This report describes the process and outcomes of a graduation project for the MSc program Strategic Product Design. The client organization in this project is Innovation Booster (IB). IB, founded in 2012 and located in Amsterdam, is specialized in innovation services. IB is active in segments characterized by traditional and complex organisations. IB offers Entrepreneurial Innovation which consists of three types of expertise services: Innovation Strategies, Business Innovation and Behavioural Innovation.

At the beginning of this project, IB was struggling with their client acquisition. Their sales calls were prepared ad-hoc and IB’s salespeople did not have the required knowledge about potential clients and their context. This resulted in insufficient acquisition, a too low success rate from sales calls and a too expensive and time consuming overall client acquisition process. Subsequently, growth, scalability and continuity could not be ensured. What IB needed was a tool for successful proactive acquisition that leads to high success rates. With high success rates IB could achieve a continuous flow of challenging projects required for growth, scalability and continuity. The tool should provide them the required knowledge, structure and focus for preparing sales calls. Therefore, the initial design challenge was stated as follows:
“Develop a tool for proactive client acquisition that provides the required knowledge, structure and focus for high success rates from sales calls.”

An experience workshop is designed that lets potential clients experience IB’s way of working. The process of the experience workshop is based on literature on reflection, the iterative cycle of Design Thinking and the 1-10-100 method. The experience workshop is preceded by six preparation steps and is succeeded by a follow-up step. Together, the experience workshop, its preparation and follow-up steps form a proactive approach to client acquisition. The process of this proactive client acquisition approach is based on needs of the salespeople of IB and literature on client acquisition, sales and marketing models. The proactive client acquisition approach maps out each step of client acquisition, accompanied by the goal and desired output of each step, and how to realize this output. The approach provides structure and focus in IB’s acquisition process, accompanied by pragmatic tools that support IB in realizing their acquisition goals. With the new approach, IB’s salespeople have the required knowledge about the potential client’s organisation and industry before approaching the potential clients.

The experience workshop is tested and validated with three potential clients from three different organizations through non-participant observation and semi-structured interviewing. Furthermore, the proactive client acquisition approach, including the experience workshop, is validated through a co-reflection session with four people from both the Project Management and New Business Development departments of IB. The validation study concluded that clients become impressed and enthusiastic about cooperating with IB after participating in an experience workshop. In addition, the first pilot have shown that the experience workshop leads to a less expensive and time consuming overall client acquisition process.

For a successful implementation of the proactive client acquisition approach, an internal communication and organisation plan is proposed. In this plan, the different roles and responsibilities are described that are required for a successful implementation and maintenance of the proactive client acquisition approach in the future.