Planning is the most important step for Technical Onboarding and Revenue

There's external and internal planning, do both well and increase your likelihood of success

Mutual Action Plans put structure around your evaluation, and sometimes you’re still left scratching your head asking yourself why deals are stalling. It’s where Founders and salespeople review progress using an internal Close Plan. Most of the time you’ll try to create “v1” or “v 0.1” of your sales process documenting every step of the way. This is great, but there’s two things: 

1. They are likely steps on what you did to close a deal, not how to close it at the pace you expect someone else to do it as you hire and scale a team. 

2. It probably doesn’t account for all the things you need the prospect to do in order to get the deal done.

A Mutual Action Plan is the right first step towards building a sales process. What also needs to be mapped out in parallel with this a set of internal steps to hold you and your team accountable. Close Plans are usually thought of or positioned as a micromanaging tool for Account Executives, but that perception limits their true utility in making selling a team sport within your organization. If you want to map out a “sales process” or “sales playbook,” use a Close Plan.

As Founders close their first deals or try to go from $1M to $10M+, they often have internal discussions, asking, “Is it the sales process, the product, or something else like positioning?” Internal Close Plans can help pinpoint the areas that need the most attention.

The Mutual Action Plan is not pre-work for a Close Plan. You’ll see both have pre-work and that there are natural dependencies between the two. What you want to clarify and identify over time is the nuances that are required in your business to build a great experience for customers on how you handle things both internally and externally. Shared context and simplified language allow teams to ramp faster and have clarity on the current status of both active opportunities and customers. 

Note: This post assumes you have full context on running a Mutual Action Plan. As always, this is a simplified model to show how to apply this process to build a strong revenue organization. 

Founders are exceptionally busy. There is no question that more templates and checklists can be exhausting, pedantic, and frankly useless. That said, the reason why sales is so hard, especially at the beginning, is that you’re still trying to figure out the series of steps that lead to success. Some call this repeatability, but we argue that you just need a “shape” of a process to know how to close rather than it feeling like the “well oiled machine” companies aspire to have. 

Typically what happens as you start to get comfortable with closing (what a feeling this is!), you start to skip steps since “this deal isn’t much different than before.” Or, you bring in your first Account Executives and it gets incredibly confusing on what changed and why. Usually it starts with skipping steps, or thinking a step wasn’t needed on a particular deal. Close Plans will help with constant review and accountability – this will feel tedious, but similar to a good diet, you just have to keep with it. 

To start, review your Mutual Action Plan, and break down the internal steps and checklists you can hold yourself accountable to. This template is an example of what you can do to confirm and check each opportunity you have in your pipeline. The goal is to inspect what parts of the sales process needs attention and which parts of your Product may need more attention to complete the deal. 

Especially with new products, you want to get deals faster. You need the revenue to hit milestones for your next fundraise, but if you move too fast and don’t have clarity on how customers will succeed in using your product, you won’t close more deals. Having a nice deck, formal pricing, and asking for the next steps is table stakes, not the accelerant! 

Use this template to get started on building your process to understand how you're controlling the expectations and needs of your customers and what is needed from your team internally to get those deals over the finish line faster. Reach out to us directly if you want to learn how to operationalize this faster: dakota@dm.studio, trey@dm.studio.