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Participating at trade shows, industry or customer events is a great opportunity to show-off.  Your latest and greatest thinking and early stage offerings.  And areas where the storytelling around your showcases is growing in importance. With focus shifting from what you are showing off. Towards providing customers with vital business contexts on what your showcase can deliver.

The purpose of this template

This writing template enable you to articulate a showcase on one page. By challenging you to think through why and how your showcase makes a difference for your customer. Instead of what you promote and want to sell. Challenge yourself by moving from WHAT to SO WHAT and NOW WHAT in your strategizing.

A consistent way of articulating showcases is extra valuable when you display many showcases at the same time. And where you want to come across as consistent in your storytelling between showcases. To secure great showcases don’t get killed by poor storytelling. Nor leaving valuable customer input on the table after the interaction.

Showcases support customers in their passive information browsing. With a desire to learn more and create a new opportunity to engage further. when you play it right.

Identified opportunity

Start by articulating the opportunity in one sentence. Worded as an opportunity for your customer to take action, to improve their business.

Be specific on what you showcase today and possible expansions in the future. Avoid being too generic. Broad opportunity descriptions often have short legs and do not move fast.

Customer business context

Be clear on the context why your showcase is relevant to your customers’ business. As specific as you can on what it addresses and which improvements to expect. Convey insights you have gained when working with customers in building the case behind your showcase.

Associated market disruptions

Describe the market disruptions you see tied to your showcase. Disruptions customers can either exploit with an offensive strategy or defend against. Articulate possible strategies for both offensive and defensive disruptive game plans.

Enabling technologies

Describe the underlying technology enablers. With a rough order of magnitude for the expected improvements. Understanding how technologies work is secondary. Your insights on how the technologies make a difference and the role they plan in the bigger picture is more relevant.

Minimum viable product in showcase

Design your showcases as a minimum viable product of what you envision as offering for the opportunity. In early stages focused on validating hypotheses made about the viability of both needs and offerings. Be specific about which feedback you are looking for. Articulated down to the key questions you would like to penetrate with the current generation of your showcase. It is easy to over emphasize what you want to show, and not get specific enough feedback in return.

Hypothesis of business outcomes

Present which business outcomes your showcase could deliver. Focused on 3-5 metrics defining customers’ appetite and interest in the showcase. Worded in statements on increasing and decreasing key performance indicators.

In early stages, it is possible to stick out your nose with bolder statements. As long as they are specific to enable feedback to guide expectation setting for the real offering.

Excitement triggers

A critical objective for your showcase is to trigger excitement. Where your storytelling cement the excitement with one or several of the following

• Strong one-liners grabbing your customers’ attention.
• Relevant facts backing up your story.
• Before and after comparisons.
• Numbers triggering customers to think.

Showcase headline

Think like a journalist word-smithing front-page headlines. Include a number or time frame to make headline vibrant. Name your showcase as your customer would have described the opportunity to his/her peers. And word it to make it stick in your customer’s mind.

Avoid “concept stacking”, tech acronyms, product names and generic names. They are gone the moment your customer take their eyes off your showcase.

Next steps

Craft a clear idea for the next step you envision a showcase interaction to lead to. Guiding customers either to relevant digital assets or two-way conversation follow-ups.