How to Save Time with Free Action Plan Templates

When you're in sales, time is everything. You need to move quickly and efficiently to close deals and keep your customers happy as things progress. But the B2B sales process can often be bogged down by inefficient systems, paperwork, and miscommunication. 

There are many moving parts to a successful B2B sale, and it can be tough to keep track of everything across separate email chains, spreadsheets, documents, and more. In fact, in a survey of more than 250 B2B customers, Gartner found that 77% of B2B buyers rated their latest purchase experience as extremely complex or challenging. So, how do you make your business stand out in a digital-first environment as the work-from-home transition continues to grow?

Fostering a customer-collaborative sales process through a mutual action plan is the answer.

Using free action plan templates, account executives can easily and quickly map out the action items required for deal closure and client satisfaction throughout every stage of the customer journey - from prospect to onboarded customer. On the customer side, their team can use the action plan template to see a bird's-eye view of their progress and what's left to do to keep the purchasing process moving.

In this article, we'll show you how you can use them as customer-enablement tools to save time in your sales process and increase the number of deals you close.

What is an action plan template?

Before getting into the details of how to use them, it's important to know what Action Plan templates are. In short, an action plan template is a structured document that provides a framework for salespeople to track and manage their entire sales process. In addition, they provide sales teams with a customer-collaborative way to document and follow up on the action items required to close a deal.

Action Plan Templates are also known as:

• Mutual Close Plans
• Mutual Success Plans
• Joint Engagement Plans
• Joint Success Plans
• Go-Live Plans

These documents will provide a central workplace to help you monitor an end-to-end sales process. It includes tracking assigned action items and tasks, due dates and timelines, relevant sales material, and a space to communicate - giving you a consolidated overview of the evaluation or product offering's needs, goals, and objectives.

Saving time with free action plan templates

One Source of Truth For Content and Notes

An action plan template provides a central source of truth for all relevant content, notes, and action items for a particular deal. This means that you can quickly and easily find the information you need when you need it - no more searching through emails or old CRM records to find that one piece of information you need.

Keeping all relevant sales information in one place will save plenty of time, and when you can find the information you need quickly, you can move on to the next task and close more deals.

Clear responsibilities and task delegation

When working on a complex B2B sale with multiple stakeholders, it's important to have a clear understanding of who is responsible for the required actions. Action plan templates can help by allowing you to assign tasks and responsibilities to specific team members.

This ensures that everyone knows what they need to do and when they need to do it, saving a lot of time and energy that would otherwise be spent trying to figure out who needs to do what.

It's also helpful to record who is responsible for what in case there are any issues or problems down the road. By having a clear task delegation system in place, you can avoid finger-pointing and instead focus on solving the problem at hand.

Visibility of open and completed action items

Another key benefit of action plan templates is that they provide visibility into all action items, open and closed.

Offering a task management system within the template can give sales teams and customers one place to glance at which tasks are open and which still need to be done. Managing bottlenecks and avoiding miscommunication is vital to shortening sales processes, making this an essential feature of any action plan template.

On the customer side, sales enablement tools, such as a visual representation of all action items, can help customers feel confident that everything is progressing as it should. As competition heats up across digital-first industries, it's more important to make your sales process as simple and efficient as possible from start to finish in order to win more business.

Structured timeframes protecting momentum

When developing an action plan, it's important to include specific dates and deadlines for each task. This not only helps to ensure that tasks are completed in a timely manner but also protects the progress of the sale.

If a particular task takes longer than expected, you can quickly see why and take steps to get things back on track. This is especially helpful when working on long sales cycles, as it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture. Including specific dates and deadlines in your action plan template will help you keep the sale on track and avoid costly delays.

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Recapped resources to shorten your sales cycle

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Our free Mutual Action Plan template

At Recapped, we offer a free Mutual Action Plan (MAP) template that is ready to use right out of the box. By downloading our MAPs template, you'll gain a customer collaborative synchronization spreadsheet that will help you drive best-in-class sales execution and create predictable revenue with a single document.

We're excited that you're excited about Mutual Action Plans. This resource is a great start to collaboration.

Click to download our free MAPs and other sales enablement resources template.

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The Next Level – Recapped: A Customer Collaboration Platform

Do you want to skip the spreadsheets?

Let's take Mutual Action Plans and collaboration to the next level!

The Recapped customer-collaborative software platform is an all-in-one solution to help sales teams close more deals, faster. With our software, you can quickly create and manage action plans, track customer engagement, store and share relevant data and meeting notes, and get real-time insights into your sales process.

Consult with a Revenue Specialist today to see what's right for you.