that changes team behavior the most requires a plan accepted by the buyer for a deal to enter commit, with the legal, procurement and signature dates confirmed by named people. A deal without a plan stays in the funnel as best case, in the categories I describe in sales forecasting. When the salesperson moves the close date, the plan shows which step slipped, and the manager stops accepting a new date without a recorded reason.

The metrics come from the CRM: the percentage of deals at proposal with an accepted plan, the average gap in days between planned and actual signature and the steps that slip most, by function. The last one sometimes reveals the bottleneck inside your own company, such as a legal team slow to answer clause questions.

Mutual action plan, buying committee and post-sale

The plan shows the missing committee members

Each row in the buyer column names someone from the buying committee, and empty rows show the roles the salesperson has not mapped yet. The signature row is the most direct test: without the decision maker’s name next to a date they confirmed, the deal depends on a meeting nobody at your company controls. The role map I describe in B2B buying committee tells you who takes part, and the plan tells you when each person comes in and what they need to deliver.

The plan continues after signature

The last rows of the plan are the kickoff and go-live, with the customer’s success criteria. CS or the implementation team joins a meeting in the two weeks before signature, meets the sponsor and takes over the final rows. At handoff, post-sale receives the plan with the dates and the promises made during the sale, and the customer meets the same people and the same timeline at kickoff, as I detail in B2B post-sale.

What marketing delivers

The salesperson can only anticipate the buyer’s steps with material for each one. Marketing produces that material with your company’s legal, security and finance teams, based on the functions table: security and privacy FAQs, a registration folder, an annotated draft contract and the plan template itself.

A roadmap for leadership

1. Set the baseline. For last semester’s deals, measure the time between approved proposal and signature, how many times the close date changed and where each deal stalled.
2. Map your customers’ buying process. With implementation, legal and finance, list the functions and documents customers ask for and build the folder for each one.
3. Write the template and the usage criteria. Define the five-to-twelve-row template and when to propose it, and put both in the playbook.
4. Configure the CRM after the text is approved. Create the four fields and the link to the shared document.
5. Practice on open deals. Each salesperson builds the plan for two deals and presents it to the manager, who plays the buyer.
6. Change the commit rule and review weekly. Announce the date from which deals without an accepted plan leave commit, and track the metrics in the pipeline meeting.

Running the plan is a conversation the team practices: what HR and L&D need to assess

Any salesperson can copy the template in ten minutes, and the difficulty lies in the conversations around it: asking who in legal reviews contracts without sounding intrusive, turning an “I don’t know” into a next step with an owner, explaining to the customer’s director that their date does not work with registration still stuck. Someone who only read about the method falls back on “I’ll wait to hear from you” at the first evasive answer. In the negotiation training programs I run, each participant builds the plan for an open deal and rehearses the presentation with colleagues playing the buyer and the customer’s legal counsel, and the manager leaves knowing what to ask for at the next meeting, following the logic of sales training that changes behavior.

HR and L&D can spot the need in the CRM: a growing gap between approved proposal and signature, close dates changed several times on the same deal, losses marked “no response” after an approved proposal and kickoffs scheduled weeks after signature. The cohort brings together salespeople, KAMs, sales managers, presales and the people who receive the customer in implementation and CS. To measure, set a baseline with the percentage of deals with an accepted plan, the proposal-to-signature cycle and the time from signature to kickoff, and compare after one sales cycle.

If your team’s deals stall between the approved proposal and the signed contract, that stretch of the sale is the focus of the in-company Complex Negotiation training. I run the program on the open opportunities of your operation, and the cohort leaves with the team’s objection matrix and the closing guide, which includes the mutual action plan template, the questions about the customer’s buying process and the phrases for renegotiating a date.

Frequently asked questions

What is a mutual action plan?

It is a timeline that seller and buyer build together, working backward from the date the customer needs the result. It lists the steps up to signature and the start of implementation, with owners on both sides, dates and status.

What is the difference between a mutual action plan and an implementation schedule?

The implementation schedule starts after signature and covers the project. The mutual action plan covers the path to signature, with legal, security, procurement and budget approval, and ends at go-live, where the implementation schedule takes over.

When in the sale should you propose a mutual action plan?

Once discovery has confirmed the problem, the decision maker is known and the customer has stated a date with consequences. In complex sales, that usually falls between the second meeting and the proposal.

What do you do when the buyer won’t build the plan?

Ask what they need to resolve inside the company before deciding and who takes part in that decision. If they won’t talk about internal steps, they have not decided to buy or lack access to whoever decides, and the deal leaves the month’s commit until that changes.

How do you record a mutual action plan in the CRM?

Keep the plan in a shared document, with the link on the deal, and create four fields: the customer’s result date, the agreed signature date, the buyer’s next step and the plan status.

How do you train the team to run a mutual action plan?

Use the team’s own open deals: each salesperson builds the plan for a real opportunity and rehearses the presentation in role-play, with colleagues playing the buyer and the customer’s legal counsel. Afterwards, the manager sustains the habit in the pipeline meeting with the accepted-plan rule for commit.