THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Client intimacy
Next steps
24 issue: RI WORLD
The headquarters of COFCO
are in Beijing's Central
Business District
Time spent working with a cliënt increases understanding
of their business, John Baker says, but it doesn't always fuliy
explain what drives them strategically. The team approached
the meeting on three levels. "Firstly, we were able to demon-
strate our understanding of the client's business; locking into
the important strategie drivers that cause the CEO and his
board the greatest concern, and we were able to demonstrate
that we are aware of their businesses and were able to
elaborate on the upstream, mid stream and downstream
challenges that we believe the company faces. This helped
us to establish a 'meeting of the minds' position with them.
Secondly, we displayed a thorough understanding of their
strategie position - without this, it's very difficult to build
cliënt intimacy. Thirdly, we were able to outline what COFCO's
strategie options were as a company, and we were able to put
forward a range of achievable solutions underpinned by our
F&A expertise."
The devil is often in the details, however, and preparing for
a number of scenarios and eventualities is both intensive
and requires resources. Soh Flang Kwang says that the
Rabobank team discussed the framework of their approach,
breaking it down into consequent parts. "Primarily, our aim
was to establish a strategie dialogue with the company's
management and, when that had been achieved, we knew
we would be ready to go on to the second level, which was
sector-level engagement. This involved engaging a number
of the company's units on a granular level, and for this the
SRBs, Sector Heads and FAR specialists explained our F&A
knowledge and thought leadership. This step was crucial to
achieving the cliënt intimacy that we needed to move onto
the next step, which was outlining our solutions at a product
level. At this point we looked in detail at each strategie option
and assigned products to them, which showed COFCO exactly
how we could help them achieve their financial goals."
With the first Thought Leadership cliënt engagement success-
fully behind them, the Wholesale Clients Asia team has had
a chance to reflect on the technique's value. However, what
elements do they feel need to be incorporated to ensure
success in future pitches across Rabobank globally?
Lex Kloosterman: 'The first point is that we need to be very
honest about the quality of the relationship we have with our
clients. While we would like to be able to use our Thought
