Making Mutual Action Plans Sexy with Mark Fershteyn

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Appreciate it, brother. Thanks for having me.

So for people that are listening. So the way this happened, I made a post on LinkedIn about some of the topics, and Mark jumped on is like, yo, I think people need to hear about action plans and collaborative selling. I was like, yes. No one else is taught. Like, everyone's talking about prospecting and cold calling and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, yes, action plans and collaborative selling. So we're going to dive right into this. What the hell is a mutual action plan? Because there's a lot of people nodding their heads and they think they know what it is, but they don't. So let's define this right out the gate. What is a mutual action plan in the sales process?

Yeah, great question, Katie. I mean, literally, what it sounds like, right? It's really. A mutual action plan is a document that outlines what both sides have to do to see success in a complex deal. That's it, Right. A mutual action plan lets the buyers and sellers collaborate together to map out the buyer journey. So there's really no surprises along the way. And our belief around it and why we started a company around it is we believe it's a superpower when used correctly.

So you said something there. I'm already going to dive into this. We're going to go. Not that we had a script. We're going to script right away. You said success for both sides. And I think so often salespeople never actually define what success looks like for the buyer. So how does a rep determine what success looks like for a buyer?

That's a great question. I mean, it's really when you solve that pain that they came to you in the first place for, it's not you getting the commission check or you closing the deal. It's you solving their pain. So much so that they then go and tell their friends about it, that they post it on LinkedIn. Then all of a sudden, they're texting you because they're in your city and they want to meet up for a beer. And that is, in my opinion, success for both sides.

But I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna push you here. How do I determine that, right? Everyone talks about pain. How do you actually find out what that pain is? How do you actually find out what success means? Right. Because the removal of pain doesn't necessarily mean success. Right. So how do I find out what success looks like to my buyer?

You talk, you collaborate, you have a hell of a discovery call, maybe two. You figure out what their actual initiatives are, you dive in, you figure out what their incentives are based, you know, let's take it even a step further, right? Yes, their pain might be to close more deals, but why do they want a promotion? Do they want, you know, a salary increase? Do they want to look better in front of their peers? Right. What is the actual underlying. That's what you should go after.

Love it. And so do all of those things make it into a mutual action plan?

Ideally.

Right.

I think a lot of people have different definitions, right? There's things like joint engagement plans and close plans and all these things. Really, at the end of the day, as long as you're guiding the buyer and you're enabling the buyer to be successful, you're on the right track.

Love it. So then why are these so important? I guess there's two questions here. Why are they so important and why do they work so well? Because you gotta really believe in something to go start a company around it. Right? Right. So why are they so important? And why do they close deals faster? Right. Because everyone can say, oh, this tool helps close faster or mutual action plans help deals close faster. Why? Why do they actually help a deal close faster?

Yeah, I mean, so if you think about it, right, let's say you're working a mid market enterprise deal. Shit gets complicated really quickly. Right. There's 10 stakeholders, maybe 20 on the buying side. There's timelines you have to manage and most of the time you're selling to someone that's never even bought a service or solution like yours. Right? So not only do you have to herd all of these cats into a deadline, but you also have to guide them and enable them to be successful.

Right.

Like we just talked about, I think it's almost impossible to do this with email. Right. So with the biggest benefit of mutual action lines is they help everyone stay accountable. They give you insights into what the hell is actually going on. It's not. This deal is in stage five in my salesforce. Therefore, it's 60% chance to close. It's no, let's look at this phase. This stage three has 10 tasks that have to be done. They're on task six. Normally this task takes 10 days, we're at 30 days, something is going wrong. It's that kind of level that brings it into it. And when you do that and when you guide the buyer, close deals faster. Like the biggest analogy we always use is, let me ask you, like, why do you think Amazon has blown up so much? Why do you think it's been so successful?

I mean, because they focus on what the consumers actually want.

Exactly right. How hard is it to buy something off Amazon? It's one click. That's one click, right? They enabled the buyer. If you can do the same thing for your buyer and make it 10 times easier for them to go through your purchase process than your competitor, you're going to win more deals now.

