Corporate Solution at Jones Lang Lasalle free essay sample

Should the account management function be a cost center or profit center? Should Peter Barge recruit an internal or external candidate to be BoA’s account manager? Part A). We feel that this new account manager function should be considered as a cost center. Generally, account managers are points of contact in managing customer’s accounts with the business, and this is also true in JLL’s reasons for introducing an account manager. JLL wants to ensure that their clients feel that their RE needs are being met. Therefore it will not be the incoming account manager’s job to go out and find new clients to work with, and thus we cannot expect the account manager to produce any additional profits to the company but maintain existing clients. Instead, the account manager will be working closely with JLL’s three business units – Tenant Representation, Project Development Management, and Corporate Property Services – as well as Bank of America to enhance information transfers and business understandings between these parties. We will write a custom essay sample on Corporate Solution at Jones Lang Lasalle or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page When transferring information between JLL business units and Bank of America, the account management will ensure clients’ needs are well understood by regional offices. Before the idea of account management, JLL’s business units strayed away from sharing information amongst each other, partially because they were afraid of losing clients to each other. Therefore, the account manager needs to be an effective and fair intermediary between JLL’s business units, as well as between JLL and Bank of America. Consequently, profits are not necessarily generated by this mid-stream function but the downstream regional offices, which with help from the new role use their resources to provide clients with improved RE solutions. Part B). We decided that account managers should be recruited externally. First, the nature of the job client service oriented. The major function of this position is to diagnose and respond to customer’s requests in a timely and proactive manner. Since internal unit managers are highly specialized in their own unit (region), and would need to acquire extra knowledge about other units as external managers do, putting them into this position would not yield any advantage over hiring external managers. Furthermore, internal managers might make biased decisions which benefit their own unit at a cost of corporate profits. They might allocate the majority of the businesses to his/her unit simply because he/she thinks it was better than what other units have to offer. This conflict of interests would jeopardize the initial incentive in setting up the position. As for external managers, since they yield no prior experience with any of regional office of the company, they would evaluate each unit equally and make the optimal allocation decision to achieve real estate solutions for MNCs and therefore maximize overall profit. At last, we recommend fixed and performance-based pay for the new role. Evaluation criteria could include client feedbacks (primary), revenue generated through that client (secondary) and feedbacks from regional offices the account manager deals with.