A deal without a shared plan drifts. Ollie drafts the mutual action plan before it does.

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 6 to 12 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 2 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 4 or 5 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. See how a 50-seller revenue team runs Ollie.

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.

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, and the meetings, and keeps a structured picture of each deal current: the stakeholders engaged, the qualification criteria, the decision process, and 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 2 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.

Example: the draft arrives

The missing piece was the decision process: your champion confirmed the steering-committee route yesterday.

Example: the drafted plan

Created June 3, with a target completion of August 29. On the seller’s side, every milestone is owned by you, the account executive. Here are all 8, with the owner on the buyer’s side and the dates. The plan closes with the shared success criteria.

1. Security review complete. SOC 2 pack reviewed and data processing terms accepted by IT. Buyer owner: their IT lead. Complete, June 9 to 13.
2. Technical evaluation signed off. Sandbox evaluation against integration and reporting criteria. Buyer owner: their IT lead. Complete, June 16 to 27.
3. Steering committee approval. Decision meeting with operations and finance to approve the rollout. Buyer owner: your champion. In progress, July 6 to 10.
4. MSA to legal review. Master service agreement submitted to their legal team for redlines. Buyer owner: their legal team. Scheduled, July 13 to 24.
5. Redlines resolved. Buyer owner: their legal team. Not started, July 27 to August 1.
6. Commercial agreement finalized. Buyer owner: your champion. Not started, August 3 to 8.
7. Countersignature. Buyer owner: your champion. Not started, August 10 to 12.
8. Kickoff scheduled. Buyer owner: their IT lead. Not started, August 17 to 21.

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.

What should a mutual action plan template include?

A complete mutual action plan template includes 5 components: milestones (6 to 12 steps from now until close), dual ownership on every milestone, target dates, decision points, and the key actions at each step.

1. Milestones. 6 to 12 key steps from now until close.
2. Dual ownership. Every milestone has a buyer owner and a seller owner.
3. Target dates. When each step should be complete.
4. Decision points. Where the deal moves forward or pauses for approval.
5. Key actions. 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.

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 3 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Business case, late stage. The economic buyer needs financial justification, not enthusiasm: projected gains, investment analysis, and 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 3. Complex enterprise deals use them in sequence. That is champion enablement with Ollie: the plan, the value summary, and the business case, each drafted from the deal.

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 3 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.”

Example: a redraft

You ask in Slack: “Update the MAP. And add a proof-of-concept milestone before legal review.” A minute later, Ollie replies with the updated draft:

Ollie picked up the new timeline from yesterday’s call with their IT lead, without being told, and made their IT lead the buyer owner of the proof of concept.

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.

Running at Supermetrics today

At Supermetrics, Ollie works across 50 sellers in 3 regions, and the deal documents were the part of the work reps felt first. Business cases that used to take 1 to 2 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. In the pilot, the team working with Ollie had a 20% higher win rate than the rest of the sales org.

Read the full Supermetrics case study.

Related: how Ollie watches every deal and acts on the unhealthy ones, how managers find where the pipeline stalls, and how AI sales meeting prep arrives before every deal meeting. To see the plan, the value summary, and the business case on your own deals, explore champion enablement.