Mutual Action Plans: Aligning Buyers and Sellers

This is part two of our four-part series with Aligned on digital sales rooms, MAPs, onboarding, and forecasting. Each article stands on its own, so you can jump to whichever pain point you’re solving right now.

• Article 1: Digital Sales Rooms & Buyer Enablement (click here to read it)
• Article 2: Mutual Action Plans: Aligning Buyers and Sellers (you’re here!)
• Article 3: Seamless Customer Onboarding (coming soon)
• Article 4: How RevOps Can Improve Forecasting (coming soon)

The road to inefficiency is paved with good intentions. Every ‘quick fix’—a new CRM field, a custom object, a shiny dashboard—starts out reasonably. Until it doesn’t. (Here’s looking at you, Feature Request object that even the product team never used.)

Some tools deserve a quick death. MAPs aren’t one of them. Done right, they make deals faster, forecasts sharper, and adoption smoother.

If you’re like most B2B GTM teams with a complex sales process, MAPs can help you maintain urgency, keep buyer committees coordinated, and streamline handoffs to customer success. When executed well, a MAP makes your seller look good, the buying process less overwhelming, your product adoption a sure thing, and sets more customers up to become brand evangelists.

The trick? Implement MAPs so sales instantly see the value—and don’t assume you’re just creating more busywork so an exec can have another dashboard they never check. (Ouch, but true.)

What Is a Mutual Action Plan (MAP)?

A Mutual Action Plan (MAP) is a living, collaborative roadmap that documents your customer’s goals, the milestones needed to get there, and who owns each step—on both sides. Call them mutual close plans, joint execution plans, or success plans—it’s the same shared project plan for a successful purchase process.

An effective MAP is built around one core principle:
Fake urgency doesn’t close deals. Buyers see through it. 

Real urgency comes from their internal drivers, and the MAP should surface and reinforce those.

The MAP should capture:

• The problem your buyer is trying to solve
• When they need to solve it
• The circumstances that made it urgent

Conveniently, those same points should guide your technical team’s approach—and now they’re written down in a MAP, not buried in email threads.

Once the central questions are answered, you can add other items that matter to both buyer and seller. Each point should capture:

• Who needs to do what?
• By when?
• How does it keep the deal moving toward value?

MAPs connect the buyer’s urgent need with your process for delivering it. A digital MAP should also let both parties update and view progress in real time.

Click here to see an example of a Mutual Action Plan from our friends at Aligned.

Why MAPs Improve Outcomes

MAPs aren’t just a “nice to have.” They deliver measurable results:

• Higher win rates. According to Topo, roughly 70% of revenue leaders who adopted MAPs reported win-rate improvements, with an average 13% lift across deals.
  
  
• Deal velocity. Clear next steps prevent stalls and expose blockers early, so you don’t discover the deal is off the rails in week 10.
  
  
• Stakeholder alignment. In complex B2B deals with 6–10 stakeholders (per Gartner), MAPs keep everyone on the same page instead of chasing scattered threads.
  
  

RevOps folks love data, but stats alone won’t win sales over. Change is hard, especially when paychecks rely on closing business.

We recommend selecting a few sellers who are most open to change to pilot your MAP build and work with you on refining it before rolling it out to the rest of the team. By the time you have the MAP where it needs to be to be widely launched, you have a few wins to celebrate with those early adopters ← and that will convince the rest of your team to get on board the MAP train.

For more on change management, check out this article for best practices.

Forecasting Benefits of MAPs

Forecasts are only as good as the inputs—and gut feel isn’t a strategy. In Xactly’s 2024 Sales Forecasting Benchmark Report, just 20% of orgs hit forecasts within ±5% accuracy. MAPs give RevOps a clearer signal by showing who’s engaged, what milestones are complete, and where deals are at risk.

MAPs provide:

• Transparency. Self-reported qualification is problematic. More visibility into your seller’s activity means less guesswork by your sales management team - and more accurate forecasts.
  
  
• Evidence of intent. If buyers are engaging with their sales team and completing MAP items, you have much more direct buying signals than that forecasting call where Fred said he’ll definitely close deal XYZ.
  
  
• Predictability. You know which milestones are complete and which are at risk, making forecasts more reliable.
  
  

Salespeople can avoid or game pipeline hygiene. They can’t fake whether a buyer is actively participating in a MAP.

Best Practices for Implementing MAPs

Want MAPs to work? Follow these rules:

• Templatize it. Build MAPs around customer milestones, not just sales methodology.
  
  
• Integrate with CRM. Updates flow into your system of record automatically.
  
  
• Train & pilot. Start with change-friendly reps, prove value, then scale.
  
  
• Manager accountability. MAPs should show up in pipeline reviews. If they’re missing, deals get flagged.
  
  

And remember: the best MAPs are all about the buyer’s question, “How do I get this live and working to solve my problem fast?”

MAPs as the New Standard

Mutual Action Plans aren’t busywork—they’re buyer alignment in action. They build trust, eliminate surprises, and turn forecasting from wishful thinking into predictable revenue. For RevOps leaders, MAPs are that rare tool that makes sales more effective and forecasts more reliable. 

That’s not busy work for you or your sales reps. That’s business impact.

👉 Want to see how leading teams implement MAPs? Check out Aligned’s Mutual Action Plan resources and their Buyer Enablement Playbook for more details.