What have been your highlights since joining the EICC?

During my first week, Dame Stella Rimington, who was formerly the Director General of MI5, was the keynote speaker at an association conference. Since then, I’ve seen other truly inspiring speakers, everyone from Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson to George Clooney, the First Minister to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Seeing the building in action is incredibly exciting.

What first attracted you to working at the EICC?

I grew up in Edinburgh and I’m incredibly proud of our city. The EICC has a direct economic impact on the wider community and that is hugely attractive for someone who is born and bred here.

The sales team has recently expanded, can you tell us about the new members of the team?

There has been significant change to the structure of the sales team. We recently recruited for the corporate sales team, two of which were new roles. We’ve also expanded our association team and brought in Derrick Lothian as Senior Association Business Development Manager. He has previous experience as a professional conference organiser, so he has brought a fresh perspective to the team. We’ve also increased our research function with another member of the association research team.

What are the key priorities for the sales team this year?

For 2016, the focus will very much be on the association sector. The EICC is much more flexible than people realise; we don’t only host large-scale events – we have lots of different shapes and sizes of meeting spaces for 50 to 2,000 delegates. As part of this, we are very keen to increase our collaboration with partners and agencies.

What new sales initiatives have you introduced?

We embarked on research last year with our clients and we received feedback that the way we quoted for business was quite complex. We’ve taken this on board and we have just launched a simplified proposal, offering an ‘open door rate’ to our clients. There’s always lots of extras we can add to enhance an event but we wanted our clients to have competitive rates including everything you really need to run an event, for example, the venue hire, audio-visual equipment and stewards. In 2015, we also introduced a delegate day rate, which proved to be incredibly popular.

How would you like people to perceive the EICC going forward?

For me, I would like people to see us as a spectacular conference centre in the heart of an amazing city that offers clears costs, flexible spaces for all types of events, and an experienced and creative team. Our repeat business levels are high. Once people come here, they really fall in love with the EICC. We want to get more people experiencing the conference centre for the first time.