The buyer sets the pace, so give them a path

The buyer sets the pace, so give them a path

You do not control how fast a deal closes. The buyer does, and the buyer is moving at the speed of their own internal process: their approvals, their politics, their competing priorities. Pretending otherwise is why so many "acceleration" tactics feel like pushing a rope. You cannot make someone buy faster by wanting it more.

What you can do is remove friction from their path. Most deals slow down not because the buyer lost interest, but because they hit an invisible obstacle: a stakeholder you never met, a procurement step nobody mentioned, a security review you did not see coming. Your job is to surface those obstacles early and help the buyer clear them, not to wait and hope.

The tool for this is a mutual action plan: a shared, written sequence of the steps from here to signed, with owners and dates on both sides. It sounds bureaucratic. It is the opposite. It turns a vague "let's stay in touch" into a concrete path the buyer has agreed to walk. When a step slips, you both see it, and you can address the real blocker instead of sending another check-in.

A mutual plan also exposes the deals that were never real. A buyer who will not co-author a path to a decision is a buyer who has not decided to decide. That is worth knowing now rather than after three more weeks of polite emails. The plan qualifies and accelerates at the same time.

The framing matters. You are not managing the buyer, you are making their life easier. "Here is what usually trips deals like this up, let's get ahead of it" is a gift, not a sales tactic. Buyers move faster for sellers who clearly know the road.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: Do you use a mutual action plan in your own deals? Walk through the exact steps you put on it, from first call to signature.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: Describe a deal that was secretly stalled by a stakeholder you had not met. How did surfacing them change the timeline?