How Mutual Action Plans Revolutionize Your Sales Process

At Recapped, we’re a company with an intimate understanding of what truly goes into the sales cycle and ultimately, what gets a deal across the finish line.

We’re a company founded by sales people, for sales people. Nearly a decade ago as a sales rep and manager, I saw the growing need for mutual action plans first-hand. Over the years, I watched over 30,000 deals rise and fall. The need to simplify the sales process became apparent. Fast.

The real sales process

If you’re in sales, you know that closing a deal comes down to many crucial aspects, such as proper targeting, research, and execution. And that’s only at the top of the funnel. The real game begins when it’s time to create some true alignment between key stakeholders. You were finally able to get the attention of all the stakeholders. Now what do you do?

If you zoom out, you may come to realize that everything in the sales process comes down to tasks. Every little thing you need to do to get a deal done is a task, whether it be menial like inputting a prospects information into a CRM, or pivotal such as sharing valuable content with the deals champion.

Tasks add up quicker than you'd think

In fact, we’ve analyzed data and found that the average mid-market sales person has to accomplish nearly 40 tasks in order to close a deal. Imagine that across an entire sales team of 10 reps, each managing their own pipeline. How the hell do you keep track of all that? It’s a miracle that anything ever gets across the finish line, and that’s just at the mid-market level.

At the enterprise level, you add in extra decision makers, hand-off points and various new pitfalls and suddenly the average number of tasks is closer to 100. And that’s for every single deal. Zoom out further and the math says that you’re trying to accomplish roughly 10,000 tasks per quarter!

Too many tasks create pitfalls

When you think about just how many tasks need to be accomplished to close a sale, it’s easy to imagine gaps and cracks where you might lose your deal. SDRs and account executives often spend time in the dark wondering where in the process a customer is, whether they’ve opened the contract yet or whether another team member has even sent it to them. This lack of transparency and customer collaboration needs to be avoided at all costs.

Shine a light on your sales process

This is precisely where mutual action plans come in. A proper mutual action plan allows your team, your customer, and every key decision maker to collaborate together in one intuitive, transparent, collaborative home. They exist to create clear roadmaps for your customer to be able to buy your products as efficiently as possible, one of the most important yet overlooked aspects of modern selling.

In fact, the Harvard Business Review reports that “65% of B2B customers reported that they spent as much time as they’d expected to need for the entire purchase just getting ready to speak with a sales rep.” The biggest winners will be the businesses that solve this problem for their customers.

Think of Amazon

No, not the rainforest, the business. Amazon has wisely spent years getting their sales process down to one-click for their customers. If you’ve ever used their “Buy it now” function, you know how relieving it feels to be on the end of that transaction. 

This is precisely why Amazon has blown up the way that it has and this is exactly the kind of efficiency and simplicity that today's customers have come to expect. When you make it easy and time-saving for your customer to purchase your product they will thank you for it!

The bottom line

At the end of the day, you need to reduce the amount of tasks that both you and your customer need to accomplish in order to complete a deal. It’s that simple. The future of sales is about working with your customer, enabling them to make purchasing your product as easy as possible. And mutual action plans are the most elegant, efficient and sophisticated way for sales teams to do exactly that.

Ready to revolutionize your sales process?

Request a demo of Recapped today at: https://www.recapped.io/demo

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