Gilbane’s Big Idea for Growth

Gilbane wanted to transform the company from an Operations and Engineering minded culture to a Sales culture, where everybody sells. Everyone engaging customers needed to always be selling. DSG helped Gilbane achieve this big cultural change. 

I remember the first time I talked to Bill Gilbane, president of the Gilbane Building Company, who told me: "We're not looking for Dale Carnegie training. We're transforming our company from an operations/engineering-minded culture to a sales culture where everybody sells. Everyone who's engaging customers is always selling. That's the culture we're trying to build." We needed to get our operational people comfortable with the idea that they would soon be held accountable for selling as it is also part of their role. They would need a skill set to converse, talk, and show an owner where they could add value.

The handoff and transition from sales to operations needed to be smoother, and we wanted our doer-sellers to take ownership of that sales process. We needed DSG to help us incorporate this big idea for cultural change within the company. Our goal was to transform them from operational people who had to sell into other operational people, to a doer-seller who is a builder of businesses, facilities, and relationships. The business development team was previously responsible for finding business, and the doer-sellers were responsible for building the buildings. DSG set out to achieve the change by involving these two teams to work together more effectively towards one role - building businesses and relationships over time so that Gilbane could grow.