At tech company XYZ, the new marketing vice president—who was charged with meetings oversight—asked the head of sales to evaluate a customer/prospective customer meeting that included entertainment, product rollout, and hands-on product experiences, according to Bill Voegeli, president of Association Insights and coordinator of MPI’s Business Value of Meetings initiative. He declined to reveal the name of the company.
The sales manager replied that revenues were greater than the cost of the meeting, and noted that customers have come to expect this annual event.
But the new vice president challenged the sales head. What if we could get a lot more from the meeting, she said? What if we target the number of customers we invite and set quotas for sales people to procure attendees. In other words, she was looking to create measureable objectives. Some sales people complained, because they objected to having their behavior tracked, but the vice president knew those measurements would change behaviors and yield more value.
She was right, Voegeli says.
“In the first quarter after the meeting, sales went up an unprecedented amount,” he reports. “When you measure business value, it’s important to realize where your value might come from. The new vice president knew that installing the measures would be worth it, and wouldn’t add any costs to the meeting.”
That was the first year of this company’s measurement efforts, Voegeli notes. The second year, the marketing executive suggested the company measure the marginal sales increase, in order to determine how much money would have been made without holding the annual customer meeting. In other words, she set out to isolate the meetings effect.
She asked for a budget to bring in an objective third-party service to call customers and ask them how much influence the meeting has on their buying decisions. Interviews revealed that the meeting is extremely influential, because customers said it was where they could get sales, support and product development together in the same place.
“This tech company is now in its 20th year of measuring results, and spends more than $2 million annually to prove the business value of meetings,” Voegeli says.
“One point to understand here is the company started small, with virtually no measurement costs. The meetings industry needs to understand how important these measurements can be,” he says. “If for nothing else, planners can avoid the probing questions of a politician or shareholder, such as we saw with the A.I.G. Effect, by measuring business value.”
