Mutual action plan
A mutual action plan is a shared, dated sequence of steps both buyer and seller commit to, converting an assumed close date into an agreed one.
Its operational value is that it makes the close date falsifiable. A date derived from a plan the buyer has agreed to can be checked against the buyer’s own progress; a date a seller picked cannot be checked at all until it slips.
The signal is in the buyer’s behaviour, not the artefact. A buyer who edits the plan, adds their own procurement steps and misses none of them is a different deal from one who accepts the plan and does nothing. Recording that distinction is what makes the plan a forecasting input rather than a document.
Where it breaks
The plan is built by the seller and never opened by the buyer, so it records the seller’s hopes on letterhead.
Related terms
- Stage integrity
- Stage integrity is the property of a pipeline in which every stage change corresponds to a verifiable change in buyer commitment, evidenced on the record.
- Sales forecast
- A sales forecast is a derivation from pipeline state under a stated method, not a negotiated commitment collected up the management chain.
- Forecast category
- Forecast category is the seller’s judgement of an opportunity’s likelihood, commit, best case, pipeline, omitted, held deliberately separate from pipeline stage.
- Qualification logic
- Qualification logic is the explicit, shared rule set that determines when a record is worth advancing, and it must resolve to the same answer in marketing, sales and the CRM.
Field notes on this
- When pipeline stages describe sellers, not buyers
Seller-activity stages can weaken conversion and forecast analysis. Define buyer evidence, then calibrate it against realized outcomes.