So Bezos was asked a question and you know, everyone has their different feelings on Bezos as an individual, but they asked him, like, you know, what's going to change in the next 10 years? What's going to change in the next 10 years? And how is Amazon going to adapt? And his response was golden. And it applies to this too. He goes, well, a lot of things are going to change, but what we focus on, what is not going to change, consumers are still going to want lower prices and faster delivery. That's not going to change. Right. And so if we look at the sales world, there's not going to be fewer people involved in decisions moving forward. That's not going to happen. Right. Those are things that are not going to change. So having action plans in place, I think is something that will become more foundational and should. So let's move to that next step. Alright? Someone listens to this, they go, all right, that does sound good. How do I build a good mutual action plan? Let's say I'm starting from scratch and I go, you know, yeah, I do need something. What are the things that should be included in action plan that actually do help the deal along?

Yeah, great question. So a couple things. So first it has to be collaborative, right? It can't be something you go off and do in a vacuum and then just send it off over email. The whole point of it is that it's mutual. Sitting there and mapping out what the next steps look like, what the possible objections are, but also who the stakeholders involved are, who are the decision makers on the buying side and on the selling team. What did we talk about? What are the call notes from our different conversation? Because I think we can all relate. You think you have a great call, you talk to your prospect, a week later, they forgot everything you said. Or worse, they Forgot everything they said. So having that all in one place. And then of course, I think the part that brings it all together is just having the content in there, the collateral, the resources. So that way they're not searching through their inbox looking for that contract you sent them or the case study or that YouTube video of another competitor and how you beat them. It's all around consolidation and making it as easy as possible.

And so if I'm hearing that correctly, if you're trying to build a basic mutual action plan, you need the stakeholders. What should be in there on the stakeholders? Right. So it shouldn't just be like, Kevin, Mark, Julie, what should they have in there about the stakeholders? Yeah.

So I would have what the responsibilities are, where they're going to be a part of the action plan. Maybe Kevin's in there, but he doesn't sign off until we get to legal. Great. So we're going to put him in that part. Are we going to make a note of it? You know, ideally, if you can make it some kind of internal notes that you can see as a sales rep, but the customer can't. That's ideal. But it doesn't have to be right. If you're. Let's say, I think the easiest way to implement this would be to do like a Google spreadsheet. Right. That you share with the client. It's not ideal, but it gets you 20, 30% of the way there. Right. So now you have notes who they're responsible for contact information. You're also showing the buyer that you went above and beyond. Right. If you're doing this and your competitor isn't, just put yourself in the buyer's chance. Which one would you rather have?

Yeah, no, for sure. I want someone that's guiding me along the way. And something that he said earlier, if you're listening, no one has ever taught buyers how to buy. And so you may have this assumption that they know what they're doing. I'll let you know. They probably don't. And so the rep that actually helps me buy, helps me buy, walks me through the process. Because you've sold it more times than I've bought it.

Yeah.

You actually know more as a salesperson on how it should be bought. And if you can educate through that process, I think that's huge. So you got our stakeholders, we've got the call notes you said, putting things in there like, you know what they said, which I think is huge. Right. And then. And then what? So now we get into the action items. Right. So if this is a living document.

Right?

Like how many action items go in there? Right? Like how? I guess there's two questions here. One, action items went to how do I get the prospect to actually uphold their end of a map? I'm gonna start calling it map by the way. It's what I've always called it throughout my career. Mutual action plan. That's what I'm calling. I'm like, I'm done saying mutual action plan. It's too much. Right? So one, like how many action items should you put into a map? And then two, how do you, I guess, hold a prospect accountable to getting those things done?

Yeah, excellent question. So I think one of the biggest mistakes or misconceptions that we see is that the action plan stops when the contract is signed again. It's all around solving that pain. That could mean six months after the contract is signed, after customer success has already been in there onboarding the customer. And now you're drinking champagne post corona world together. You're popping the bottle first off. So however many steps take you to get there, that's what needs to be in the mutual action plan. You know, I mean for us. Here's the crazy part. So We've analyzed over 20,000 deals in our system. The average mid market deal has 40 tasks that have to be completed. That's just mid market and that's buyer and seller. Right now on the enterprise side, it's over 100. Right. So you have, I mean, you think about it, you're a sales rep, you're working 10 deals. All of a sudden that's 8,000 tasks that have to be done every single month. How do you do that? Right. It's. There's no way to keep it in your eye. At least I can. I'm sure there's people way smarter than me. They can. But you know, for most of us.

