Wondering how to take control of your sales process?
How to lead your customer to buyer and seller success?
Have no fear, MAAP is here!
All jokes aside, you have done need assessment, you and your customer are both clear on the task at hand and have decided the problem is worth solving.
Now it’s time to position yourself as the go-to person. But how?
You can do so by getting a head start. Invite your customer to the Mutually Agreed Action Plan (MAAP), and turn your sales process into a professional project plan.
The MAAP is designed to help the customer make an informed buying decision and achieve their goals. When employed correctly, it will help you to stay in control of your sales process. It will guide you and your customer towards a common goal and provide clarity to all parties involved.
You can make the MAAP as simple or as complex as needed. Detailed MAAP’s work best for medium to complex opportunities. They take some time to set up properly, so use them only after you’ve qualified and have done proper need assessment.
The MAAP provides a way to implement commercial consequences, plan decision making, define all major stakeholders and appoint accountability.
This is done by incorporating all opportunity milestones into your project timeline and appoint individual tasks to your major stakeholders.
With that being said, check out the MAAP example below. It’s a three worksheet Excel file you can use (template included in the book Challenge, Sell Teach, Involve) for those medium to complex opportunities.
MAAP Worksheet 1: The Project Definition
As worksheet 1 shows, you can use this sheet to get both yours and the customer’s nose pointing in the same direction. Define the project scope, the parties involved, goals and objectives. It is the front sheet of your MAAP and should contain your contact details. Nothing too fancy here.
MAAP Worksheet 2: The Project Planning
The project timeline is the core of the MAAP. It helps visualize the project plan and adds professionality to your plan.
It’s function is to create urgency when deadlines are soon to be overdue, and aid with creating the feeling of accountability for different stakeholders amongst your customers.
This is the part where you can add those major milestones like we talked about earlier.
Use the timeline to plan for meetings, deliverables, and key decisions, etc. In later communication, you can use the timeline to follow up with your stakeholders and keep on top of the planning.
MAAP Worksheet 3: Project Members
This worksheet should contain all the stakeholders relevant to the project. Ideally, the customer team members should be representative of all people that could influence the outcome of the project. At the minimum, it should contain all operational & commercial decision-makers, gatekeepers, and major influencers.
As it is coupled with the project timeline, you can use it to assign stakeholders to specific tasks or decision milestones. By doing so, you involve your stakeholders on a common journey, and make it much more likely that all stakeholders work towards the same goals and objectives.
Mutual Agreed action Plan: A summary
The MAAP is set up to achieve three major goals:
- Involve your customer
- Enable control of your sales process
- Create consensus amongst your stakeholders
If you’d like to know more about how to set up and use the Mutual Agreed Action Plan ( and other awesome SME selling techniques), be sure to check out my LIVING book: Challenge, Sell Teach, Involve.
PS. Wonder why it’s called a LIVING book?
It’s a digital book that lives inside an online learning environment and keeps evolving in time. The book gets updates frequently, either in additional content added, or in updating existing content to make sure all insights provided stay relevant.
It’s isn’t a regular book either. Yes, it contains text & pictures like any other, but it also contains all templates used and it even has instructional video’s on how to use templates like the MAAP correctly!
So if you’d like an ultimate book on Sales using Subject Matter Expertise, a book that grows as you grow, be sure to check out:
Challenge, Sell Teach, Involve
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Take care — Mohamed Ali
