The Showcase Workshop Guide to

Content Planning

Remember that leather briefcase you toted around in the 1980s when you were a high-flying sales executive?

No? Well … okay. Imagine you were a high-flying sales executive in the 1980s.

You toted around a polished leather briefcase full of brochures and spec sheets. Walking into a sales meeting, you placed that glorious tote on the table in front of you, pulled out those glossy printed materials and passed them around the room like you were the King of Egypt handing out jewels.

You made your pitch.

You left the room.

And those brochures and spec sheets got neatly filed away.

Just kidding! They more often went in the trash. Just like today.

Successful salespeople don’t use leather briefcases full of paper anymore. Successful salespeople use Showcase Workshop.

It works on any mobile device, with or without an internet connection. No nifty briefcase required.

Think of Showcase as your go-to content toolkit.

“A showcase” is simply a collection of your sales materials. Instead of printed copies packed in your briefcase, you have electronic copies organised into the Showcase Workshop app.

Your showcase may contain just a few PowerPoint decks like this one:

Or it can be a neatly organized collection of digital brochures, videos, price lists, and flyers detailing current promotions.

It’s up to you what content you have in your showcase. You can customize it to include your most important sales enablement assets, and be quickly and easily navigated during sales conversations.

There is no limit to the number of showcases you can create in your account, so you can create multiple showcases for your company. If it doesn’t make sense in your business to have all your content in one single showcase, you can break it up into separate showcases – one for each product line, one for each offer, or even one for each business unit.

The Showcase Workshop app is completely customizable.

For some people, however, that can feel a bit overwhelming to begin with.

You have so many ideas on how your content could be added to your showcase. Where do you start?

Let’s start with a mindset shift.

The first thing to do – before you read any further – is shake your “print mentality” and don a digital mindset.

When you create printed assets, you have to get all the architecture, design and text absolutely perfect before you place the order, because changing it later is expensive and time consuming.

This is not the case when you’re creating a digital content toolkit!

The beauty of creating a showcase with Showcase Workshop is that updates, changes and iterations are cheap (if not free!) and easy to do.

Hitting the Publish button isn’t the same commitment as pushing the Print button.

The first version of your showcase might not be perfect. But that’s okay. You can always go back and change it.

Enjoy the freedom and power of your new digital mindset!

Now that you’re free of the fear of making a costly or embarrassing mistake, it’s time to create your content plan.

Don’t worry. It’s not scary or time consuming. This guide will walk you through, lickety split.

It will take you less than 60 minutes to complete an entire content plan for your showcase using the 3-phase approach that follows.

Later on in this guide, we’ll also show you some examples of how other companies are organizing their showcases so you can get a feel for all the possibilities.

First things first. Set aside 60 minutes for yourself and any team members or stakeholders you

may want input from. Make sure you’ve got a whiteboard and a full pot

of coffee on-hand, and get ready to start planning for your sales success.

In the Discovery phase, you’re going to get a crash course in effective content modeling for sales teams.

If you google the term “content modeling,” you’ll get a bunch of search results having to do with information architecture. You’ll read about taxonomy and gathering requirements. It’s all very fancy. And if you have the patience to wade through all those articles, you might learn some valuable skills.

But you don’t need to learn information architecture to create a content model that empowers your sales team in the field.

The Showcase Workshop method is designed for sales and marketing teams, and it’s so much simpler.

You need to make only two decisions to create a working content model in Phase 1:

1. Who are the users?

2. What is the context in which your users are accessing content in your showcase?

Let’s dive deeper into each, shall we?

Use the following worksheet to work through these questions either on your own or with your team.

Phase 1: Discovery

Worksheet for Phase 1: DiscoveryWho are the users?

Users

1. Who will be using this showcase?

(e.g. the sales team, the marketing team, senior management …)

2. How are these users currently accessing the sales enablement materials

that you plan to put into this showcase for them?

List out all the ways your team accesses sales and marketing content. (e.g. PowerPoint, Dropbox, SharePoint …)

3. Where (physically) will these users need to have access to Showcase Workshop?

(e.g. in customers’ offices, in stores, at trade shows, on worksites, in their own offices …)

4. What devices will they be using to access the showcase?

(e.g. tablet, smartphone, computer …)

Worksheet for Phase 1: DiscoveryWhat is the context?

