Sales & Marketing Careers at White Lodging

Hi, I’m Katie Ferrera. I’m the Market Assistant Director of Sales at Marriott Place Indianapolis in Indianapolis, Indiana. I started in a pastry shop. I took a pre-opening position. I was lifting 50-pound bags of sugar and flour and making cookies 1,200 at a time, and I quickly realized that that is not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, as fun as it was. We posted a culinary administrative assistant position, and our chef came by and was writing on the BEO board, and I said, what’s that position? And he said, do you know how to use computers? And I said, I was going to major in journalism — of course I know how to use computers. So we walked down the hallway and we’re going to interview, and he says, do you know how to use Excel? I said, no, but I’m a quick learner. His office was in a garde manger kitchen, which was at 45 degrees. So I was in South Florida wearing tights underneath a suit, in a kitchen, in proximity to a chef, doing shorthand, doing all the paperwork for our culinary team. I stayed there for almost four years. I got to see the behind the scenes, the costing, all the details that go into that, and an impact that happened across multiple hotels. After a while, I took an opportunity to transfer into event management. I had relationships at that point, I had trust, and they’re like, you know enough and you have resources, we can teach you the rest. After about a year of that, I had the opportunity to move home to a small hotel that had been open for 20 years. Totally different experience. So from event management, I went into a selling and servicing role, and in selling and servicing, I was doing small pop-up groups. Eventually that role led to a leader in catering sales. I brought my food and beverage knowledge, I brought my sales skills together, and then was recruited by White Lodging to be Director of Catering. I moved from a smaller hotel to a bigger hotel. Then I went into operations leadership. I came back into sales. I took on markets that were different, and there really wasn’t a point in my career where I ever felt like I was struggling to learn, because I was stretching, but I wasn’t really stretching to a breaking point. And I had good support along the way. We have a sales team of 27, with everything from coordinator all the way up to senior account executives. The wonderful thing about having five hotels is you have just about every type of business in the hotel that you can possibly imagine. We might be servicing a citywide conference for firefighters, or a couple of weeks ago we hosted the NFL Combine and had every major franchise here. It’s a lot of logistics. It’s a lot of trying to find a solution to multiple different opportunities to ultimately make everybody feel good about the decisions we make every day. To be in my position, I think you really need to be able to juggle a lot of different things. My days aren’t the same. I have to be flexible. I have to be able to think on my feet, able to read the room and understand: this is a priority, somebody’s stressed, this happened and it’s urgent. I love spending time with my team, understanding what motivates them and how to get them to be their best selves. But I also love working on the strategy side and really understanding how to make the hotel run as optimally as possible. If I can educate them on a way to do that, and I see that light go off — oh, I didn’t think of that — it’s motivating. And I think that’s what’s made me successful, and I’ve had those aha moments along my career because great mentors have taught me.