Mutual action plans: 5 tips for your sales team + template

Enterprise sales cycles are more complex and competitive than ever. Multiple stakeholders and extended review processes can stall even the strongest opportunities, making the deal take longer and your team’s frustration rise. That’s why revenue teams are turning to Mutual Action Plans (MAPs). MAPs are shared roadmaps that align buyers and sellers on what needs to happen, when, and by whom.

Across Outreach, we’ve found that deals where account executives engage buyers with a mutual action plan have a 26% higher win rate than those without. 

For AEs already using MAPs, that number won’t come as a surprise. When both sides are aligned on timelines, steps, stakeholders, and success criteria, buyers stay engaged. And engaged buyers are far more likely to move forward.

This post explores what mutual action plans are, how to build them, and the common mistakes to avoid, plus how Outreach helps you operationalize MAPs at scale.

What is a mutual action plan?

A mutual action plan is a co-created roadmap that lays out the steps, responsibilities, and timelines required to achieve a shared goal. Most often, it’s to move a complex enterprise deal to a successful close. 

Unlike internal sales checklists, a MAP is designed to be transparent and collaborative. Both the buying and selling teams contribute, agree on the milestones, and hold each other accountable.

You’ll also hear MAPs referred to as mutual success plans, close plans, joint execution plans, or go-live plans. The words are different, but the intent is the same: to ensure that buyers and sellers stay aligned from the first business case discussion to final implementation and beyond.

At their best, MAPs do more than document next steps. They:

• Anchor the deal in buyer-defined success criteria rather than seller assumptions.
• Provide predictability by clarifying timelines and surfacing risks early.
• Create mutual accountability, where both parties are responsible for progress.
• Act as a living document that evolves as the opportunity progresses.

For enterprise sales teams, this makes MAPs an essential tool for deal management, but also for building trust and accelerating decisions in environments where buyers expect transparency and partnership.

5 tips for building a mutual action plan

A MAP works best when it feels simple and buyer-centric. Here are a few practical ways to set one up for success:

1. Break the process into clear steps with timelines

Your MAP should mirror the sales process, but in customer-friendly language. Instead of “discovery” or “qualification,” you might use terms like Education or Validation. Adding timelines helps both sides see what needs to happen, by when, and keeps momentum moving toward the goal.

2. Assign responsibilities and milestones on both sides

A good MAP makes progress visible. One way to do this is by setting early checkpoints, like a “Success Plan Review.” This gives you and your champion a chance to align on success metrics, business initiatives, and the sales process itself. 

From there, you can add milestones that reflect the buyer’s internal steps as well as your own.

3. Share the plan widely with stakeholders

Once you’ve mapped out the plan, don’t keep it in a silo. 

Share it with every stakeholder involved and revisit it at the start and end of meetings. That way, when new voices join late in the process, you can point to the progress already made, update expectations, and capture any new success criteria.

4. Use templates to keep things consistent

Consistency makes MAPs easier to adopt across teams. Create templates with common steps, like separate versions for renewals and new business. 

You can also bake in your sales methodology (for us at Outreach, it’s MEDDPICC) to make sure each plan follows the same qualification and sales process standards.

5. Highlight customer outcomes

MAPs need to show value. That’s why we always include success criteria in every plan. When senior leaders like a CRO or CFO join the conversation, it helps to point back to the agreed business outcomes the buyer cares most about.

Mistakes to avoid with mutual action plans

MAPs aren’t a new concept, but in many sales organizations, they haven’t become a consistent part of the selling process. That’s usually because of how they’re created and managed. The numbers reveal the scope of this challenge: 45% of sellers consistently use MAPs, while 43% use them only sometimes and 12% never use them.

Here are the most common mistakes to avoid:

• Inconsistent formats: When every seller builds their own version of a MAP, important details often get missed. Qualification criteria might not be captured, making it harder for managers to compare deals or coach effectively.
• Disconnected from daily workflows: If a MAP lives in a separate spreadsheet or slide deck, it quickly becomes “just another document” for sellers to maintain. Without integration into the sales process, updates slip through the cracks and the plan loses its value.
• Poor visibility and buyer engagement: A MAP only works if buyers know it exists and stay involved in it. When buyers aren’t looped in, plans stall out. Likewise, managers have little visibility into whether deals are progressing, making it harder to support reps or forecast accurately.

The good news: these issues are fixable. By templatizing MAPs and embedding them into your sales process, you can make them easy to adopt and hard to ignore. 

For example, within Outreach, reps can add a standardized Success Plan to every opportunity. Buyers and sellers stay aligned on goals, requirements, and next steps, while managers gain a clear view into engagement levels across the pipeline.

Mutual action plan template

A strong MAP doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, the best ones are transparent and easy for both sellers and buyers to update. 

Here’s a template structure you can adapt to your own process:

How Outreach supports mutual action plans

Creating a MAP is one thing. Ensuring it'll actually be used and updated is often the challenge. Outreach aims to solve that by embedding MAPs into workflows in ways that keep them alive and useful.

A shared workspace that stays current

Outreach’s Success Plans act as a live, collaborative document for both sellers and buyers. It isn’t a PDF or slide that gets buried in someone’s inbox. Instead, it's a constantly accessible hub where milestones, resources, recordings, and next steps all live together. That means even if an AE changes mid-deal or new stakeholders appear, the context stays intact and the deal keeps rolling.

Guiding deals using your proven methods

You don’t have to invent a new way to sell. Outreach lets you create MAP templates that reflect your preferred sales frameworks like MEDDPICC, MEDDIC, or SPIN Selling and map them directly to fields in your CRM.

Engaged and visible to everyone

A MAP isn't helpful if only one side sees it. With shared access and visibility into who is viewing or engaging with the plan, sellers can keep buyers involved and managers can track deal health without chasing updates.

Reduces risk while building trust

When a MAP is clear, shared, and collaborative, it builds confidence on both sides. Buyers see each step forward in real time, which reduces friction. Sellers are also empowered to monitor engagement and act early if momentum drops.

Make every deal predictable with mutual action plans

MAPs give buyers and sellers clarity and confidence. They simplify buying journeys, keep stakeholders aligned, and ensure that success is measured by the outcomes that matter most to the customer.

When MAPs are part of every opportunity, they become a powerful driver of deal velocity, forecast accuracy, and stronger buyer relationships.