How JLL EMEA Promoted 40 Directors From Within Without Hiring

JLL is a leading global commercial real estate services company.

Beth Miller is the Chief of Staff for EMEA Capital Markets where part of her responsibility included helping to run a training program for their top brokers and advisors across Europe to help get them promoted to director level.

Speaking about the goals they had for working with Cosmic Growth and the challenges they were facing beforehand, Beth explains how, ‘’with any European setup, you have lots of different countries, different cultures, different people, advising and selling to clients in many different ways.’’

‘’It was all quite disparate and disjointed. We just didn’t really know how people were going about it.’’

‘’The other thing is we just didn’t have any formal sales training. There was nothing in-house. Whilst we have a large learning and development team, we didn’t have a sales specific specialism within that.’’

‘’Therefore we wanted to partner with a third party that would bring a different view and more structured perspective that could maybe shed some light on how we could improve.’’

How Cosmic Growth Helped JLL

Beth explains how JLL run an annual training program where they have everyone together in one place for three training modules. The sales training was a large part of one of those modules.

For the corporate real estate sales program, Cosmic Growth created a custom sales playbook specifically tailored to JLL’s needs across Europe based on interviews and meetings with JLL’s brokers and advisors, the leaders of the program and any existing sales documentation available. 

We then ran a 2 day workshop in London to around 50 of their top brokers and advisors which was followed up with some one-on-one training for a select group of 15 brokers afterwards.

‘’It was basically all the top talent from across Europe. Each country got a certain allocation of seats for people who had been earmarked to be the producers and leaders of the future.’’ 

‘’It wasn’t just purely about sales either, but also around how to build rapport, how to build relationships, how to strengthen and deepen relationships.’’

‘’One of the Highest Rated Modules’’

Speaking on the program feedback Beth explains, ‘’we always send a survey after finishing the program, and the sales training specifically came out as one of the highest rated modules. The team felt like they really got a lot from it.’’

‘’Those that took up the additional sales coaching afterwards said it was really powerful too because it enabled them to embed the skills that they’d learned in the main program.’’

‘It was all really highly regarded.’’

Developing Future Leaders

In terms of developing future leaders and the impact, Beth noted ‘’a noticeable change in terms of the confidence and abilities‘’ of the team involved.

Most importantly, ‘’nearly everyone within a two year period of completing the course, basically everyone involved, has been promoted to director. It’s got a really good conversion rate in terms of the promotions.’’

‘’We’ve also got a few people now that are leading teams and doing a really great job, not just from a client perspective, but also from a leadership perspective.’’

‘’It’s been great to see them drive through the organization.’’

For the Current Leaders

Talking about the benefit to the program leaders, Beth states ‘’sales training is something that just isn’t in our wheelhouse. We recognized we needed to bring in expert advice.’’

‘’Liaising with you guys was really straightforward. You were always exceptionally well prepared. You always tailored any of the collaterals or the presenting material to what we required.’’ 

‘’I think you really understood the purpose of the training. It was a partnership model that worked well.’’

For Anyone Thinking of Working With Cosmic Growth

My biggest advice would be to make sure you, ‘’brief them (Cosmic Growth) properly on what exactly it is you want to get out of the training and why you need it. Then I think the results you’ll see will be quite specific.’’

‘’Having done the training it makes you realize how it’s such a delicate artform and in the world of AI and mass sales, it reiterates the human experience of selling, how important it is, and how long term you need to be.’’

‘’Sales doesn’t need to be faceless and it doesn’t need to be generic. It can be personal too, to your style. You just have to know what you’re doing.’’