Use case · Mutual action plan
A deal without a shared plan drifts. Ollie drafts the mutual action plan before it does.
A mutual action plan (MAP) is a timeline both sides agree to: the milestones between today and a signed deal, with an owner on each side and a date on each step. Ollie is the AI sales co-worker that drafts the mutual action plan from what has actually happened in the deal (the stakeholders, the decision process, the next steps already discussed) and keeps it current as the deal changes.
The definition
What is a mutual action plan?
A mutual action plan is a shared document between buyer and seller that says: here is what we are both doing, when we are doing it, and who is responsible. A good one has six to twelve milestones from now until close (technical evaluation, steering committee approval, legal review), each with a buyer owner, a seller owner, and a target date. It is written as a shared commitment, not a seller forecast.
That last part is why most MAPs fail. A plan the seller writes alone is a close plan wearing a costume. The buyer never committed to those dates, so the dates mean nothing, and by week two the document is describing a deal that no longer exists.
The problem is not that reps don't know what a MAP is. It is that building one that reflects the actual deal, everything the buyer has said across four or five conversations, takes hours of rereading notes and call recordings. So most deals never get one, and the ones that do get a template filled in from memory.
The stakes
Your champion sells when you're not in the room
Complex deals are decided in meetings your rep never attends: the budget conversation, the steering committee, the hallway exchange with the CFO. Those rooms are not calm. In Gartner's 2025 survey of B2B buying teams, 74% showed unhealthy conflict during the decision process, and the teams that reached consensus were 2.5 times more likely to report a high-quality deal. The person carrying your deal through that conflict is your champion, and champions lose winnable deals for an avoidable reason: they walk in armed with enthusiasm instead of a plan.
Champion enablement means giving that person what they need to sell internally. A mutual action plan is the piece that choreographs it: it tells the champion's own organization what happens next, who owns it, and when the decision points come. When the timeline is written down and both sides have agreed to it, momentum stops depending on whoever remembered to follow up. Buyers misjudge the timeline too: research published in Harvard Business Review found that a typical complex purchase takes twice as long as customers expect. A dual-owned plan is how both sides see the slip coming.
The mechanism
How does Ollie create a mutual action plan?
Ollie drafts the MAP; the understanding underneath it comes from Optivian, the deal intelligence layer Ollie is built on. Optivian reads every deal interaction, the emails, the calls, the meetings, and keeps a structured picture of each deal current: the stakeholders engaged, the qualification criteria, the decision process, the next steps that were actually discussed. The MAP is drafted from that picture.
Timing works the same way. A MAP drafted after the first call is fiction; there is no decision process to plan around yet. Optivian watches for the ingredients a real plan needs: at least two stakeholders engaged, next steps documented, the decision process understood, and enough conversations to know how this buyer actually buys. When the deal crosses that line, the draft arrives from Ollie in Slack, Teams, or the CRM, with an explanation of why this deal and why now.
The draft is a starting point, and the deal keeps moving after it is written. When the buyer mentions a budget window, a new stakeholder joins, or procurement turns out to be the real bottleneck, the rep does not have to brief Ollie on any of it. Ollie redrafts from the latest deal context, so the change the buyer mentioned in Tuesday's call is already in Wednesday's draft. The rep steers only the judgment calls, in plain language: “Add a proof-of-concept milestone before legal review.” The MAP stays a living document instead of a snapshot that ages out.
The template
What should a mutual action plan template include?
A complete mutual action plan template includes five components: milestones (six to twelve steps from now until close), dual ownership on every milestone, target dates, decision points, and the key actions at each step.
Six to twelve key steps from now until close
Every milestone has a buyer owner and a seller owner
When each step should be complete
Where the deal moves forward or pauses for approval
What actually happens at each milestone
The template is the easy part. The hard part is what goes in it: the milestones have to match this buyer's real decision process, the dates have to survive contact with their budget calendar, and the owners have to be people who actually appeared in the deal.
Templates start with a blank page. Ollie starts with the deal: every draft comes from the deal profile, the interaction history, and what the buyer has actually said, so a MAP for one deal names different milestones and different owners than the next.
Champion enablement
The MAP is one of three documents your champion needs
Champion enablement is the work of arming the buyer-side person who sells for you internally: the champion who has to convince their own colleagues without your rep in the room. It runs on three documents, and each has a moment in the deal. The pressure those documents work against is real: Forrester's 2026 buyer research finds business buyers under mounting pressure to justify every dollar spent, with procurement acting as a decision maker in 53% of buying cycles.
Value summary, early to mid stage. A one-pager written in the champion's voice, comparing the options on the table, including doing nothing, so the champion can convince peers and their manager the problem is worth solving. This is the document your champion wishes existed the night before they pitch it internally.
Mutual action plan, mid stage. The shared timeline above: the milestones, the owners on both sides, and the dates both sides agreed to. Fit is agreed, multiple stakeholders are in motion, and momentum now depends on who does what by when.
Business case, late stage. The economic buyer needs financial justification, not enthusiasm: projected gains, investment analysis, payback period. Ollie builds the numbers from quantified metrics extracted from the deal and proof points from your own case studies, and shows the calculation basis behind the numbers, so the CFO can see where each one comes from instead of taking a vendor's word for it.
Ollie drafts each document when the deal reaches its moment. Not every deal needs all three. Complex enterprise deals use them in sequence.
The shift
Why does this work as a co-worker and not as a template library?
Every sales team already has templates. The MAP template sits in a shared drive next to the business case spreadsheet, and neither has been opened since the enablement session that introduced them. Mid-deal, nobody has three spare hours to fill one in well.
Nobody opens the template, because the deal is already understood. Optivian keeps the deal's picture current; Ollie notices when the deal is ready for a MAP or a business case, drafts the document, and brings it to the rep where the rep already works. The work arrives done, at the moment it is useful, with the reasoning attached. The rep's job shrinks from “build this from scratch someday” to “review this now and share it.”
That is what makes Ollie an AI sales co-worker, not an assistant. An assistant waits to be asked. A template waits to be filled in. A co-worker notices the deal needs the document and has it ready before you do.
Customer story · Supermetrics
Running at Supermetrics today
At Supermetrics, Ollie works across 50 sellers in three regions, and the deal documents were the part of the work reps felt first. Business cases that used to take one to two hours each are now drafted in minutes, and in multiple recent wins, Ollie-generated business cases were the specific assets used to secure board-level budget approval. Mutual action plans and value summaries followed the same pattern: assets that moved deals forward but were almost never produced by hand, because making them genuinely good took time nobody had. After the hire, the pilot team's win rate ran 20% higher than the rest of the sales org.
It used to take me 1–2 hours to build each business case… with Ollie I can do it in minutes.
Related: how Ollie watches every deal and acts on the unhealthy ones, and how managers find where the pipeline stalls.
FAQ
Common questions about mutual action plans
See it on a deal
Watch Ollie work, then see the drafts up close
Book a 30-minute demo. The video shows how Ollie works; the demo shows the documents themselves: a mutual action plan, a value summary, a business case with the calculation basis open, each drafted from a representative deal. And you leave with the answers a video can't give: how setup works, where drafts land for your team, and what writes back to your CRM.