And then I'm jump in there real quick there and be so bold to say salespeople. You can't. You trust your memories way too much. That's not the right way to do it. Like you shouldn't have to remember all these things. It should be outlined in a way that you can just completely go through it. Because we've all been there, we've all forgotten that to send something, we've all forgotten to complete a small step. We've all missed a piece in the sales process that comes and bites us six months later. Like having that shit documented is so valuable. I still remember getting to the end of a line on a deal and I had Missed one of the simplest security questions that should have been asked four months prior and we got to the very end, everything good to go. And because we missed that, we had to redo all, everything. Right. Because we thought we had it so we can't remember it.

Right.

So I think yes, building all those tasks in there are huge. But then how do you help a buyer? Right. Because buying is not their full time job. You know, I've got a hundred reps that I'm looking after. I got a number to go hit, I've got all this going on. How does a sales rep help me actually make sure I'm completing my tasks throughout this process?

Yeah, So a couple things. So one, you have to make it brain dead simple for them to engage, right. You know, like a lot of companies will talk to, they're like, oh yeah, we have a great mutual action plan process. We do it in Jira or we do it in Asana, but our customers don't engage it. It's like, well, you don't have a great process then. Yeah, no customer is going to sign into Asana, create an account and jump through hoops. Right. Like they're giving you money they shouldn't have to. Right. So first off, you have to make it super simple. Once you do that, it's all around then positioning and framing. Another mistake we always see is like, hey, we just fire this off and we never talk about it. No, you have to frame it the right way. I think that's probably where a lot of this uncomfortability comes from because people don't know how to frame it. It's like, look, I've sold this product a lot more than you've ever bought it. To make your experience as best as possible and as seamless as possible, here are usually the steps that need to happen. Does this match up with your buying process, how do we change it, et cetera? Does this match up with your timeline? Right. Because a lot of times you're talking to a customer like, yeah, we want to go live by August, we'll sign the contract July 30th. Well, it's like, no, we have 30 things that need to happen before then. So if you want to go live in August, we need to sign a contract yesterday. Right. But they're not aware of that. So you have to make it super simple and you have to really be diligent about using it on every meeting. So like for example, I start off every sales call by pulling up the mutual action plan and saying, hey, here's what we talked about, here's what we said. Were these things accomplished? Yes. No. And things are going to get pushed. It's fine. Again, their job isn't buying unless they're in procurement. And even then it's probably not. Right. But the other thing is, like, you're going to be driving most of it. So that should be the expectation. It shouldn't be, oh, if my customer is not going in and engaging it every single day, something is wrong. I think that's like a cherry on top.

So how do you walk that line, though, of mapping out all the things that need to get done, get done without overwhelming the buyer? Right. Because if I'm a buyer and I'm getting ready to do something and I see a list of 70 things, I go, oh, God, like, I don't, I don't have time for this. Right. So, like, how do you balance that of like making sure they understand what needs to get done, but that I don't feel as a buyer that I'm like, Jesus, 22 steps. What is all this? How do you balance that?

Yeah, it's an excellent question. And I think there is a thin line to walk. It depends on every sales team sells to a Persona. A lot of it does depend on the Persona. If you're selling to engineers and CTOs, they might want to see all 80 steps with the specific due dates and deadlines. That's just the way that works. If you're selling a salesperson, we might be like, hell no, back up. It does matter. What I would always recommend is you know your buyer best, right? And start small and say, hey, to get to the next phase, which maybe that's a poc. Here are the five things that need to happen. And then when we finish that, now let's unlock the next phase, which is implementation or rollout, right? Or contracts, for example. Here are the 10 steps that need to be there. Now, you can implement everything from day one. We usually don't recommend it, but you want to have everything mapped out. Right? But also the other thing is you're not going to be doing 22 tasks in a week. This is going to be a six, nine month process. So it's a meeting here, it's a meeting there. And they're also not the only ones doing it. There's going to be five or six other people on the buying side that are going to be responsible for these tasks. And that's why it's so important to assign clear owners and clear timelines. Because just having all the tasks in there that's scary as hell.

Right?

That's not gonna do any good.

Now, I want to back up to something you said, right? He's like, you know, you know the buyers process, you know better because you're talking to a lot of them. I don't know that a lot of sales reps actually do. Because here's what's interesting for a mid market is, you know, and it's what's hard about our industry. A mid market sales rep or an enterprise sales rep, have they ever bought mid market software or enterprise software? They haven't. They don't know what it's actually like to buy. So how as a sales rep or how as a sales team do you educate or learn how people in your industry buy? Because I think the salespeople and sales leaders make a lot of assumptions on how people buy because they've never actually bought a product of that level. Right. So how do we find out the buying process to help start building out mutual action plans? Because it can't just be as easy as. Hey, Mark. Okay, cool. So walk me through your buying process.

