Client Engagement Playbook
Global Property Management
Copyright © 2023 CBRE. All rights reserved.
Introduction
A leader’s mindset: How to use this guide
Our clients’ perspective
Top 10 ways to better engage your clients
Clients are, rightly, demanding more from their service providers than ever before. It’s our job to make sure we deliver the very best of Property Management and become trusted advisors and partners to our clients. I want to ensure that each of you is fully equipped when you engage your clients and help differentiate our CBRE Property Management proposition. So, I’m delighted to introduce the CBRE Global Property Management Client Engagement Playbook. The purpose of this Playbook is to get you to think differently about how you can better serve and drive exceptional outcomes for our tenants, clients, and even your internal customers. Inside, you’ll find a series of tips and techniques to help you better engage with your clients. Please take the time to familiarize yourself with the material and consider what you can do differently. Remember, client engage is everyone’s responsibility.
Emma Buckland
Global President Property Management
Client Focus Week
It is important to identify team members who achieve success in client engagement. Create the space to learn and share best practice during team meetings. This is particularly helpful to junior colleagues. Don’t forget we can learn from clients too.
Stay tuned to newsletters, town hall content or industry news. These are excellent sources on client topics to take to meetings.
Leaders must take ownership of these ideas and embed into the way we do business. This is not a project or campaign, its about culture and mindset.
As we continue to use digital means in client discussions, leaders have more opportunities to observe and share feedback. Explain — Demonstrate — Imitate — Check and Test Invite junior team members into client meetings for them to experience it. Support them.
Focus on picking one idea per week and discussing it at weekly meetings. Encourage participation.
There is no shortage of excellent ideas. However, the impact is in the execution of those ideas. Here are some tips to bring this playbook to life.
Consider creating more space in the diary by planning these dedicated weeks – as frequently as you fell necessary – which are designed to limit the amount of ‘internal’ activities, instead focusing more attention of client activities. This priorities the space and time needed for our client facing teams, which we know can be hard at the best of times.
Marathon not a sprint
Client discussion topics
Learn from role models and clients
Coaching and observation
One improvement per week
They are incredible and provide excellence service, think like a landlord, communicate proactively and have strong tenant relationships. They are best in class.
Our CBRE team has always made themselves available; they are responsive, detail orientated, fair and professional.
They manage the asset and communicate with third parties like they are the owners.
The CBRE property management team has been terrific to work with. They are very responsive and engaged.
I find that working with managers who take an ownership mentality and assess issues and problems with thoughtful recommendations make my job much easier.
The CBRE team is always proactive in taking new actions to improve their services.
For each project they take the time to consider the best people to address the task in hand.
CBRE does a great job of taking ownership of responsibilities.
Don’t take our word for how important client engagement is. Here are the thoughts of some of our clients, and why positive client engagement matters.
Steps to follow
Listen. Then Listen more.
Proactive planning can be a great way to build client engagement
Client planning involves asking difficult questions and exploring knowledge gaps
Think like a client and pre-empt client requirements
Achieve clarity of roles and responsibilities when attending a client meeting
One CBRE: Bring the whole organisation to the client
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Industry and sector knowledge is a competitive advantage
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Client follow up is about speed, precision, and transparency
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Maintain a diverse set of contact points across a client group
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Operational excellence first, then be bold and surprise our clients
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The really good Property Managers are those that get the client talking about their business, their ambitions first and then just listen for what the opportunities are going to be or what problems need to be solved. Listen first. Listen in the client boardroom and outside. This means reading press articles and speaking to a broad base within the organization across treasury or finance teams. A picture will eventually emerge. Do not always assume we know what the client wants.
Listen Then Listen more
The impact you can have with your clients starts during the planning phase and ensuring we have the inputs from all colleagues and teams who are intrinsic to a client's experience. Take into account our colleagues within Property Management, including geographical, product, and functional partners, and then across the wider CBRE organisation. Capturing everyone’s thoughts, ideas and actions in the right format and housing them in a convenient and accessible place for all team members will help with better coordination and information flow. Remember that our clients are willing to put in the preparation time ahead of any discussion or meeting you have with them to agree on the appropriate agenda, so feel bold enough to scope this with them ahead of time. For those of you in Client Relationship Management roles, consider holding client planning sessions annually as a minimum with internal stakeholders. Of course with the client as well and gain their buy-in on frequency.
