The future state
The customer's business as it will be once your promise is kept, described in their world and not yours. The centre of the wheel, in a dozen words.
The future state is the customer’s business as it will be once your promise is kept, described in their world and not yours. It sits at the apex of the value proposition triangle and at the centre of the three rings, and its whole job is to earn the second sentence.
The scaffold for writing one is from, to, so that: from where the customer is, to where they will be, so that the thing they actually care about happens. Then cut it to a dozen words. The book borrows Collins and Porras’s big hairy audacious goal for the ambition, and warns against the usual failure, which is a future state that describes the supplier’s success (“your trusted partner for…”) rather than the customer’s. If the customer would not put the sentence in their own annual report, it is not their future state.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapter 7.
Related terms
The value proposition triangle
Future state at the apex, offer and assurance at the base, the proposition in the middle. A future state with no offer beneath it is a daydream.
The three rings
The customer's future state at the centre, the value they receive around it, your products in the outer ring. Customers buy the centre; suppliers sell the outside.
The Offer Wheel
The map of the whole value system around one customer, built inside-out, that compresses into the one-page proposition.
Customer value proposition
The answer to the customer's one real question: what is this worth to me? Said in two sentences, in their financial language.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.