Meetings continue to be one of the toughest categories for companies to fully wrap their arms around so they can manage spending properly.
Why? Because meetings are complex, with many different associated expenses and logistical challenges, and because meeting planning is often decentralized, handled by many different people within an organization.
Yet despite these management challenges, meetings are also an essential link between companies and their constituencies, including clients and prospects. As we turn toward economic recovery in the new year, meetings will be a critical element in helping companies forge ahead to meet their business goals.
That’s why the practice of strategic meetings management will generate more and more corporate interest in 2010. Companies will increasingly seek to not only understand what they spend on meetings, events and incentives, but ensure they are getting the best return from those expenditures, both from a monetary standpoint and attendee experience.
Interest in strategic meetings management gained a lot of momentum in 2009 when corporate travel and meetings of all types came under media, public and government scrutiny. The result has been a renewed focus throughout organizations to ensure policies and procedures are in place to understand, control and provide transparency around meeting and travel investments.
The industry has continued to grow and refine its services and the cost savings and risk management benefits offered by strategic meetings management programs.
Best practices include the following:
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Providing benchmark cost savings and cost avoidance reports for not only the client organization, but also in how the client organization compares to other similar programs. The availability of this benchmarked cost information provides the organization with the ability to identify areas for further improvement.
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Offering progressive organizations and service providers statistical analysis of spend data to provide meeting planners with meeting options and ideas for locations that can provide comparable quality at lower cost.
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Helping leading service providers to understand the need in providing third-party quality assurances that attest to the quality and completeness of the strategic meetings management process being employed across the organization.
However, even though more sophisticated data analysis provides compelling additional value, it is not enough to address the issues facing organizations today. The need for transparency in spend is highlighted in the recommended industry-led guidelines developed via a collaborative effort among industry leaders.
Key elements of a strategic meetings management program to assist with meeting the recommended guidelines in 2010 should include:
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A centralized system for ME&I (meetings, events and incentives) registration across the corporation that assures transparency, accountability and compliance with internal controls and policies.
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A defined process for measuring, tracking and reporting on the business benefit of conducting such programs, such as return on objective or return on investment analysis.
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A reporting process that identifies attendees and their relationship to the organization and the business purpose for their attendance.
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An expenditure control for costs per program or per participant, based on and consistent with the particular business objective and audience involved.
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A rules structure for incentive travel that ties attendee qualification to sound business practices and measurable performance or productivity goals.
2010: Where We Need to Go
The development of strategic meetings management has been gradual, but now it’s reaching a tipping point. In the 1980s and 1990s, corporations were tasked with having to develop better approaches to managing expenses across their organizations. Various industries and service providers recognized the opportunity for significant cost savings and improved risk management if they could manage this spend on an enterprise-wide basis.
These initial efforts were dubbed "meetings consolidation" and involved the development and implementation of broad policies and a new business process that provided the organization with the ability to apply proven strategic sourcing principles to meetings, events and incentives.
Over the past few years, it became clear that strategic sourcing was able to deliver consistent and measurable results through an integrated and balanced approach. But while all that is good at reducing costs, it does not guarantee strategic outcomes.
Based on the history and factors that led to the development of strategic meetings management, the approach has come to be known as a cost-cutting way to create value for the organization. While this view is understandable, it is not broad enough to meet the needs and demands of participants at meetings, events and incentive programs.
What is needed in 2010 is a broader view of the value that a strategic meetings management strategy should bring to the organization. That additional value is delivered from improving the effectiveness of individual meetings, events and incentives and by optimizing spend through better alignment of the entire meetings, events and incentives strategy to the business strategy. In short, we need to define strategic meetings management as both strategic sourcing and the achievement of strategic outcomes.
So how does an organization go about achieving strategic outcomes? Improving effectiveness requires the organization to think differently about how meetings, events and incentives decisions are made and who is involved in the decision-making process. Most strategic meetings management providers identify two key constituents involved in these decisions: meeting owners and meeting planners. While these groups are important, it is increasingly important to understand the needs, desires and motivations of the attendees, whether they are employees, channel partners, customers or prospects.
The need to more completely involve the attendee in the development of a strategic meetings management strategy is a daunting task. It cannot be fully accomplished using traditional approaches to understanding and motivating attendees, such as attendee post-program surveys, informal input, gut feel or advisory boards. While these activities are popular and easy to administer, they do not address the very diverse needs of today’s audience.
For example:
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How do you attract an increasingly harried and highly sought after client to attend your customer event?
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How do the needs, experiences and expectations of a global workforce impact your meetings, events and incentives strategy?
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How do meeting planners and meeting owners better understand and integrate attendees’ attitudes and desires in the area of content, presentation design, attendee mix and the overall experience to achieve better results?
Traditional approaches to researching these issues do not adequately address the needs of an increasingly diverse workforce or customer base. This diversity exhibits itself in individuals proactively seeking more relevant personal experiences, not just trips or "we’ve-always-done-it this-way" meetings and events.
Additionally, organizations and planners are increasingly being asked to measure and demonstrate how to improve the contribution from meetings, events and incentives as vehicles for effective communications, culture-building and engagement of the participants around brand and business objectives.
Accomplishing this requires a new approach; one that brings the "voice of the participant" more fully to the decisions that are being made about meetings, events and incentives destinations, activities and content. This insight helps companies develop a clearer view into how a specific audience wants those decisions made. It also leads to better defined and more relevant and inspiring programs that drive increased performance, increase engagement and optimize return on investment.
Future of Strategic Management
While it remains important to implement an enterprise-wide approach to sourcing and contracting, it should be the beginning and not the end state of a strategic meetings and event management program.
A best approach in 2010 will take the conversation beyond simple cost-savings measures and carry it into results that add additional strategic value by delivering more effective outcomes from the organization’s entire meetings, events and incentives portfolio.
The comprehensive methodology, and the sophisticated predictive modeling research that supports it, will empower organizations with the ability to better understand the needs, learning and communication styles of their attendees so that companies, in turn, can improve the form, content and delivery of these important event components.
With this new approach, companies will be able to achieve more effective outcomes from their meetings, events and incentives, while gaining the ability to demonstrate how these activities align and contribute to their overall business performance.
—Issa Jouaneh is vice president of Maxvantage and Global Meetings Solutions, American Express Business Travel.
