Stay on Track with Sales Action Items

Give every deal a next step with an owner and a due date. How Recordbook's action items work, and how they keep co-sell deals from stalling.

August 23, 2023 · By Joseph Lamoureux

Most deals don’t die from a “no.” They die from silence: a follow-up nobody sent, a proposal that sat in drafts, a call both sides assumed the other would schedule. Sales action items exist to make the next step on every deal explicit, owned and dated, so “I thought you were doing that” stops being how deals slip.

What an action item is

An action item is something that needs to happen to move an opportunity closer to Closed-Won: schedule a meeting, prepare a demo, write a proposal, send the security questionnaire, get pricing approved. The action items on an opportunity are the one place people need to look to know what happens next.

Adding an action item

Each action item has a short description of the task and a due date, the date and time it’s expected to be done. You can assign it to a team member. When it’s saved, Recordbook records its owner and a timestamp.

Write descriptions as actions, not topics. “Send revised pricing to CFO” can be done and checked off. “Pricing” can’t.

Color tells you what’s urgent

Recordbook color-codes action items as their deadlines approach:

Yellow: due within seven days.
Red: due within three days.

Scanning the opportunity list, the colors show which deals need something soon without opening any of them.

Sorting by action items

Click the sort icon, to the right of the filters icon, and choose Actions Due (Soonest). Your opportunities reorder by their next action due, which turns the deal list into a prioritized to-do list across everything you’re working on.

Asked “what needs to happen next on these deals?” Sort by actions due and the answer is on screen. It’s also the fastest way to start the day: work from the top until the reds are gone.

Stalled deals don’t hide

An opportunity with no open action item is a deal with no plan. Recordbook’s AI helps here: it surfaces deals that have stalled and pulls out the action items that would move them. The fix is still a person deciding what happens next, but you find out which deals need that decision before the quarter ends, not after.

Action items across two companies

Co-sell deals add a failure mode of their own: each side assumes the other owns the next step. The partner thinks you’re sending the statement of work; you think they are. Two weeks later, nobody has, and the customer has noticed.

On a shared Recordbook deal, action items sit on the same record for both teams, with an owner and a due date. There’s no ambiguity about whose move it is, and no “just checking in” email to find out. For the weekly partner sync, sort by actions due with the partner’s tag filtered and go down the list: what’s done, what’s late and what’s next.

A useful rule from AWS co-sell programs applies to any partner: if a launched deal has had no update for 14 days, escalate. Put a review action item on every co-sell deal so that check happens on schedule. The AWS ACE guide explains why “ghost” opportunities are one of the most common ways co-sell deals die.

Habits that keep deals moving

Every open opportunity has at least one open action item. No next step, no plan.
Every action item has one owner. Shared ownership is no ownership.
Due dates are real. A date you never intend to meet trains everyone to ignore the colors.
Close the loop in notes. When an action item is done, add a note with the outcome and create the next action item.
Clear the reds daily. Either do them, reassign them or move the date with a reason.

The result

When every deal has a dated, owned next step, status meetings get shorter, follow-ups stop slipping and nobody has to ask what happens next. The deal list tells you, in order, in color.

Try it on your own pipeline

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