CEO <\/a>of UK & Ireland. Before joining CPM, she was with eir for 14 years.<\/p>\nThe eldest of eight girls, Laois native Butler originally planned to be a teacher and embarked on an arts degree in University College Dublin, where she spent two years.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hated it. I was lonely and I felt I needed a smaller classroom environment. I took the year out and thought, \u2018what do I want to do?\u2019 I have a logical brain, I love seeing how things connect and network. So computer science was where I threw my hat in the ring. And I absolutely loved it.\u201d<\/p>\n
After living in Dublin for 20 years, Butler and her husband ultimately decided to build a house on her family homestead.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve all moved back home [to Laois] and a few of us have built homes on the farm. The furthest sister is seven kilometres away. She married another farmer who had his own farm.\u201d<\/p>\n
Butler and her husband have a five-year-old son who, in turn, has 17 cousins. It\u2019s exactly the life she wanted for him.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s fabulous. Mammy and Daddy are young, they\u2019re both 71 and they live 200 yards from us,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Being surrounded by family makes it marginally easier to spend time away.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love being in Dublin and London, but then you drive through the countryside [and] the peace and tranquility is just …\u201d<\/p>\n
CPM International has 28 offices worldwide and Butler is in charge of those in the UK and Ireland. \u201cThe two offices in Ireland and two in the UK make up half the value of the group. It\u2019s the biggest part of the business.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe business\u201d is a sales outsourcing and customer experience agency. Essentially, CPM provides sales teams for brands.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople might ask why companies wouldn\u2019t want to have their own team directly. Well, our clients are brilliant at, say, brewing beer or consumer electronics or telco. We\u2019re brilliant at hiring, developing and nurturing great salespeople.<\/p>\n
\u201cI spend most of my time on the road,\u201d she says, noting that while 300 staff are office-based in the UK and 50 in Ireland, the rest of the 3,500 people are on the road, in client offices.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt means I can understand the culture and dynamic of their business. I then work with my teams to say what style of person and team is going to fit this brand.\u201d<\/p>\n
CPM International has many competitors. In Ireland alone, there are over 90 agencies doing similar work. Butler believes there is enough business for everyone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI genuinely believe that, and I\u2019d like to think we\u2019ve got good relationships with our competitors, because we\u2019re all here to do the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
CPM\u2019s USP is the heft of heritage they boast.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re the oldest and longest at what we\u2019ve been doing. We were the first agency in Ireland, set up to serve Mars 40 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, as part of the Omnicom group, they have scale and expertise behind them. \u201cThat also brings assurances with technology. We\u2019re always evolving the latest tech to bring to our salespeople,\u201d Butler says.<\/p>\n
So how did the computer science graduate find herself leading CPM UK & Ireland?<\/p>\n
Butler spent 14 years with eir, leading the enterprise and government market division and ultimately the only woman on its leadership team.<\/p>\n
\u201cVery similar to what I\u2019m doing now, leading relationships with the biggest companies in Ireland, but it was always men. I was facing off against very few women,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
When the opportunity arose to run a company with CPM, she saw the potential of what she could do.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had to give myself a kick and say, \u2018come on Lorraine, just take a shot here\u2019 and it was the best decision I ever made. As much as I loved eir, I can run [CPM] end to end, and I have made a good impact.\u201d<\/p>\n
Starting off as the company\u2019s first female managing director 10 years ago was not easy, however.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the first six months, genuinely, a lot of customers refused to return my calls. It\u2019s 100 per cent true. I thought, \u2018how am I going to overcome this?\u2019 So I sought out the women\u2019s network in retail. There wasn\u2019t one, so we set up one.<\/p>\n
\u201cI reached out to a couple of people who I knew were instrumental, good, influential people in retail, and we did some research. [It] showed that less than 6 per cent of women were in [a] boardroom position. Extraordinary statistics, hopefully totally different now.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe asked if they would be willing to share their experiences with other groups of women. On the back of that, I then started having business relationships with those women. They were the decision-makers for my customers, so they started to return my calls.\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t all so straightforward.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne day, I asked one of our [male] customers, \u2018why haven\u2019t you returned any of my calls?\u2019 He answered, \u2018Sure why would I, you haven\u2019t a clue what you\u2019re doing and you\u2019re a woman.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Butler responded, \u201cWell, I am a woman and I can\u2019t do anything about that, but I certainly know what I\u2019m doing. And I said, \u2018I mightn\u2019t know your industry, but I\u2019m never going to get to know what it is unless you give me a chance\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some shouting followed, Butler says, but ultimately he appreciated that style of directness and they just sat down and started to work through the issues.<\/p>\n
Other aspects of the business surprised her too, namely the myriad differences between the UK and Ireland, including the issue of talent attraction and retention.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Ireland, we\u2019re at full employment more or less. People are moving roles much more frequently than they\u2019ve ever done before. So you have to back all the investment in training and development of that talent, and that takes time,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the UK, there\u2019s an influx of graduates looking for work, and we\u2019re getting some really good talent because we\u2019ve got loads of work for them.<\/p>\n
\u201cHolistically, the UK employment market is more challenged. The cost of living [there] is far tougher than Ireland. We\u2019ve got great momentum in Ireland, despite everything we\u2019re seeing recently with fuel challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her modus operandi comes across differently in the UK too. Asked how her teams might describe her, Butler says colleagues in Ireland would call her an Energizer Bunny, not hierarchical and focused on people to the core.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Lorraine-Butler-pic.jpg\")
Lorraine Butler Chief Executive Officer, UK & Ireland, CPM. Picture Jason Clarke<\/p>\n
\u201cGenuinely, people are the most important thing in any company. In the UK they would think I\u2019m not hierarchical enough, that I\u2019m \u2018too into people\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy style when I went in [was] I wanted to go directly to talk to people, not to go through the chain of command. Ithink there\u2019s too many links in that chain, and that\u2019s also prevalent across lots of UK companies. Accountability can be spread very thin in a hierarchical organisation.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for the future, Butler says she has high hopes for continued growth. \u201cWe\u2019re 40 years in Ireland and we\u2019ve grown five-fold since I started. I\u2019d like to leave a legacy of resilience and progress, where people really trust CPM and they know that we\u2019ll do what we say we\u2019re going to do. If you don\u2019t have underlying trust, it\u2019s all short-lived.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CPM UK & Ireland CEO Lorraine Butler talks to Sarah Freeman about her management style at the sales…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":474662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-474661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=474661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/474661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/474662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=474661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=474661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=474661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}