close-plan

---
name: close-plan
description: Builds a close plan scheduled backwards from the buyer's go-live date, so every step, owner and date to signature is agreed in writing. Use once the buyer says they want to proceed.
---

# Every step to signature agreed before you get there

A dated plan both sides have accepted, and the email that gets it accepted.

## Claude does

1. Asks for the buyer's critical go-live date and the value events after it. Everything schedules backwards from it. No date, no plan, and Claude says so rather than inventing one.
2. Asks who signs, who pays, and who owns security, legal and procurement, with how long each took last time. A won 50k to 250k deal typically involves at least ten stakeholders, so a plan naming two is unfinished.
3. Tests your champion on five signs: gives access, shares information, acts unprompted, tells you things you did not know, commits to dates. Three failures and you have no champion, and the plan dies in their inbox.
4. Places the executive step around the third touchpoint. Evaluations starting with an executive correlate with roughly 6 percent lower win rates; executives joining at the third touch, roughly 5 percent higher.
5. Turns each unknown into a step with one named owner and a date, never a status. Fifty-nine percent of sales leaders say the signing stage takes too long, and nobody plans it.
6. Writes risk, not urgency: what happens if it fails, the opt-out, the phased start, the pilot scope. Forty to sixty percent of lost deals go to indecision, and urgency backfired 84 percent of the time.
7. Recommends one sequence and scope, never a menu, so the risk is shared. Price is agreed on the phone: email only wins 5 percent of the time, email plus phone 35 percent.
8. Refuses to guess. Dates, names, legal terms, procurement rules and lead times come from you or stay a visible gap.

## Then Codex does

Codex does the arithmetic. From the critical date and your durations it counts backwards over working days, builds the dated table, writes the agreement email and the risk register, and runs the sweep. No judgement.

Fill in {CRITICAL_DATE}, {STEPS_AND_DURATIONS}, {STAKEHOLDERS} and {RISK_TERMS} in CODEX.md first, then run:

```
codex exec --sandbox danger-full-access --skip-git-repo-check -C "<working folder>" - < CODEX.md
```

## Claude checks

1. Every row names one person, not a team, with a real date.
2. The schedule starts today or later. If it starts in the past, the go-live date is already impossible and you say so now, not in week six.
3. Security, legal, procurement and the signature each have their own row.
4. The executive step is not first.
5. No urgency, no expiring discount, no invented deadline.
6. No lead time or approval rule Codex was not given.
7. The email asks the buyer to correct the plan, not approve it.

Any failure: reject, fix the input, rerun Codex. Never hand-patch.

## Rules

- Schedule backwards from the buyer's date, never forwards from your quarter.
- Every step has one named person and a date, never a status.
- No champion, no plan.
- Email the price, agree it on the phone, confirm by email. Half of written communication is misread.
- No urgency, no expiring discount, no fear.
- Public information only.
- Never invent a fact, a number or a quote.
- Anything sent in someone's name says whose name it is.

## If Codex is not installed

Claude builds the plan, the email and the register itself and says so.

## Built from

- Gong Labs, multithreading, 1M+ executive sales cycles: https://www.gong.io/blog/when-and-how-to-multi-thread-when-selling-to-executives
- MEDDICC, Andy Whyte, champion signs, paper process: https://meddicc.com/resources/5-signs-you-dont-have-a-champion
- The JOLT Effect, Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna: https://www.jolteffect.com/blog/what-is-the-jolt-effect
- Great Demo!, Peter Cohan, Transition Vision (PDF): https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6540c97c6e5b78f21ab4a9b5/67dbb3814d8a2c44393f3105_Seven%20Validated%20Habits%20of%20Stunningly%20Successful%20Demos.pdf
- Gong Labs, negotiation channels, 37,671 deals: https://www.gong.io/resources/labs/this-deadly-simple-negotiation-mistake-is-costing-you-deals-heres-how-to-avoid-it/
- Gong Labs, product demo study, 3 million demos, next steps: https://www.gong.io/resources/labs/product-demo/

# Close plan - Codex task

You are scheduling a plan from inputs that are already agreed. Do not invent steps, dates, owners or terms.

## You are given

- {CRITICAL_DATE}: the buyer's go-live date as YYYY-MM-DD, plus the value events that follow it with their dates.
- {STEPS_AND_DURATIONS}: every step to signature, in the order it must happen, each with an owner, a side (buyer or seller) and a duration in working days.
- {STAKEHOLDERS}: name, role, and the step each one owns or must attend. The signer is marked.
- {RISK_TERMS}: what happens if it does not work, the opt-out, the phased start and the pilot scope, in the words already approved.

## Produce

In the working folder:

1. `close-plan.md`. A table with columns Step, Owner (a named person), Side, Start, Finish, Depends on. Schedule backwards from {CRITICAL_DATE}: the last step finishes on that date, and each earlier step finishes the working day before its successor starts. Monday to Friday only. Below the table, a Dates section listing the critical date and the value events, then a Risk section copied verbatim from {RISK_TERMS}.
2. `agreement-email.md`. Maximum 130 words, addressed to the champion, attaching the plan and asking them to correct any date or owner that is wrong. Ends by proposing a short call to agree price.
3. `risk-register.md`. One row per plan step, columns Step, What could slip it, Earliest sign, Who to ask.
4. `checks.md`, holding the results below.

## Rules

- Copy names, dates, durations and terms exactly as given. Never round, recalculate or rephrase them.
- Never add a step, an owner, a duration or a stakeholder that was not supplied.
- Never add urgency, an expiring discount, or any deadline other than {CRITICAL_DATE}.
- If the backwards schedule starts before today, do not compress anything to make it fit. Report the overrun.
- A missing input stays as `[GAP: what is needed]`. Never fill it.
- British English. No em dash characters.

## Return

Print, and nothing else:

- The file list with word counts.
- The computed start date, and if it falls before today, the number of working days by which the plan overruns.
- Sweep results: any row with no named person; any row naming a team or a department instead of a person; any Start or Finish falling on a Saturday or Sunday; any Depends on that names a step not in the table; any `[GAP: ...]` markers; any brace placeholder left unfilled.
- PASS or FAIL for each of: signature step present, legal step present, security step present, procurement step present, executive step is not the first row, one risk-register row per plan row.