Context

6. Are there key messages or any key content you feel are critical to deliver to this audience?

7. What is your ultimate goal for your showcase? What do you want it to achieve for your business?

(e.g. help sell a product or service, educate customers, provide operational information …)

5. Who is your users’ audience? Who are the customers who will see this showcase?

(e.g. medical professionals, white-collar managers, technical sales staff, B2C salespeople in-store …)

Note: If you have multiple, distinct audiences, consider creating a unique showcase for each, and repeat this 3-phase exercise for each audience.

A carefully planned, well thought out, neatly organized collection of content can save your sales team valuable time. It helps them present themselves as the capable experts they are in front of your customers who may be frustrated by the outdated sales presentation a typical salesperson puts them through.

Remember that 1980s salesman with the shiny leather briefcase? We don’t need to tell you that most customers aren’t keen on engaging with that guy.

Whether your content is digital brochures, photos, videos spec sheets or customer forms, thoughtful content mapping will save you, your sales team and your customers many headaches in the long run.

Here are the most common ways our customers have approached their overall content maps.

Use these examples as inspiration as you go through the rest of the Phase 2 exercises.

By product

Mapping your content by product works well if you have a complex set of products and each product has a lot of supporting information.

Phase 2: Content Mapping

In this case, you probably have a long sales cycle and each sale requires a high volume of content to support the sale.

Examples of industries that organize their content by product are medical devices, materials handling and building materials.

As a service catalog

Mapping your content using a service catalog approach works well when you have a number of products and offerings that you typically sell together / bundled to customers.

It also works well when a customer might select their purchase from a range of comprehensive offers. If your customers often purchase more than one product at a time, a service catalog approach can really streamline your sales process.

Examples of industries that organize their content as a service catalog are telecommunications, automobiles, financial and insurance services.

For pure accessibility

This content mapping style is ideal for internal communications. If you have content that you simply want to get into the hands of

your store managers, merchandisers or distribution force, this is the best way to organize it.

Organizing your content for accessibility means making it as simple as possible to access critical content. It’s not fussy and it doesn’t include a ton of content. It just saves you the time of having to send the content by email.

As a sales conversation workflow

If your sales team follows a predictable path of conversation and interaction with customers, mapping your showcase content as a workflow can work wonders.

In this case, you would consider the story you want to tell your customer, the steps you want to take them through, and then what action you ultimately want them to take at the end. Action examples would be: collect their data, fill in a form, watch a video, etc.

This content organization style works well for consultants, real estate professionals and really for anyone who wants to have a consistent process of conversing with buyers. This is an ideal content map to use for a showcase employed at a trade show!

Now that you have an idea of different content mapping styles, let’s walk through it for your own content.

Step 1:

Create a list of all the content (files, documents, videos, images etc) that you want to include in your showcase.

You can do this in a spreadsheet or Word file, use our worksheet or jot it down on your whiteboard to start.

One of our favorite ways to get this list down is to write each piece of content on a post-it note and stick them all up on a wall. This way you can move them around to plan out your content map.

Here’s an example of what that content list might look like at a mid-sized building materials company:

• Current Promotional brochure 1 [pdf]

• Current Promotional brochure 2 [pdf]

• Product Range A customer presentation [slideshow]

• Product Range A brochure [pdf]

• Product Range A video

• Product Range A data sheet [pdf]

• Product Range A images [jpegs]

• Product Range A pricing guide [excel]

• Product Range B customer presentation [slideshow]

• Product Range B brochure [pdf]

• Product Range B video

• Product Range B data sheet [pdf]

• Product Range B images [jpegs]

• Product Range B pricing guide [excel]

• Customer case studies [pdfs]

• Research [weblinks]

• Training materials [weblinks]

• Company news [social media links]

Or an example for a small IT Service Provider:

• Product Overview 1 [pdf]

• Product Overview 2 [pdf]

• Product Overview 3 [pdf]

• Product Overview 4 [pdf]

• Product Overview 5 [pdf]

• Case Study 1 [pdf]

• Case Study 2 [pdf]

• Case Study 3 [pdf]

• Price list [pdf]

• Introduction to our services [video]

• Customer presentation [slideshow]

• How we customize your services [video]

• Link to our website

Step 2:

Put a tick next to everything that is fit for purpose and some other kind of mark next to any content that needs to be reviewed.

Other than whether the content is actually up to date, the other reason you may need to review your content is if it is not currently suitable for display on small devices.

For example, if you have a spec sheet with a lot of small text on it and you want your sales team to present that to customers, from a tablet, you may want to have the design modified to improve that experience.