When planning your client engagement, it helps having internal consensus across products and functional teams, and geographical teams on the key client priorities. Consider holding a client planning session to get organized. Use it as an opportunity to challenge your own thinking, explore gaps and create a debate well ahead of any discussions we have with the client. We should ask those difficult questions, but come up with a range of solutions to offer our clients. Feeling slightly uncomfortable and being challenged as part of client planning sets us up for a successful client engagement.
Conduct client conversations with purpose, whether it is a more strategic dialogue around building value for our clients or more operational in nature and supporting their day-to-day needs. Ensure all conversations and meetings are action oriented so that the client feels assured that you’ll then go away and resolve the challenges that they face. Remember to also review previous call reports and actions. There may have been critical aspects the client had mentioned which may still be unresolved or present as an opportunity for further discussion. In some instances its best to start a dialogue by demonstrating the action taken from your last discussion with them.
Think like a client. Pick up on exactly what was said in the past and pre-empt client requirements
Every member of the team should know what their role is before, during and after a meeting. Do not overcrowd meetings. Having too many agenda items could dilute the impact. Internal coordination ahead of a meeting is important, so you should agree ahead of time on the role each team member will take and their execution priorities.
We all have a duty to think about the total value we can bring to our clients. While we don’t expect you to have an intimate knowledge of everything that Property Management or CBRE does, we do need you to be ‘cocktail smart’ and have a base level knowledge of our offerings and expertise, and know who to reach out to within the organization for support. Clients also want to know and meet the specialists, so consider who is best placed from other part of our the organization to join the conversation. Think about our speciality services and product owners in Property Management, as well as colleagues in Leasing, Valuation and Advisory Services, and Project Management. For those of you in Client Relationship Management roles, our clients don't expect you to be on every call and have all the knowledge, but you do need to be on top of information flow.
Be curious and outward looking. Take advantage of market and global trends. Build your sector knowledge and leverage industry best practices. The more insight we have, the more our clients will benefit. All these elements are a differentiator and gives CBRE the ability to communicate what we're seeing across peers and geographies and what our client’s competitors are doing. Therefore, a strong and knowledgeable team is really important. The need for sector and industry specialism is sometimes misunderstood. We do not need to be experts in the running of our clients' businesses - rather we need to be experts in how to support our clients with managing their real estate assets in this sector. We need all our teams to be ‘cocktail smart’. Sector specialism ensures better decisions, better product build-out and better understanding of the client journey and life-cycle.
Whenever we engage with our clients we have a duty to respond and act quickly. Clients should never feel the need to chase up on things. Clients always want to assume that all is in hand. We should provide an honest appraisal of which items are more important to us than others including a clear message of our risk appetite. Be frank - if it's a no, say so early. The honest approach is best, and it builds credibility and trust.
Global clients and large client organisations often have a broad set of stakeholders when making buying decisions, so it’s important to map out various client stakeholders. Consider adopting a ‘buddy’ approach to ensure there is strong and close coverage at a strategic and tactical level. Property Managers may assume they have strong relationships with a certain part of the organisation and that may be so - but the gaps might cost them the next lease renewal, RFP, or a new opportunity. Don't underestimate the most junior member in the client organisation who may have strong views and a strong influence.
It’s important that operational excellence comes first. Let’s consistently deliver our core Property Management services to our clients all the time. If we get this right then we earn the right to then over deliver. Create moments where we stand out in the quality of the solution, the speed of delivery, the content we cover in our responses or the diversity of our thinking. Work hard in creating wow moments to stand out from the crowd. Challenge yourself and each other, and think ‘outside the box’ to come up with ideas that truly add value to the client and their business.
