Siobhan O'Sullivan, director of sales and marketing at Fitzwilliam Hotel, Belfast in conversation with
SANDRA O'CONNELL
MY PARENTS have a pub and restaurant in Cahirciveen called the Shebeen and from the time we were old enough to see over the bar we were out pulling pints and talking to customers.
When I have kids of my own I’ll do the same to them because it means you grow up able to talk to everyone and anyone. It also means you can get a job anywhere because sales is all about building relationships.
I’m up every morning for my spinning class at 6.45am. There are about 20 of us and we sit on our bikes with an instructor telling us to go faster or slower. I have to do it in the morning because I never know what time my day will end and anyway, I’d be too tired.
I’m in for 8.30am and go through all my e-mails. Actually, I’m a bit sad because, thanks to my iPhone, I get e-mails 24/seven and, if I get one at 3am, I’ll respond to it then.
At 10am we have our operations meeting, to find out who is coming to the hotel and what’s on and if there are any VIPs. We get a lot of those because we’re a funky, contemporary kind of five-star and we make a good fit with the music industry. There’s loads going on music-wise in Belfast these days. In November, the MTV music awards are here and MTV has already contracted half of our rooms.
During the day I’ll be in and out making sales calls. We have a lot of corporate accounts and Belfast is small enough that I can usually walk to see clients.
Up here they complain about being stuck in traffic if they have been 15 minutes in a traffic jam. I tell them they don’t know traffic until they have spent two hours a day on the M50 which is all too familiar to me. I lived in Dublin for 10 years before I came here last year.
For lunch I’ll have a salad at my desk. I try to be good but only because in this job you have to have lunch and dinner with clients a lot and you can’t ask someone out to dinner and then have a salad or skip dessert.
At the moment I’m preparing for a marketing road show in the UK. We’ll be hitting Manchester, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Newcastle in four days, making sales calls every day.
I’ve a hen weekend right after it, so I’ll either be asleep after half an hour or dancing on the table.
When I’m away myself the first thing I check out in any hotel is the bathroom. If I run my finger over a sink and pick up any residue from cleaning solutions, I know it hasn’t been cleaned properly and I’ll check out.