Opportunity next-step plan

Purpose

Organise the evidence and commitments in an opportunity into a practical path to the next decision. Make customer milestones, internal dependencies, owners, dates, and unresolved gates explicit.

Scope

Opportunity objective, customer outcomes, decision process, stakeholders, evaluation steps, commercial review, implementation dependencies, risks, commitments, dates, and evidence gaps.

Excluded: assigning work without evidence, contacting participants, changing CRM, and promising dates not supported by the opportunity.

Data basis

• Opportunity records, call notes, proposals, and customer requirements.
• Qualification framework, stage definitions, and planning template.
• Existing mutual action plan or prior commitments.

Result

A dated action plan, decision-gate sheet, and open-questions memo.

Quality criteria

• Every milestone has source, owner, date or explicit unknown.
• Dependencies and decision gates are ordered.
• Customer commitments are distinguished from internal proposals.
• Risks link to actions or open points.
• Plan dates do not contradict source dates.

Instructions

Start with the customer's decision and desired outcome. Use only stated commitments as committed milestones. Label proposed dates and owners. Sequence dependencies before downstream actions. Keep the plan usable as a review artifact, with one row per milestone or question.

Adapt before use

Keep a clear audit trail throughout the run. Use the source wording and field values that support each material conclusion, and retain uncertainty when the evidence does not decide the issue. Separate a missing record from a negative result and a contradictory record from an exception. Prefer a short, prioritised result over unsupported completeness. Check that counts, identifiers, dates, and labels agree across the written result and the structured output. When a rule, source, or mapping is unavailable, name the limitation and explain how it affects interpretation. Do not silently infer ownership, approval, timing, or business intent.

• Map opportunity, activity, stakeholder and requirement fields.
• Define milestone, gate, owner, status, and date vocabulary.
• Add the company's mutual-action-plan format.