Buying meetings: Savvy strategies

At this year’s GBTA convention in Denver, meetings technology firm Starcite unveiled its Strategic Meetings Management Handbook, authored by experts including regular Buying Business Travel writer Amon Cohen. Here he looks at how buyers can build an effective meetings strategy that is as sophisticated as their travel programmes

THREE CHEERS FOR THE RECESSION! That may not be a universally popular slogan, given lengthening dole queues and less ready-cash in the pockets of those who still have a job. Yet when it comes to meetings management, the economic downturn has been “the gift that keeps giving”, according to Kevin Iwamoto, vice-president for enterprise strategy at Starcite.

Iwamoto contends that the difficult conditions of the past three years have finally persuaded businesses to tackle an area of spend that, although accounting for an average 1-3 per cent of corporate revenue, has gone unmanaged for far too long.

“Companies realised they had to do some serious analysis of meetings expenses and assess their return on investment,” says Iwamoto, who previously spent more than a decade managing both meetings and travel for Hewlett-Packard. “Before the recession, companies were trying to outdo each other with the lavishiness of their events, but when their excesses became a public shame, agendas and entertainments were modified and all of a sudden, meetings weren’t a sacred cow any more. Senior management started asking questions which no one had asked before, like why are we doing this, and can we do it for less expense?”

Asking the questions was a good start, but many companies quickly discovered they had no means of answering them. Regular business travel (often described as “transient travel”) has long been consolidated, measured and therefore controlled, but all these disciplines were largely missing from group events. Instead, the spend was typically Balkanised among numerous departments, such as marketing or training, each negotiating separately with meetings agencies or venues and often even using different contracts with different terms and conditions.

Centralise, Rationa lise

According to Iwamoto, the last few years have made companies realise they must create a centralised strategy to review, approve and manage meetings. It is a realisation, says Yvette Rudge, a director of the Institute of Travel & Meetings (ITM) and meetings buyer for a large professional services that has been given added impetus by a heightened awareness of the need for risk management. Not only have various disasters and security incidents concentrated minds but, she adds, “there is also the need to understand who we are using for quality and brand reputation purposes”.

Another contributing factor to the rise of the strategic meetings management programme (SMMP), as it is often labelled, is technology, which has had two quite distinct influences. The first is that virtual conferencing is exerting added pressure on companies to justify the greater cost involved in putting a group of employees or customers together face to face. The second is the emergence of meetings management technology providers such as Starcite, Cvent and Arcaneo Metron.

Technology enhances meetings management in two main ways, says Starcite’s Iwamoto. “First, we can standardise what are currently very manual processes, such as providing attendee registration websites. Second, we can help with strategic management. If a company registers all its meetings on one tool, managers can instantly do a search of what events are coming up, who is attending and what the budgets are. Now you have it centralised instead of having to search every nook and cranny in your company. You can carry out supplier spend analysis and leverage discounts.”

With both the motivation and the tools to tackle meetings costs, it sounds like an ideal opportunity for procurement to march in and bring this rogue expenditure under control at last. A survey of 222 meetings and incentives planners by the CWT Travel Management Institute found that 42 per cent expect procurement to increase its involvement in meetings, while only 6 per cent thought it would decrease.

EMOTIVE EVENTS

Unfortunately, meetings are not a simple buying category, which is precisely why they have gone unmanaged for so long. Inkerman Associates managing director Richard Eades, who manages meetings on an outsourced basis for a global oil and gas company, cautions against purchasers throwing their weight around. “If the project is led by procurement, it will fail,” he says. “It has to be led by someone who understands meetings because they are so emotive, all the way from the booker to the end customer.

“Procurement’s objectives for a meeting will not be the same as the stakeholder’s. Successful meetings are built on experience and trust, so if a purchaser suddenly says ‘this is the agency you are using for venue finding’, it is going to put a lot of backs up if it is the first they’ve heard of it.”

In some cases stakeholders would have every right to feel aggrieved. It is essential, Eades says, to engage with internal stakeholders from the outset to understand why particular venues and agencies meet the needs of the meetings they organise. If not, procurement might end up sourcing venues which are inappropriate for the company’s list of events, posing a serious threat to their success.

However, in other cases, meetings organisers resist outside intervention for less justifiable motives. One problem, says Eades, is that incentivisation of bookers by venues – offering free personal accommodation for example – is a common occurrence, although he hopes the new Bribery Act will minimise this potentially pernicious influence.

More likely, however, is that many PAs and other stakeholders regard organising meetings as one of the most enjoyable aspects of their work and they fear having it taken away from them. For this reason, Eades, Rudge and Iwamoto all regard communication as the most important task of all for a strategic meeting manager. “You have to communicate that you don’t want to take away the fun elements of their job,” says Iwamoto. “What you really want is all the logistical data, sourcing and contracting consistency, and a way to report all that information to the executive branch.”

Rudge agrees, and points out that, communicated correctly, this message can convert your most hostile adversaries into your greatest champions. “When you educate bookers that the organisation is spending millions of pounds annually on venues and six figures on something as simple as flowers, they are often so surprised that they want to work with you,” she says.

Communication is so paramount to SMMP success that the experts recommend creating a comprehensive change management strategy, mapping out the required messages, the intended audiences and how those messages will be delivered. As always, gaining senior management buy-in for the strategy first is likely to prove somewhere between important and critical.

Once all stakeholders are engaged in this way, the strategy can be sealed into place by issuing a formal meetings policy.

“This can only be the last stage in the process,” says Rudge. “Whenever you communicate to a large population in an organisation, you have to be really sure what you are communicating. If people think the programme might change, or is only half-formed, they won’t respect you or your policy. This is especially the case because meetings is such an emotive area. The key to a good meetings policy is clarity and consistency. There should be no room for ambiguity, otherwise you won’t get the best result.”

If all of that sounds like a daunting process – which may be yet another reason why SMMPs have been slow to emerge – then take heart. No one can expect a fully formed SMMP to be introduced overnight, so by breaking the strategy down into phases, the workload starts to look much more manageable. Even more encouragingly, says Eades, sorting out meetings is not as hard as it can be made to look. “SMMP sounds quite procurement-led and complicated,” he says, “but there is a danger you can over-complicate something that is really about people.”

• The ITM offers a comprehensive Meetings “How-To” Toolkit, including advice on setting objectives and stakeholder engagement, plus sample health and safety documentation, and requests for proposal. It is available to members only (www.itm.org.uk).

THE BOOK

Starcite vice-president Kevin Iwamoto is also a co-author of Strategic Meetings Management Handbook: From Theory to Practice. He says: “A lot of things have been written about SMMP in theory – we wanted to show it is achievable in practice and gets very good results.” To find out more or to order a copy, go to www.starcite.com