How to build the best mutual action plans
Guide and collaborate with your buyers in a transparent and structured way using mutual action plans.
Building the best mutual action plans in sales and customer success involves collaboration, clarity, and alignment between all stakeholders. Depending on the type of deal or relationship tis can involve the sales team, the customer success team, and the customer. Here's a step-by-step guide to creating the best and most effective mutual action plans:
- Understand Customer Goals: Start by thoroughly understanding the goals and objectives of the customer. What are they hoping to achieve by purchasing your product or service? What challenges are they facing? Understanding their motivations will help tailor the action plan to their specific needs.
- Identify Key Success Metrics: Work with the customer to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that will measure the success of the partnership. These metrics should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
- Collaborative Planning Meeting: Schedule a collaborative planning meeting with stakeholders from both the sales and customer success teams, as well as key decision-makers from the customer's organization. During this meeting, discuss the customer's goals, challenges, and expectations, and collectively brainstorm strategies to address them.
- Define Phases and Action Items: Based on the insights gained from the planning meeting, outline specific action items that need to be completed by both the customer and your internal teams to achieve the desired outcomes. Clearly define responsibilities, deadlines, and success criteria for each action item.
- Establish Communication Channels: Establish clear communication channels and cadences for ongoing collaboration between the sales and customer success teams and the customer. This may include regular check-in meetings, status updates, progress reports, and shared project management tools.
- Set Milestones and Review Points: Break down the action plan into manageable milestones and set review points to assess progress, identify any roadblocks or challenges, and make necessary adjustments to the plan. Celebrate achievements and milestones along the way to maintain motivation and momentum.
- Document and Share the Plan: Document the mutual action plan in a formal document or project management tool and share it with all stakeholders involved. Ensure that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities and has access to the necessary resources and support to execute the plan successfully.
- Monitor and Measure Progress: Continuously monitor progress against the action plan and track key performance metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the partnership. Use data-driven insights to identify areas for improvement and adjust strategies as needed to stay on track towards achieving mutual goals.
- Iterate and Evolve: As the partnership progresses, be open to feedback from the customer and internal teams, and be willing to adapt and iterate the action plan based on changing circumstances or new insights. Continuous improvement is key to building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with customers.
By following these steps and fostering a collaborative and transparent approach to mutual action planning, sales and customer success teams can work together effectively to drive value for customers and achieve shared success.
Action plans with the Along platform
On top of that, the Along platform allows you to expand on the basic rules to create the best mutual action plans with the following aspects:
- Assign the actions in your mutual plans to hold your stakeholders accountable
- Set due dates to define clear deadlines or mark specific calls or milestones throughout the process
- Get instant and optimised notifications on all action plan related updates so you are always in the loop about progress and about what is going on
- Add content within each action so that stakeholders have more context about what has been discussed or what needs to be done
- Control the visibility of your mutual action plan, the phases, and the actions so that you can control which stakeholders view what content
- Collaborate within the action plan with commenting and sharing capabilities to refer to specific topics and to streamline communication
- Monitor the action plan progress with different status details that you can filter by to take action where it is needed
Read more about Mutual Action Plans
With the Along platform, you get access to various mutual action plan templates that might be specific to your use case so that you can optimise your mutual action plan. That way you can achieve the best possible mutual action plan guaranteed and in not time.
Do you want to see what the best mutual action plans look like? Schedule a demo for free