Right.

So like, how do. How do we learn that as a sales org, as a sales team, how do we learn what some of those foundational steps are for our buyers so we can start building out not templated action plans, but like we kind of know, right? And now we're fitting things in.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think first off, it has to start with leadership. Right. If your sales stages in salesforce are all around sales activities and not around buying activities, you're going to be in for a pain of heart. Right.

Say that one more time for the people, please.

Yeah. So if your salesforce stages are all around your sales stages and not the customer's buyer journey, it's going to be a shit show from day one. Right. Again, your job as a salesperson is solving a pain and captivating the customer. That's what it is. It's not about pitching your product and shoving it down their throat. That's a byproduct of solving their problems. One thing we did very early on is we actually sat down, we shadowed some of our advisors and customers in the early days in the alpha, before we were doing pilots of figuring out, okay, what does your buying process look like? Okay, now let us go and create those templates. Listen, it's a lot of hard work, but you have to have this beginner mindset. I see mindfulness behind you in the book. You have to be mindful about it. Right. And you have to take this children's approach of, I don't know anything, let me learn from you. But once you do that a couple of times, it starts to become a lot easier.

I love that because that is what allows you then to educate people through something I'm a big fan of with maps. And right now I don't have to use them as much because we're in SMB, right? So it's a little bit faster. But when we were selling bigger deals at other companies, having tried checklists for them, right? Like, you know, what legal is going to ask them? Have that ready. Like, you know, like what those common questions and objections are going to be and having that included in the resources. Because a lot of maps, they just have resources that are like, you know, testimonials or a case study where it's like, all right, cool. But they don't actually have things that make buying easier. So what are some of those resources that people can include in a map that make buying easier?

Yeah, I love it. So a couple things, right? So not only of, you know, let's even take your example level deeper, right? Yes. We have Legal. We know that these are the questions. Because of that, we've already adapted our contract to match what we think is going to happen for you. Here's the contract. So while we're running in parallel, you can take this to Legal and we can start getting red lines so we're not held up at that finish line, you know, three months down the road, right? So Enable again, it all comes back to Enable Match. I sound like a damn broken record, but that's the name of the game, right? So it's some other resources we see. So like for example, if you're setting up a poc, you're probably going to need list of accounts, list of usernames, right? So having a place for them to upload that information, whether it's an Excel sheet, having contracts in there, having forms in there, really just you have to ask yourself, what is the goal of this stack? Maybe it's to complete the contract. Is the contract in there? No. Then it probably should be even putting something like a link to the DocuSign in there so they don't have to look through their email. That's an easy way to get enablement. One thing we do is after a call, I'll include the transcription and the call recording in there. Hey, here's the notes that we talked about. Here's what you said you loved. Here's the link with the transcript time of when you said you liked it and here's the pitch deck that we covered, right? So now, yeah, now when you go talk to your boss who wasn't part of the meeting, you're not having to go and pitch recap what you're not going to be doing. You just share this page with them. That's it.

I like that a lot. Like showing we literally just did a training with our team the other day where it's like the more times in follow up and proposals that you can say you said, remember when you liked you wanted, you told me you asked for like the more times you can use their words back, the better your follow up will be. Now you said something good there though, right? It's like, all right, you know, my person is gonna give a recap to the CEO or the cfo. Let's talk about champion selling a little bit, right? Of like, how can you empower your champion, right? Because the days of just getting the CEOs buy in or just getting the VPs buy in are gone. Like it is 7, I think it's up to what average of almost 8 now decision makers in like not even like a mid market deal. Like we're talking like just deal. Just a deal, just a deal, right? Like there's almost seven people involved and there isn't always even in that seven, someone that makes the decision you actually have to get. It would be easier if there was one person that made the decision, but because seven people have to agree. Let's talk about collaborative selling now a little bit, right? Like how do you work through a sales process where you're not going to get to talk to all the DMs and I say DMs in quotes. There may not even be one, right? So let's talk about that a little bit. How can you champion sell better and how does a map fit into that?

Yeah, so I think a map fits incredibly perfectly into it, right? Incredibly perfectly.

That's nice. I like it incredibly, perfectly, substantially. All the words, all the leads, 100%.

