Aim is to change behaviour - Hamso
Meetings will only be profitable if they persuade delegates to act upon what they have learned, Elling Hamso, a meetings management consultant, said.
Dr Hamso said that unless a meeting energised the attendees to do something, it would not deliver a ROI.
He was speaking at a session on effective meetings at the Crossroads Paris conference, organised by the Paragon Partnership and attended by nearly 200 delegates from Europe and the US.
"The overall purpose of a meeting is the same. What we try to achieve is to persuade or inspire the people in front of us, to connect with them, to educate them to do something different," Dr Hamso, managing partner at the European Event ROI Institute, said.
"The best chance of success is by changing the attitude of the people in the room to do something afterwards that they would not otherwise have done."
He said it was getting people to act differently which made the event worthwhile.
Dr Hamso drew up as pyramid of what a company should expect from a meeting to achieve an ROI.
The first was the need to satisfy the delegates in terms of both their hotel and the meeting programme.
Next was to find out what they learned from the event and then to apply this new knowledge.
Finally the company then had to measure the business impact of what they now did differently which could convert 9nto the firm's profit. The ROI was what was converted into profit.
"It is a fundamental that you can only generate value by changing people's behaviour," he said.
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