A newly established customer engagement team in a Swiss pharmaceutical company currently has no standard process for internal customer acquisition. As a result, employees perform their activities according to intuition and experience. The immediate result is non-transparent, highly inefficient, and inconsistent work, which leads to undesirable handling of potential customers. For further business development, it is essential to introduce and implement a transparent and efficient process for internal customer acquisition.

The work is divided into three phases: analysis, concept, and implementation. In the first phase, the current internal customer acquisition (AS-IS) process is analysed using a value stream mapping method. In the second phase, the newly arising (TO-BE) process is modelled using the insights gained from the analysis. In the last phase, a decision tree is used to guide the classification of potential customers, and the created (TO-BE) process is defined as a standard operating procedure (SOP).

On this basis, a transparent and comprehensible new process was visualised and launched. The implementation concept was developed in the corporate form of a standard operating procedure (SOP) and made available to the customer engagement team. This standard operating procedure serves current and future employees as a working document for the internal customer acquisition process. Moreover, further recommendations were made that provide an outlook on what steps to follow next and how further improvements can be made. For example, clearly defined suggestions for improvement were made for the internal documentation system for potential customers or templates were created for current processing.