Claire Tolan, Managing Director – Ireland, Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard reflects on how learnings from her early career inform a customer-focused approach to strategic planning and how she mentors now
There’s always a risk with mentoring someone ambitious within your own company—build up their fire too much and they may leave to pursue those ambitions elsewhere. It’s not something that overly concerns Claire Tolan, Managing Director – Ireland, Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard. Although she’s been lucky to grow her career within the company, she’s happy to see people go elsewhere to build up their experience if there isn’t a suitable position open for them—with her no-nonsense attitude tempered by a palpable sense of fun, it’s no surprise that people are keen to return to the fold to work with her again, and she’s more than willing to hold the door open for them.
As a child the Malahide woman had notions of being Dublin’s answer to Nancy Drew, keeping a keen eye on all the activity in her neighbourhood, but after a degree in marketing and languages in DCU, she forgot her detective dreams, and instead joined a graduate scheme organised by Ibec, and was selected by Irish Distillers to go to San Francisco as a brand ambassador for Bushmills.
Diving In
After she got over her initial disappointment at not going to Spain she took to the city and her new job like a duck to water: “As soon as I got to San Francisco I realised it was amazing! I landed over in the middle of the dotcom boom and literally every night there were rooftop parties. It was a really exciting place to be.”
Of course, in the drinks trade, the rooftop parties are work—sponsorship and promotional opportunities. “At the time, Jameson was big on the East Coast and Bushmills was really big on the West Coast,” she recalls. “It was a brilliant experience; I was really thrown into it and had to build relationships with sales, distributors and influencers—it’s a three-tier system over there. It was very entrepreneurial; you had to get out and do it yourself.”
She laughs reminiscing over operating in the early internet days, with a fax machine in her bedroom, and a big aerial on her mobile phone. “I have this memory still of driving my car up and down the hills in San Francisco thinking ‘This is amazing’. It’s such a vibrant place. It was so easy to meet people; people really liked the brand, they were open to doing stuff with me, the team on the ground were really supportive. I loved it.”
As the Bushmills brand moved into the Pernod Ricard portfolio in the US, she took on a role as Field Marketing Manager with them and worked across the entire portfolio of brands and across the entire Western Division—“from Alaska down to Louisiana”. As a 23-year-old female in a team of around 40 men, she says, far from coming up against sexism, “It was like having 40 dads! I never had to get a taxi from the airport, someone always picked me up.” As it was a newly created role, the team were thrilled to have support and help around marketing activations to help their sales.
Building Relationships
Throughout Tolan’s career reminiscences, the phrase that keeps coming up again and again is
“building relationships”, and she says she learned the most from observing two of the market managers who “had a really natural way of dealing with people”. She recalls, “They’d have a bit of craic with them, but ultimately got so much done by building these really strong customer relationships.”
When I put it to her that turning up with a bottle of whiskey makes for a fairly smooth start to relationship building, she counters that the follow-up is what matters. “What you need to do is prove yourself—see how you can support them and if you see an opportunity, actually follow through on it.
“When it comes to on-the-ground sales roles, following up and doing what you said you were going to do is so important; people see a lot of reps come and go, but you can make a difference by understanding their business.”
Her on-the-ground experience and lessons learned from those early days in the US still inform a customer-focused approach in her current role as Managing Director, responsible for the sales and marketing of the full Pernod Ricard portfolio of premium wines and spirits on the island of Ireland. “When we’re doing plans for our strategic accounts, I always look at it through the lens of the customer. They don’t care about marketing activations; they want to know if it’s driving footfall, if it’s going to give sales at a different time of day, or bring new consumers in.”
Get Into Action
Tolan benefitted from a company mentoring scheme at a time when her career took a massive leap—taking on the €12.7m redevelopment of the Jameson Distillery Bow Street project and jumping from managing a team of 20 to managing a team of 150. Now she mentors others, having recently worked with a colleague based in France.
Her key piece of advice: “The biggest thing for me is ‘get into action’. Try things out.” She has found her style to be that of a coach, encouraging her mentees to make connections with senior people, ask questions and even to start water-cooler conversations with senior colleagues they want to connect with: “Ultimately, it’s about asking the questions and probing, because they have the answers. They know themselves.”
What she has found is, “A lot of the time people are just trying to work out what their next role is. It’s all simple stuff but it helps having a different perspective.”
There are, she says, “so many opportunities in this industry”, pointing out the number of new whiskey brands in the market. “Irish whiskey is the fastest growing spirit, and Jameson is the number one Irish whiskey, so even within our company it’s a really exciting, dynamic place to work. Because we do our marketing here, we’ve got really good budgets and work with really good agencies. There’s so much innovation, but also, I feel the heritage passed down. When it’s your turn with the brand you do the best that you can with it, and hand it on in a better place.”