Business Travel Executive, April 2018

STRATEGIC MEETING MANAGEMENT 20Business Travel Executive APRIL 2018 The idea of strategic meetings management is not new Yet its implementation today can be as vexing as ever By Lark Gould SMM Meetings Secret Sauce The fundamentals of strategic meetings management have been around since 2004 and the concept goes back even further But while its value to the corporate bottom line is proven actually getting organizations to adopt an SMM program is a different matter In a nutshell SMM turns each meeting into its own corporate entity that aligns the events purpose procurement best practices and policies across all departments and stakeholders The goal is to streamline spend and optimized return on investment for each event Not surprisingly creating such a far reaching policy framework and putting it into action can be daunting But for those who stay the course the rewards can be substantial This discipline of SMM has been around for nearly15 years says Kari Wendel vice president global SMM strategy and solutions at CWT Meetings Events The focus was on visibility and savings one of the last areas of spend that was not under control And these are still core Dick Zeller SMM practice lead at Maritz Travel Company has been involved with the concept for some three decades dating back to what was originally labeled Meeting Consolidation in the 1980s In part the idea came about from the lingering suspicion that meetings costs could be better controlled I have never worked with a company that underestimated their meeting and event spend Zeller notes Meetings management has always been a very large area of corporate spend because it has to be purchased in a thousand pieces difficult to quantify because it buried pieces in multiple budget categories Centralizing this practice enables risk management transparency and the introduction of standardized best practices An effective SMM solution focuses on leveraged procurement practices and enhanced service delivery The goals of reducing costs and driving effective meetings are not mutually exclusive he says Right Time Right Place Indeed SMM casts a wide net aiming to create enterprise wide meeting related processes on spend volumes standards and suppliers to achieve cost savings risk mitigation and superior service To the companies who wade in says Wendel the return on SMM done well is always significant 1500 percent to 3000 percent returns So it is never too expensive Studies show that about 15 percent of an organizations collective time is spent in meetings But the cost goes beyond the time spent Approximately 3 percent of an organizations revenue also goes into meetings and events If an organization invests that much time and treasure in meetings and events what is it doing to ensure that both expenditures are worthwhile An average enterprise generally spends one half to one percent of its annual sales on meetings and events That translates to approximately 25 to 30 percent of total T E spend 60 percent of air volume or 2 to 3 percent of revenue Starting up an SMM program has to begin with discovering where the organizations numbers fall in these categories finding out how departments involved align on budgets and goals and whether results are coming in on target Quantitative and qualitative goals have to be set in advance whether you are looking at sales or client stickiness you can measure anything as long as you set those goals up front Doing it after the fact wont prove anything And it all must tie in to greater corporate objectives Wendel advises No two corporations are alike in fact no two meetings are alike So there is no one size fits all for SMM But there are questions approaches templates that can uncover the keys to creating a strategy that will make sense Companies such as Carlson Wagonlit Cvent BCD and Maritz among others can manage these processes since it is often much more than one person one department or one team can take on Mind the Gaps Zeller believes SMM requires organizations to understand and address the gaps between current state of meetings and the desired future state If you are in a fragmented state of meetings and events using multiple third party providers having admins and other unmanaged internal resources signing contracts and planning meetings have no meeting policy and allow meeting practices to vary from one department to another you are not going to fix everything immediately he advises Building an SMM solution can take a year to 18 months so patience is the most important ingredient Pulling together a consistent and transparent solution getting departments stakeholders and owners on board and developing policy that keeps meetings large and small on track is a long road with few short cuts It is important that companies build a realistic timeline for implementing the solution says Zeller Programs often falter when they launch before they are fully developed and the meeting owners have not bought into the change However he warns doing nothing is not an option Implementing an SMM solution seems overwhelming so nothing happens Thats a mistake If you dont do anything you will be in the same place you are today a year from now