Comparing by fit
Two ways of thinking, side by side. There is no winner here — read across each row and choose the one that fits your situation.
Sales
A jointly owned, dated plan from here to live — so the deal has no invisible middle.
By 6days
Sales
A checklist for whether a complex deal is real, before you spend a quarter finding out.
By 6days
When to use — Mutual Action Plan
Use it on complex deals with long cycles, multiple approval gates, and implementation work after signature — especially where you have been burned by late-stage procedural slippage or where the buyer has a hard date they must hit.
When to use — MEDDPICC Qualification
Use it on high-value B2B deals with several stakeholders and a long cycle, especially where forecast accuracy matters and pipeline reviews have become exercises in optimism. It is most useful as a shared vocabulary that lets a manager ask 'what don't we know?' without it reading as an attack on the rep.
When not to use — Mutual Action Plan
Avoid it on small or fast transactions, where it is bureaucratic overhead the buyer will resent. It is worthless if it becomes a seller-authored document emailed for agreement — that is a project plan with a friendly name, and it will not predict anything. And it cannot fix a deal with no genuine urgency; it will simply document the drift precisely.
When not to use — MEDDPICC Qualification
Avoid it in transactional or self-serve sales, where the overhead exceeds the deal value and there is no committee to map. Applied mechanically it becomes a CRM compliance ritual that reps fill in after the fact, which produces the paperwork and none of the thinking. It also qualifies deals; it does not create them.
Late-stage deals slip for procedural reasons nobody tracked. A security review nobody scheduled, a legal redline waiting on a lawyer's holiday, a signature authority that turned out to sit two levels up. The seller's forecast says a date; the buyer's organisation has never agreed to that date and often has not been asked. Both sides are surprised, and the surprise is always in the same direction.
Enterprise pipelines fill with deals that feel promising and never close. The meetings are pleasant, the champion is enthusiastic, the demo goes well — and then the deal stalls in procurement, or the budget turns out to belong to another department, or the enthusiastic champion had no authority to buy anything. The cost is not the lost deal; it is the quarter of attention that went into it and the forecast built on top of it.
A mutual action plan is a shared document listing every step from the current moment to a working deployment, each with an owner on one side or the other and a date both sides accept. It is written with the buyer, not for them. Its value is partly logistical and partly diagnostic: a champion who will not co-author a plan, or cannot get anyone to own a step, has just told you something about the deal that no amount of enthusiasm can offset. It replaces the seller's private forecast with a jointly held commitment.
MEDDPICC is a qualification checklist for complex, multi-stakeholder sales. Each letter names something you must know to claim a deal is real: metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, paper process, identified pain, champion, and competition. It is diagnostic rather than procedural — it does not tell you what to do, it tells you what you cannot yet answer. Gaps are the output. A deal where you cannot name the economic buyer is not a late-stage deal no matter how many meetings you have had, and the framework's real function is to make that unarguable in a pipeline review.
Start at the business outcome and its date — the quarter they need results by — and work backwards to today. Starting from your close date makes it your plan, and a plan the buyer experiences as yours will not survive contact with their calendar.
Capture the buyer's internal machinery as explicitly as your own: security review, legal, procurement, board approval, data migration, training. The steps you cannot see are exactly the ones that cause the slip.
Every step gets a person, on whichever side. Steps owned by 'the team' do not happen. This is also where you discover whether your champion can actually direct anyone.
Dates must be accepted by the owner, not assigned to them. A date invented by the seller is a wish; a date the buyer's legal counsel agreed to is a commitment you can hold them to without friction.
Worked example — Mutual Action Plan
A vendor and a buyer co-author a plan for a 1 October go-live: security questionnaire returned 12 June (buyer's InfoSec lead), architecture review 26 June (both), redlines returned 10 July (buyer's counsel), procurement submission 24 July (buyer's champion), signature 8 August (the CFO), migration 15 August–15 September (both), training 20 September (vendor). In week three the security questionnaire is four days late and InfoSec is unresponsive. That single visible slip triggers a conversation in June rather than a missed date in October — and it reveals that InfoSec was never told the project existed.
Worked example — MEDDPICC Qualification
A rep reports a deal at 90% for quarter end. Walking the checklist: metrics are vague ('better visibility'), the economic buyer has never been met, and the paper process includes a security review the champion has not mentioned and cannot start until legal signs an NDA amendment. Three gaps, all fatal to the date. The deal is not dead — but it is a next-quarter deal, and the honest reforecast made in week two is worth far more than the pleasant surprise in week twelve.
Mutual action plans are a practitioner convention rather than a published methodology, and they circulate under several names including mutual close plans and joint execution plans. The underlying idea is imported from project management, where jointly owned schedules with named owners long predate their use in sales. No individual origin is credibly claimed.
The checklist grew out of enterprise software sales practice in the 1990s, commonly traced to methods developed at Parametric Technology Corporation and spread by practitioners who moved through that organisation. It began as MEDDIC and gained letters over time as practitioners added the paper process and competition. It circulates as accumulated craft with several competing commercial trainings attached; no single canonical text governs it.
Not specified
Walk the plan in every subsequent meeting and let slippage be visible early. A missed step surfaced in week two is a scheduling problem; the same step surfaced in week ten is a lost quarter.
Establish the measurable outcome the buyer expects, in their numbers. Not 'improved efficiency' but 'cut invoice processing from nine days to two.' Without a number there is no business case, and without a business case the deal dies the moment budgets tighten.
Find the person who can release the money — not the person who wants the product. These are different people in most enterprises. If you have not met them, you do not have a deal; you have a project someone is enthusiastic about.
Understand what they will judge on and how the judgement gets made: who is involved, in what order, against what standard. Criteria are often set before you arrive, sometimes by a competitor. Discovering them late means discovering you have been answering the wrong exam.
Trace what happens after 'yes' — legal, security review, procurement, signature authority. This is where forecast dates go to die, and it is almost always longer than the champion believes, because they have never watched it closely.
Verify the pain is severe enough to fund action, that your champion has genuine internal credit and will spend it, and that you know who else is being considered — including the option of doing nothing, which wins more enterprise deals than any vendor.