Right? I mean listen, at the end of the day, so, you know, first off, I think let's clear up the misconception, right? A lot of people when they think they go, oh, I do a great job of arming my champion and I don't have this problem, right? Harvard Business Review and I don't argue with our business review. I think it was 72% of champions wish they had more information and felt that they were unarmed to sell up the chain, right? So that means nearly every single champion we're Working with doesn't feel properly enabled. So let's start there. Right? So then when you create this mutual action plan, a natural part of it is, okay, as we're going through the buying process, who else needs to be involved? Right? And that leads to a really natural evolution of, hey, can you make these introductions? Can I start having these conversations? Right? And I think it's. We talked about this earlier, but it's so powerful to start multi threading that from early on, right? You don't want to be reliant on one person because what if they, God forbid, get fired or what if they go take another job? What if they get sick? Right? Shit happens, right? So you cannot be reliant on one person. And your job is to build consensus because when you have five of those seven people giving you the thumbs up, you are infinitely more successful than when you have one of seven.

Right.

It's just statistics. So having them all in one place, having that, having the champion actually walk you through the org chart and really the kind of like back channel information you say, oh, well, when you talk to Mike, Mike really only cares about the numbers, so make sure you really talk about the roi. Oh, but when you talk to Jamie, she only really cares about, you know, the customer experience. Right. And if you don't have a champion that's willing to do that, you know, obviously this isn't the case for all of it, but chances are you probably don't have that great of a deal.

And so what's so important with this is you have to ask those questions. The champion isn't always just going to be like, gail that through. So what are some good questions you should always ask your champion? So I like that first one, right? It's like, who are the other people involved? But you took it a step further. What do they care about? Right? Like, okay, these people are involved, but like, all right, Karen, she's going to care about this and Doug's going to care about this. What are some of those questions we should be asking our champion to not only build a better plan, but set ourselves up for success as that deal progresses?

Yeah. Where to start? So one of my favorite ones is first off, have you ever implemented a product like this before? Right. Or have you ever bought? Because that's going to unlock a lot of what you talk about, right? They're going to be like, oh, well, no, actually I haven't. So I would love some guidance. Great, let me create that for you. Right? So there you're off to a good start. If they do start walking through it. I always try and focus on the worst case because that's probably where you're going to end up, right? So, hey, okay, when you've implemented a product like this, did anything come up in the last mile that you didn't anticipate?

Oh, that's good.

And all of a sudden they're like, oh, shit. Actually, last time Jamie told me that she didn't like, you know, their color hair or whatever. And all of a sudden the deal torpedoed, right? So, like, okay, gotta change the color of my hair, right? Gotta. So start thinking about, okay, what happened, right? Hey, you know, just keep it really open, right? So, hey, what's the worst that can happen? What? You know, do you see any objections? Why or why not? You know, is there any reason that they would say no to this? Okay, let me start getting out ahead of that.

Those are good. And then you have to. Sales reps, you have to ask the question, but then you also have to document it. Put it either in the map or put it in your CRM. You do need to put these things down on paper because these are not things that you're going to remember as you go through this. Because then things stall. It happens. It happens to all of us. So, okay, now when you get those questions, how do you use it? Right? So, okay, now I know Bob cares about security and Karen cares about cash and William cares about who knows what William cares about. Right? Kind of the wild card, Willie. Right? What do I do with that information?

Yeah, I mean, listen, these aren't going to be easy sales, right? So you need to sit down. You need to. This is a great, I think, coaching opportunity with your managers, with your directors sitting down and saying, hey, let's role play this a little bit. Here's the background. Here's the situation. Like, I know you're big on role play and working through the numbers, right? Like, let's actually sit down and plan all of this. And it's. You don't need all the answers day one. But put yourself in their shoes and start thinking, okay, if I'm caring and I care about cash, okay, well, what other initiatives are they pushing for this year? Right? What else is competing for this budget? Now that we're in Corona and everything is going on with COVID do they even have a budget? If not, can we be creative? Maybe we have to do a POC with them. Maybe we have to give the product away for 30 days to let them love it first you have to start thinking through that and then implement that in the action plan. I think one of the biggest values of. Look, you have a lot of this information in your CRM. You're not going to invite your client into the CRM.

No.

No way in hell. But there's. I think one of the biggest values of having that information visible to the client is you can call them out on it. Right? So if you and I just spent six months working together and you told me all of the reasons you love this, and then you give me a no, I'm gonna be like, well, Kevin, what the fuck? You just spent six months and here are your words telling me you love this. I'm just confused. Can you help me? Like, I thought we were on the same page, but clearly something happened. And sometimes you just have to challenge the customer. Salespeople aren't always just being nice and taking orders. You have to put your foot down sometimes. And I think that transparency makes it really easy to do that. Yeah.

