Widening the Lens - Sales & Innovation at Sparck

Jan 2024 - Jan 2025 | Designer–Researcher | Sparck (BJSS) Outputs: Service blueprints, sales decks, infographics, bid writing, workshops, marketing content, user research, designs

The Challenge: Disrupting Business as Usual

Sparck was delivering great work — but its sales and bid-writing efforts had become siloed, repetitive, and overly templated. The same people were producing the same responses. Fresh thinking was hard to come by.

To break the cycle, Sparck launched the Sales & Innovation team — a lean, cross-disciplinary unit with one mandate: spot opportunities no one else could see.

As a hybrid designer, researcher, and strategist, I was embedded in this team to help build creative, credible, and differentiated materials that would move the business forward.

My Role: A Swiss Army Knife in Sales and Innovation

Over the course of my time in the team, I supported and led contributions across:

• Sales and bid materials: infographics for IAG, bid writing for GMCA, pitch decks for out Lean Product proposition
• Strategic artefacts: service blueprints (e.g. NHS/Optum), proactive research to support GRAI bid
• Internal tools: usability testing and design iteration for the Hawk AI sales tool
• Marketing enablement: created a video toolkit to help staff generate on-brand social content
• Workshops: ran and facilitated ideation and discovery sessions with internal teams (Hawk AI) and external prospects (e.g. Natural Resources Wales)

Every week brought new briefs, new problems, and new opportunities.

Process: No Guardrails, No Problem

There was no template for how we worked. The team was intentionally non-traditional, designed to flex, adapt, and fill the gaps no one else could.

For each challenge, I had to:

• Clarify the underlying problem (was it messaging, positioning, or design?)
• Choose the right method (research, workshop, synthesis, design… or all of them)
• Move quickly, often solo, and produce value early

It was design thinking and the agile mindset applied beyond the product — into the sales, strategy, and positioning of a consultancy.

Key Wins & Contributions

• Service blueprint for Optum (Healthcare Bid): helped secure follow-on work
• Hawk AI usability research & iteration: led to live changes that improved internal tooling
• Infographics and bid content for IAG and beyond: made our offering more appealing and digestible
• Marketing video toolkit: democratised video creation across the business
• Product Playbook: delved deep into lean product and created a deck to educate the business

I wasn’t just designing visuals — I was shaping narratives, validating ideas, and supporting a culture of experimentation and quality.

Challenges Faced

• Context switching: every piece of work required different tools and ways of thinking
• No pre-existing standards: we had to invent new formats and deliverables as we went
• Getting up to speed quickly: stakeholders looked to us for support, even when we lacked the domain knowledge needed. This meant getting up to speed at pace and running guerilla research to level up our understanding

Outcomes & Impact

My work directly contributed to:

• New business won through more strategic and polished sales materials
• The success and widespread use of Hawk AI
• An increase in marketing performance accross social media, with my posts being called out as the highest performing post that month
• A shift in how Sparck approached storytelling, pre-sales, and brand positioning

What I’m Proud Of

• Staying flexible and calm in ambiguity
• Designing meaningful contributions across design, research, sales, and comms
• Helping build something new — not a product, but a capability