If you are unsure about whether your content is going to be suitable, just carry on to step 3. You can always review and update your materials after your first showcase is published. Don’t let this step slow down your content planning efforts!

File name or description File type Current locationFit for purpose?

Customer presentation Powerpoint Shared drive Y

Worksheet 1 for Phase 2:

Step 3:

Now we’re going to create a map for how users will navigate this list of content in your showcase.

We recommend a maximum of 10 “buttons” or links per screen in your showcase. If you have 100 files that you want to include then we need to create a hierarchy for your files.

The best way to do this is to think through how your users would commonly want to access your list of content. What kind of useful content groupings can you make so content is easy to navigate and present in front of customers?

Take a look back at your answer to question 6, in phase 1: Are there key messages or any key content you feel are critical to deliver to this audience?

Is it important that your sales team take customers through a slideshow before they show them a demonstration video? In this case, you’d want to make it clear and simple to your users that they should start with the slideshow and then move onto the video.

Here’s a few examples to help get you started:

If you’ve decided your showcase is going to be a full services catalog, it probably makes sense to group all the content by service type like this:

If you have an extensive range of products, it probably makes most sense to group your content by product, and then group those products into logical subsets like this: small cars, sedans, suvs etc.

If we revisit our building materials company example from Step 1, it might look something like this:• Current Promotional brochure 1 [pdf]

• Current Promotional brochure 2 [pdf]

• Product Range A

» Product Range A customer presentation [slideshow]

» Product Range A brochure [pdf]

» Product Range A video

» Product Range A data sheet [pdf]

» Product Range A images [jpegs]

» Product Range A pricing guide [excel]

• Product Range B

» Product Range B customer presentation [slideshow]

» Product Range B brochure [pdf]

» Product Range B video

» Product Range B data sheet [pdf]

» Product Range B images [jpegs]

» Product Range B pricing guide [excel]

• Other Resources

» Customer case studies [pdfs]

» Research [weblinks]

» Training materials [weblinks]

» Company news [social media links]

Best Practices

Here are some best practices to keep in mind as you think about grouping your content:

• If users will need to access this content daily or in every meeting – no more than 2 clicks to each piece of content

• If users need to access the content weekly or in most meetings – no more than 3 clicks to each piece of content

• If users need to access the content monthly or in some meetings – up to 5 clicks for each piece of content

• If users only access the content rarely – consider strongly whether this content should be included in your showcase. In our experience, this content goes out of date and just sits around creating clutter and putting your users off.

Phase 3: DesignNow you’ve got a solid framework to create your initial design around.

Remember, Showcase Workshop is completely flexible! You can always update your design or your content architecture later on – so don’t worry too much about it just yet. Creating your initial design around a strong content plan, however, will really pay off. Especially if you’re using an outside design source.

With Showcase, you can create a design that reflects your brand. You’re not stuck with templates (though we have those too!), so you can design your showcase using your own in-house style guide.

There are three minor parameters to consider when you’re creating your design, and we’ll cover those in this section.

At the end of this section we’ve included some design inspiration from other customers who are making sales with their showcases.

First, those parameters:

1. Make sure you keep clear the area around the Settings button, the Back button and the Share button so users don’t accidentally hit those when they’re navigating to content. The Settings button is located in the bottom left of the screen, the Back button is located in the upper left corner, and the Share button is located in the upper right corner.

Keep clear for back button

Keep clear for share button

Keep clear for menu button

2. Choose a button design that will work consistently across all locations of your showcase. This will dramatically improve the user experience. Your sales team will know exactly what’s clickable on any given page when your buttons all look the same!

3. Each mobile device is a bit different, of course, and each will have its own design specs. You can find the most up-to-date design specs for every device here. Create your design using the specs for the most common device your team will be using when they access the showcase.

Other than those three parameters, you have free rein over your showcase design.

Now, on to that inspiration we promised you!

In the following pages, you can explore some of the designs our other customers have used in their own showcases.

Z Energy

Jackson Estate Distributors

Ricoh

B&D Doors

Spark

Showcase for Showcase

Now That You’ve Got Your Content Plan, It’s Time to Build Your Showcase!Now that you’ve got your content plan in place, you are ready to rock your first showcase.

Showcase Workshop is easy to use. No development skills necessary! But should you want some extra help, or if you have any questions along the way, check out our Tutorial page to book a session with us or email us directly. We’re happy to help!

Mitsubishi Motors