And it's easy to put your foot down into challenge when it's for their reasons, not yours. As the salesperson, if you don't have a good reason for them to close other than you want the deal, you're not gonna get that deal. And they can smell that. Right. But when you bring up the things that they wanted, the things that they've worked through, through, you've gotten ahead of all those things. It's a different conversation. Right. Which leads to kind of one of the final. Not the final question, but things to talk through. So what do you do when the dreaded ghosting happens? You have this action plan. You've been working through it. Then all of a sudden, I'm not hearing from Mark anymore. We were supposed to have this call on Thursday. He misses that call on Thursday. Nothing's being updated in the plan. How do you leverage a map when people start to ghost?

Yeah, so. Excellent question. So first thing is in the data support system. More than happy to dive into that. But when you do implement a map, you're going to increase the velocity of the sale, right? You're going to close deals faster. And when you close deals faster, the chance of someone ghosting you in the first place is going to drop. So, like, for. Again, when we analyze these 20,000 deals, we found that momentum was the number one predictor for success. And if momentum dropped at any one point, you're not getting it back. So again, it all comes back to enablement. So when you do start getting ghosted, for me, I always try and go with honesty and transparency. Like, hey, Kevin, we just built a lot of mutual respect. On my first call, when I do a discovery call, one of the things I say and teach my team to do is say, hey, listen, I'm going to be very honest with you and I expect the same from you. If this at any point is no longer an initiative or priority, please let me know. Let's not waste each other's time. I'm going to give you that level of respect and I expect it in return. And you're starting off the right foot. And when you have that all the way through, I always come back to him and say, hey, listen, I haven't heard from you in a couple of days. Are you really busy? Did something come up or are you now looking at other competitors? Questions? Whatever, just let me know. No hard feelings either way. I just want to be able to help you if you tell me, hey, you're under fire for 60 days, circle back. Right? But it's having that open like communication channel, which can be pretty hard, but that's the way I operate anyway.

Yeah, so now you said momentum, which I like, but I want to press here. When it comes to momentum, how much of that do you think is the buyer versus the seller? Right. Like, you know, call it causation, correlation. Right. Like if I need something as a buyer, I'm going to move more quickly to get something done. Do you think? So I'll rephrase the question. How does a sales rep build urgency or momentum? Right. Because again, if I've never bought something before, I've got all these other things going on, how do they, like, how do we get that momentum going? Because obviously as a buyer, if I want something, I'm going to move quickly on it. Right. But go ahead.

Sorry to cut you off, I was gonna say. So listen, at the end of the day, you can want something really badly, but if you've never navigated a mid market or enterprise buying cycle, doesn't matter how badly you want something, that doesn't mean you're gonna get it, nor does it know you know who to talk to. Right. So first off, I think again it comes down to the salesperson enabling. Obviously if you really, really want something, it's gonna help, right? But it's not gonna be the end all, be all. So it really is a collaborative effort, but at the same time it really just comes down to solving that pain. And it is all around the pain. And if you make that pain more felt, felt harder, then you're going to be able to get that urgency and that momentum but also, again, find out what their success criteria is if they want to implement your solution so they can go live by Q3, so that they can have the best quarter ever. Because otherwise your company is going to shut down. That's a hell of an urgency, right?

Yeah.

So build around that and always drive to what the success looks like.

I love it. Okay, so we're down to our final two questions here. So the first one is my second favorite question. Right? So we've been riffing on maps for 37 minutes, which might, by the way, be a record. People are like, who could talk about maps for that long? This has been a good chat, right? We've been going out, we've broken it all down. Let's say they forget everything but three things, right? They forget this whole conversation except for three things. When it comes to, you know, building or having or using a mutual action plan, what would the three things you'd want them to remember to be?

Put me on the spot here. Let's see. So first, one, I think mutual action plan is really just a way to manage your deal like a project. And if you think of it through that lens, it clears up a lot of the bullshit. Right. Two, I think enabling your buyer with a map is going to help you close more deals and it's going to make you do it faster. Right? That's it. You know, there's a reason why Salesforce and Microsoft and Adobe, like, if you're a sales rep in one of those orgs, you literally cannot move a deal to stage three in Salesforce without it having a mutual action plan created. You just can't. Right. Three, I would say it's all around traditional transparency and accountability. A map isn't worth a damn if you're not sitting down and saying, hey, you, Kevin, need to complete this task by Friday the 15th. If you don't do that, we won't be able to have a go live date of August 1st. Having that transparency and accountability, that's the main thing. And it can be a really uncomfortable skill to build up. But I promise you, it is incredibly worth it.

