With 350 delegates from 50 countries meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland to consider and discuss developments in foreign direct investment, Friisberg was honoured to contribute.
Lorri Lowe, our UK Managing Partner, was invited to moderate the keynote panel discussion of the conference on Workforce Development & Global Competition for Talent. Her panel comprised experts from Lockheed Martin, IBM, Silicon Valley and and Auticon, a neurodiversity international social enterprise.
Andrew Guy, another UK Partner, was a panellist on the subject of Healthcare Infrastructure and Health Tech.
It was evident that the overriding consideration for investment promotion agencies throughout the world is the location availability and access to talent. Friisberg's representatives fielded numerous questions from the forum which was a cross section of the FDI community responsible for over $1.56trillion of cross border investment worldwide every year.
With over 45 years of as one of the preeminent international search firms, Friisberg is ideally placed to inform and support major investment with clients ranging from Fortune 500s to innovative tech start ups and scale ups.
The UK government recently updated the UK Department for International Trade Support Directory.
Friisberg has been recognised as a company that has the skills and experience to help overseas businesses establish themselves, or expand, in the UK.
At a time of both political and economic uncertainty, companies need trusted, professional advice on how to promote and grow their businesses. We already work with investors across the globe and the DIT has now made it even easier to access our multi-sector expertise.
We are delighted to have been included and recognised as a specialist Management Consultancy firm for FDI. This demonstrates that Friisberg enjoys a reputation as a game changing and an authoritative firm providing leadership and recruitment advice to UK and international companies, ranging from start-ups to global corporates.
We always work closely with our clients, offering bespoke recruitment strategies, training insights and estimated salary projections that could be essential to the success of your business.
The efforts made by the management companies and by the Buy Side to adapt will not revert to the way things were.
We recognise that we must add more value, both for efficiency and quality of life, which will involve developing and adapting to this model through skills training (e.g. remote communication).
The “imposition” of teleworking during the lockdown period has caused the way of relating between the buy side and the sell side to change. This period has been a brake on the acquisition of new clients since they have preferred to trust existing relationships, and they have been more reluctant to learn about new alternatives, therefore, professionals able to develop close and trustworthy relationships take on special value.
Secondly, within the commercial activity itself, we have also observed that the technical component of the sale (product) and the general technical knowledge (market) on behalf of the sales professional is something that will be decisive in the post-Covid period - even more so than it already is.
Future commercial activity will be a mix between remote and face-to-face working. Likewise, and as a critical point, it will be necessary to have professionals who are capable of developing a relationship of trust and closeness remotely, and those who can reinvent their relationship with clients to be able to achieve more impact and higher quality in other ways.
You can't flood customers with webinars!
Emiliano Sacristán
Partner, Spain
First published in the Spanish edition of Funds Society Magazine, December 2020.
