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Engineering & Construction

Skanska recently worked with Hilary on a number of successful pursuits for large infrastructure projects in the Mid-Atlantic region. Hilary was brought in to provide coaching services to support our win theme development, evaluate & enhance team cohesion & participate in interview rehearsals & presentation material preparation. Hilary was quick to learn the project, the team, understand what was important to the Client & to provide valuable constructive feedback to the team. We look forward to working with Hilary again and wholeheartedly recommend Strelmark for strategic presentation readiness.”

Stephen R. Skippen

Senior Project Manager, USA Civil

“We had lost a big opportunity. Hilary was recommended to us, we hired here to work with our team on their presentation skills and since then our win rate has gone up significantly. I would recommend her to all firms that want to win more contracts in construction and other industries too as her content is transferrable.”

Jeff Pellegrino,

CEO, Peris Construction

“Hat’s off to Hilary! Her “Gain and Retain Clients” training was thoughtfully tailored to our needs as a professional service firm and delivered with unparalleled enthusiasm… and relevance. The positive influence of her training has been so profound, we have doubled the number of sessions planned for this coming year across our larger U.S. offices.”

Ian MacFarlane,

President & CEO, EA Engineering, Science & Technology, Inc.

“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, since they learned many new approaches. We plan on working with Hilary in the future both in terms of inspiring group retreats an 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? 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 C’s 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

My company asked Hilary to deliver a short afternoon training session related to building customer relationships. In just a few hours, she gave our team, composed of superintendents, project managers, accounting, HR & executives, several real time tools & skills that they could immediately use every day in their roles. The entire team was engaged throughout the training & had nothing but very positive feedback about the session. Hilary is a powerful communicator & connects easily with any type of audience. We are looking for additional ways to utilize Hilary's strong experience & depth of knowledge for additional team training sessions. I strongly recommend Hilary to any business leader who is looking for ways to take their business development & customer service offering to the next level.

Jennifer Bognet,

Executive Vice President, Bognet Construction

“I met Hilary at a golf event, on how to mix business with golf. She had such a great seminar on business golf that we wanted to go further and use her expertise and services. We learned from Hilary how to gain and retain clients and how to strategically place business in the market place. I learned so much from Hilary that I could not wait to take back to my business and share with the employees. I felt empowered to use golf as part of our business development plan and market business with golf. The benefits from Hilary were numerous. We want to strategically place business using tactics Hilary taught us. We learned not only how to gain clients but also how to retain our existing clients. Hilary’s seminar definitely helped me on and off the golf course. She taught me when to bring up business, when to provide business cards, certain question to ask and when.”

Melissa Allen,

Director of Marketing, WFT Engineering

“We have hired Hilary to help us create a culture where relationships are valued. We see this in our business as really fundamental to our ability to get work. We are a company of largely engineers, myself excluded, and our engineers need very specific ideas of how they can build relationships. These are not what I would call out-of-the-box thinkers and Hilary helped us accomplish that. I have noticed since Hilary has been working with us, is that people are initiating social activities with clients. We have tickets to the MCI center, we have tickets to cultural events and rather than me having to beg people to take clients to these things, our people are saying, ‘Hey Susan, can I have tickets to the box so that I can take my buddy Joe over at the architect’s office to the wizards play?”

Susan Ross,

Senior Vice President, Clark Construction

“Hilary’s passion and knowledge for customer relationship management is immensely appealing and impressive. My team was really disappointed when workshop was over. That’s a really good place for us to be as a team.”
**Dave’s Full Length Testimonial Below

Dave Golden,

Vice President & CIO, Clark Construction

“Thank you so much for speaking to CREW Northern Virginia. I’ve heard nothing but wonderful news! You were such breath of fresh air last night in your excitement, your message, and your delivery of your presentation. It’s actually wonderful to hear that we are still responsible for our own destination through the five C’s and can be valuable in our careers instead of getting swept up in the thoughts of “oh”, we’re just in a recession, there is nothing I can do about it”. I feel like it becomes a crutch for failure for too many. Thank you for your passion to help others succeed by providing the tools we need to gain and retain clients.”

Chasity Jansa,

LEED A.P. Assistant Project Manager, Eered Construction, L.P. – CREW NoVa