I love it. I think that's important. If most people even just started with those three things, they'd already be seeing more success. They get ghosted less you close more deals and it is a better buying experience for everyone listening. As a sales rep, you don't understand how hard it is to buy sometimes. I am a vp. I do control my budget and it is not. I can't just swipe a credit card for a $75,000 contract. I can't just go do that, you know, like, it's hard to buy sometimes, and this makes it so much easier. So I love that. And that transitioned us into my last question. It's always my favorite. So the name of the podcast is Live Better sell better. Right? Like taking care of the person in salesperson as well. So what would be your parting live better advice? Right. What's something you would tell the salespeople or the sales leaders listening that allow them to get more out of life, Live a better life. Right. Take better care of themselves. What would be the parting live better advice you have for everybody?

Yeah. So something I started doing, you know, two years ago or so is really holding myself to daily goals. Right. The same way. And really just like you do in sales, right? Okay. If we have a quota of, let's say I have to bring in $50,000 this month, that means every single day I have to bring in, I don't know what, fifteen hundred dollars. That means every single hour, I have to make twenty prospecting calls, Right? If you do the exact same thing for your sales, like, I do this twice a year, halfway through the year, it's coming up right now. At the end of the year, I sit down and I map out three or four main goals, and then I break those down into buckets and I say, okay, for these goals to be, you know, accomplished, let's say if I want to get, you know, I want to lose 40 pounds. Okay, what does that mean on a monthly schedule? And what does that mean on a weekly? And what does that mean on a daily? Well, it means I need to start working out more. Okay. Let's make that measurable. I need to start going to the gym four times a week for a minimum of an hour. Right. And then it becomes very easy, did I do this or not? And if you didn't do it, be honest with yourself. And really, like, I think one of the biggest problems for me, you know, my early childhood was I just would lie to myself, right. I think we're all, we're all guilty of it. So cut the bullshit, be honest with yourself, hold yourself accountable, and listen, if you slipped, you slipped. But do better the next day, right? If you just get 1% better every single day or five years, you're going to be a fucking monster.

Nah, man. One of the things that I do personally, and I have my team go through it all the time too, is we call them three by threes. What are the three things? Daily, weekly, and monthly that you'll commit to in order to reach your goals. Three things daily that you will not miss, weekly that you will not miss, and monthly that you will not miss in order to achieve your goals. So we do three by threes and we break that down and they're just, they're non negotiable, right? Non negotiable. And ready and ready to go. So, Mark, my man, this was, this was good, dude. Right? Like, I hope people get as excited about this stuff as you and I do because it's that important and it really can make a huge difference. Where, where can people find you? Where can they learn about what you're doing? Where can they learn about recap? Like how can they look up and learn more about this topic?

Yeah, for sure. So very active on LinkedIn, you know, that's how you and I connected. So find me on LinkedIn. Markfirstain. You can email me markcapped IO One thing we've recently launched actually with Corona and everything going on, I have friends that are account executives and if they don't have a great quarter, who knows, they might be out of a job. So one thing we've done to really try and give back as much as possible is we've created freemium accounts for every ae. So if you want a free account, hit us up, we'll give it. You just have to sit down through a 30 minute onboarding with us because we want to make sure you get up on the great foot. So if you're willing to put 30 minutes in your time, we'll give you a free account. On top of that, want to give you any of your listeners a 20% discount. All they have to do is just mention you or the podcast and they'll get 20% off the year for those team plans. And then one more thing is, you know, it can be really daunting tasks to get started with mutual action plans. Right. It's a lot to go from 0 to 100. So if you go to maptemplate recap IO, there's a free Google sheet you can use. Copy it, make it your own, tweak it. That gets you 70, 80% of the way there.

Love it. And first of all, that's amazing. Didn't know we were going to get so many bonuses on here too. We'll include the link in the call notes as well to make that easy for people. But Mark, my man, thank you for the knowledge, thank you for the bonuses there. This was amazing. Thanks for being on the show, dude.

Thanks for having me, brother. Look forward to it.