Strelmark: Business Development Consultants

Our Approach
Consulting
Workshops
Business Golf
Speaking

Workshops: Individual, Small Group,
and Company-Wide

Strelmark's programs are designed to meet a diverse range of business development workshop needs. We work with individuals, small groups, and entire companies to create a business development culture that gains and retains clients through building strategic relationships. All programs feature our methodical and innovative approach to relationship building as the cornerstone of effective business development.

Customized One-On-One Coaching for individuals includes a process of discovery, setting goals, and creating a personalized business development plan for gaining and retaining clients. The coaching process includes identification of interests, assessment of strengths and weaknesses, introduction to our strategic relationship building approach, tapping into existing networks, identifying vehicles for expanding relationships, and honing communication techniques.

Strelmark’s Orals Presentation Coaching guides teams responsible for developing and orally presenting winning proposals. Our services include critiquing scripts; coaching on style, presentation skill, content, and delivery; identifying audience concerns; advising on demographics; and maximizing impact of sound bites. Companies don't win business with proposals based upon marketing fluff, but rather on ones full of valuable content delivered by a team who can gain the prospective client’s trust.

Our small-group and company-wide programs leverage the experience participants bring while teaching practical business development skills to all levels within the firm. Although anyone within the company is an ambassador and potential channel for new business, our programs are particularly helpful for professionals on the front line of client relations. All of Strelmark workshops are customized to meet the audience's needs and is appropriate for everything from professional development days to team building events to corporate retreats. We can mix and match from the following topics to create the perfect program for your group:

Building Business By Taking A Strategic Relationship Approach
How important is it for you and your company to build trust, establish a positive reputation, and make personal contact with current or potential clients? The key to establishing a successful pipeline of new business is found in relationships. Far too often, professional service firms adopt a silver-bullet approach by hiring more sales people to make cold calls, improving the website, or printing a new brochure. Yet what they really need is to take an approach that is based on building strategic relationships—to focus on a series of interactions that will build connections with prospects and result in new contracts. Activities that support the development of strategic relationships are the most cost-effective means of retaining and gaining clients. In this presentation participants learn the concepts and tools of strategic relationship building, a methodically planned and structured approach that is a proven strategy for growing a business.

New Business Presentations: Wooing Prospects & Winning Business
Ask most prospects why they chose one professional service firm over another and the typical refrain goes something like this: "They were our kind of people. They go about things the same way we do. We knew we could work with them. In a nutshell, they spoke our language!" From writing proposals to developing PowerPoint presentations to making the final pitch, this session delivers powerful tools and communication techniques for determining the hot buttons of a potential client. Learn how to evaluate their needs, understand what drives them, and tailor what you offer to fit their culture and circumstances.

Creating A Personalized Business Development Plan
A personal business development plan is a highly effective tool for those in the professional services industry where individuals are often required to "rain-make" their own careers within an organization. In this presentation, participants will learn how to develop a customized and attainable business development plan—complete with action items and benchmark measurements—that will allow him or her to continue working with existing clients while focusing on short- and long-term business development strategies. We show how to incorporate Strelmark's unique relationship-mapping tool into the plan to effectively win engagements and expand the client base.

Relationship Truths: Mastering The Five Cs
Research has shown that even in fields such as engineering, architecture, IT, law and finance, only about 15% of one's financial success is due to technical knowledge, while 85% is due to skill in human engineering which includes personality, likeability, and success with others. In this interactive workshop participants learn and begin to master the Five C's which are the universal, absolutely critical success tools for building and managing relationships with prospects and clients that result in business growth.

Because golf is one of the most powerful business development tools available today, we offer several innovative programs that leverage business golf to gain and retain clients. Learn about our golf programs.

Berry Appleman & Leiden

"Your guidance over the last four months helped structure me on a business development track that is relatively unheard of for a lawyer who is not a chosen business development partner, or rainmaker.
Sitting down together to discuss strategies helped me pinpoint necessary contacts both in the targeted client realm and opened an entire avenue for pursuing cross-marketing opportunities and carefully tracking them. You noted that it is now a time to build collegial relationships with those who are "senior" to me and work with people who are older. This was very helpful advice. You noted that it was important to work on the different areas of business development including speaking, writing, and check-ins with existing clients. I have happily done all of that; your guidance added much needed structure and confidence/reinforcement to the process. Overall, it has been very helpful to have the business development workshops that were tailored to my daily work schedule, life, opportunities, memberships, and contacts."
Christina Lang Wallace
Of Counsel
Berry Appleman & Leiden, LLP

"The Business Development Workshop Hilary delivered served to raise the awareness level of client interaction and served as a great means for our team to learn the science of retaining clients. It was beneficial not only for our engineers in terms of their professional relationships, but also for our business development team, since they learned many new approaches. We plan on working with Hilary in the future both in terms of inspiring group retreats and also to coach on relationship marketing."
Susan Williamson Ross
Senior Vice President & Chief Administrative Officer,
Clark Construction

“In IT it's either black or white, there's no plaid. Hilary provided workshops about relationships, understanding how do I put myself in second place to be able to listen to you and understand what your needs are, so I can hopefully negotiate better, manage that relationship better, and take that relationship to the next level. It's not intuitive for us, especially being engineers. It was kind of shocking to me, but I think that most of the people in the class, on the team, didn't think they could negotiate. So I think that they now understand the potential and the importance for diplomacy. What Hilary said first when she came and started the workshop was huge. As she came into the workshop session, everyone was trying to figure out what customer relationship management was—is it the "flavor of the month?" Hilary walked in the meeting and set the stage by saying, ‘Did you know that 85% of the relationship you have from a technical standpoint that you have with your customer has nothing to do with technology? But it has everything to do with your personal relationship skills.’ That just stopped everyone right in their tracks. It gave us the focus that we needed. Something that we didn't have before. That was just huge. The other thing that Hilary said was her term of ‘raising the level of consciousness’. What this means is that proactively, we now ask ourselves, ‘What can we do to move this relationship forward?’ This is a whole new twist for us. Now when we are on the phone with that person working through a particular situation, in the back of our minds now instead of thinking how do I fix this technical thing, they are thinking, ‘How do I talk them down from the ledge? How do I diffuse the situation? How do I control this? How do I work this relationship and manipulate this relationship to where it ends on a positive for both of us?’ This ‘raising the level of consciousness’ is something that went on like a light. In terms of a specific example of how effective the workshop has been for my team I'll share a situation with one of our best customers from an IT standpoint. We support a manufacturing company outside of Clark. Their service was down. We were in a horrible situation. The guy from my team that I had to deal with was scared because he knew the potential for losing this relationship completely. So what he did before he took any action was to think about Hilary's workshop and he actually went through the four C's. So on his ride to see the customer, he formulated his plan, using the four Cs and planning how he was going to try and save this relationship. He felt ecstatic because when he met head on with the irate client, he used Hilary's workshop and instead of a "you're out of here", thirty minutes later he walked out of there with more business, which is really fantastic!"
Dave Golden,
Vice President,
Chief Information Officer
Clark Construction