The organisation

In the world of Global Real Estate, Cushman & Wakefield has an outstanding reputation for delivering first class results to its clients in delivering value through property portfolios, through its many service lines. Present in 16 countries, the EMEA region of the global firm relies on first class business development skills to manage client relationships and win new opportunities in a competitive market place.

The need for excellent relationship and business development process management was recognised by Richard Pate, Director of L&D EMEA in 2009, and he began rolling out a training programme across multiple levels of the firm to build upon existing skillsets amongst C&W’s professional staff.

The challenge

With a reach spanning from Lisbon to Moscow and Stockholm to Dubai, the UK based L&D team was faced with the challenge of delivering consistent high quality training in multiple languages for a highly customised company programme. Also, the programme had to mirror the typical career path development of personnel from surveyor through to partner, with each stage bringing new levels of involvement in the business development process.

The solution

With a global network of associates, selected for their ability to deliver extremely high quality training, using a common training notes platform, Selling Interactions was able to take the C&W programme, and code it in such a way that it could be delivered locally, to create a virtual sales academy.

4 specific programmes were developed to reflect the changing emphasis of each grade of seniority, from ensuring excellent client influence, to being much more proactive in leading opportunity identification and closure.

The programmes developed were:

1. Professional client care (Excellence in front of clients).
2. Managing client relationships (Communication and persuasion during project management).
3. Business development (Identifying and winning new opportunities).
4. Linked-in (Using social media to find and win new opportunities).

Coupled with a lean training materials localisation process, and a focused briefing session, the team soon was able to roll out the programme in 8 languages, using fully customised C&W materials, in less than one month

Setting up the team and training transfer process has given C&W the capability now to roll out any training to its global workforce in the minimum of time.

The Results

The highly interactive nature of the programmes has ensured good engagement from staff taking part in the programmes. Careful design of the content has ensured that it does not duplicate technical and professional training given as part of the normal qualification of surveyors.

One of the participants in the programme was awarded “Top Bidder Award” due to their excellence in a high stakes client pitch, a result of systematically applying professional services business development best practices.

With relevant programmes designed, the internal L&D team has the freedom to deliver the content themselves, or outsource it for local language work, or when capacity becomes an issue.

The Next steps

The internal L&D team at C&W is now in a position where they have a business development curriculum and are able to deliver it or call on external help when required. Our work now is to challenge the model, and provide critical insights in sales best practice when they are relevant, to keep C&W at the forefront in their sector.