3 ways to help your team close deals faster with success plans

Posted December 13, 2021

By Marilyn Napier

Editor at Outreach

As the quarter comes to a close, you may find yourself in a familiar position. Your forecast numbers are slipping. Sales aren’t closing on time. And you feel a sense of dread. The reason? You likely don’t have enough visibility into deal health to get deals back on track in time.

If you don't know which accounts are at risk, it's harder to coach your reps on the right deals, disqualify bad leads, and scale the sales process in a transparent and collaborative way.

So what should you do about it?

When you use Success Plans, your team creates mutual action plans that give you better visibility into deals, so you can guide your team to win more often.

Read below to learn how you can guide your team to close deals faster with:

  • Dashboard view to gain complete visibility into deal health and mitigate risk 
  • Buyer engagement signals to make sure you're engaging with the right stakeholders to improve win rates
  • Quick-start blueprints to streamline the sales process and improve onboarding motions 

All existing Outreach customers have access to Success Plans. Don't have Outreach? Request a demo.

Gain complete visibility into deal health and mitigate risk with dashboard view

Have you ever based your sales forecast on a really big deal — only to have it not close in time? Or even worse, it didn’t close at all? This happens when revenue leaders don’t have a clear view of all the deals in their pipeline. No one wants to be left in the dark and feel out of control.

When you use the dashboard view in Success Plans, you see all of your team’s deals in one glance. This gives you complete visibility into the health of the deals at both a granular and big-picture level. Managers can now spend less time looking for deal details and instead understand the at-risk opportunities that require immediate attention.

The big win for managers and reps alike is to have Plans laid out in a very clear format. This way, reps see all the pieces that need to happen for a deal to go through. It helps them make sure they're buttoned up, and for managers to rest easy knowing reps are crossing the t's and dotting the i's.
Tyler Fujishin
Former Sales Enablement Manager, Gravity Payments

So when you’re worried about that big deal that’s going to make or break your forecast, you can now see if it’s on track, delayed, or at-risk in your dashboard. From there, you can drill down into the plan to understand why the deal is delayed and work with your sales rep to get it back on track before it’s too late.

Help your team accelerate deals and improve win rates with buyer engagement signals

One of the biggest complaints we hear from sales leaders is that they don’t know where deals are stuck. And when they ask their reps, they get unclear answers.

With buyer engagement signals, sellers and managers will be notified of who is viewing the mutual action plan, sharing it with others, or downloading the content. This helps you understand what information buyers or customers are engaging with and how engaged they are.

From there, you can make sure your sales rep is engaging with the right stakeholders and make suggestions to keep the deal moving forward.

In the remote era, spotting these signals is crucial when your reps have less face-to-face time with their prospects. Buyer engagement signals help you spot deals that your reps should and shouldn’t spend more time on. This way, you can guide your sales rep to focus their selling time with prospects who have a higher potential to close.

For example, if you see the buyer has not shared the mutual action plan with the decision makers on the buying committee, or if none of the resources your sales rep has shared have been opened, it clearly signals that the buyer is not serious about the deal or they have already started working with other companies. Identifying the right signals helps your reps focus their time and effort on deals that are most likely to close. 

Streamline the sales process with quick-start blueprints

With Success Plans, sales managers can standardize and define the sales process your team should follow with quick-start blueprints. Blueprints give managers a template to drive consistency with clearly defined steps and reinforce best practices. These best practices make it easy for new hires on the team to quickly ramp up. Knowing what steps to follow help sales teams understand how to drive a deal all the way through and close faster.

When Sales Enablement Manager Tyler Fujishin from Gravity Payments heard about Success Plans, he immediately knew it was the solution his team needed. The Success Plans feature allows the Gravity Payments team to create custom templates for common sales playbooks that they can easily replicate across different verticals. Now, instead of starting from scratch with each new customer, Tyler’s team builds on a consistent, repeatable process to execute deals faster.

Create mutual action plans that help you win

At the end of the quarter, you want your team to finish strong. Success Plans not only gives you confidence on deal health, but also helps in overall business planning, budgeting, and risk management.

Ready to create your first Success Plan in Outreach? All current customers with Opportunities enabled have access.


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