Strategic Meetings Management is, at its core, a mindset. It’s a commitment to bring together activities that have been decentralized and disparate, to build policies and processes that work across the organization, to streamline and tame a beast. Success means fully embracing that mindset, but it also means adopting the technology that can fully activate that mindset. That’s what this blog is about — the technology. It’s remarkable what the right technology will do for your organization. This blog spells out the benefits, explains how technology can help put your return on investment (ROI) into focus, and offers thoughts on how to choose the system that’s right for your needs.
Understanding the Benefits
Manual processes can turn meeting planning and execution into time-consuming drudgery. You can spend as many as three days contacting hotels to gather information and pricing details, and that’s just one task of many, for one event.
Meanwhile, non-aligned processes rob you of the coordination you need to gain leverage with suppliers. They hamper the visibility you need to keep track of your spend, to ensure compliance with policies and best practices, and to keep tabs on risk.
Technology helps you automate those manual processes, speed up the timetable, and put an end to redundant work. But it also brings the big picture into focus as you centralize and strategize your meetings program. Technology allows greater visibility, data collection, and adoption of best practices. A variety of technologies make the magic happen, from customer relationship management (CRM) to reporting to expense tracking software. Here are some things that the right tool will help you achieve:
- You’ll automate and simplify the venue search and sourcing process, and doing so will save you both time and money.
- You’ll virtually eliminate the process of negotiating highly customized rates.
- You’ll ensure that your meeting planning follows best practices and complies with corporate policies.
- You’ll keep both internal and external staff, venues, and suppliers in rate compliance.
- You’ll be able to quickly generate easy-to-use reports for management review and departmental tracking.
- Your attendees will be empowered by an easier-to-use registration and self-service booking experience for hotels, flights, and ground transportation.
Without Technology, You Aren't Getting the Full Benefit of Your Efforts
The bottom line is, you can create a meetings program without specialized technology. But you won’t be getting the full benefit of your efforts. Research suggests that technology can help facilitate higher adoption rates and ultimately drive savings that are as much as 30 percent higher.
Facilitating the Policy and Procedures
The meeting registration form that gets the ball rolling is part of the technology solution. The all-important approval processes are facilitated by the technology platform, and that streamlining increases productivity. Tools within the technology help users comply and reap the benefits, and also track when compliance doesn’t happen. Technology lifts the meetings policy off the paper and brings it to life.
Your technology solution can create a master calendar of meetings and activities. That visibility goes beyond the timing and location of events to include the meetings spend, and all of the associated budgetary data.
By bringing the whole event justification and approval process into a technology platform, you can also minimize unnecessary events. Your approvers gain visibility into the whole event picture before any funds are committed.
Mastering the Business of Sourcing
Put the phone down. Stop clicking on the websites of hotels. Your SMM technology lights a fire under the sourcing process, delivering a wealth of powerful information quickly.
For example, your chosen system may let your team search profiles of thousands of venues, both traditional and unusual. Filter your preferred vendor relationships to the top, if desired, and ensure that your company’s negotiated rates are always used.
Your technology may allow you to zap a request for proposal (RFP) directly to vendors, preferred properties, or NSO contacts, compare quotes side-by-side, and pick your supplier through the review process. It should let you tap into your past spending history to gain leverage with vendors and aim for lower costs.
That certainly streamlines the process and makes life easier for planners. The best technology provides additional sourcing benefits that ensure the lowest possible costs.
For example, with the help of a centralized event calendar and well-connected technology, you can consolidate your spend over multiple events to leverage the benefits of bulk buying. Try doing that without an SMM program.
Your system can track canceled space that you can choose to reuse, turning penalties into savings. In transient hotel negotiations, you can increase buying power by including group spend, room night, and spend data.
Managing Meeting Processes
Technology is a boost for attendees and planners alike. You can pull together marketing, online registration, and travel management solutions to coordinate your meeting attendees. That can cut costs that would be associated with outsourced attendee management.
Remember - Room Blocks Help Avoid Attrition
But wait — there’s more! With an online registration portal that brings the whole experience together for attendees, you can steer them toward your group room blocks and avoid attrition. The process includes room block management that helps reduce the number of attendees considered “no shows” for sleeping rooms.
As for air travel, your attendee management power can reduce costs by integrating online air travel booking. That helps increase your use of group travel agreements and negotiated airline discounts. You’ll also decrease air transaction fees by steering the bookings online and away from call centers.
Once you automate the various attendee management functions, your meeting planners are freed up for other important tasks.
Handling Meeting Data
Data is information, and information is power. The SMM technology solution helps you capture, report, and warehouse meeting data, allowing you to harvest power from that information.
Without an SMM program, whatever data you have likely exists in separate silos, and it’s tough to get a good read on why meetings are held and how much is spent. SMM technology, on the other hand, constructs the big-picture analysis of what meetings are being held, where, by whom, and at what cost.
Gather the right data and you can build stronger and more cost-effective relationships with suppliers. You do a better job supporting brand management strategies, and you gain a better understanding of the results your meetings are delivering.
Monitor Fixed and Variable Budget Items
Throughout the process of sourcing and negotiation, your technology allows you to monitor fixed and variable budget items. You can keep tabs on trends with vendors, and more easily pinpoint budget areas ripe for savings. By handling the whole process through a single system, you can avoid time-consuming, error-prone data entry between systems.
Checking the ROI Benefits
The best technology is created with an end result in mind. In the case of SMM, one of the most sought-after end results is a reduction in cost and an increase in return on investment. Your SMM technology solution should not only help you achieve those end results — it should also collect the information that proves you have succeeded.
Your meeting technology solution should have a robust reporting function. With that, you can track and share key metrics across departments and put the spotlight on meeting ROI. Look for a system with standard reports to allow quick and easy information grabs, along with custom reporting capabilities as needed.
ROI Can Be Calculated Different Ways
You can crunch the numbers in many ways. Your basic ROI calculation will determine the net meeting benefit, and then divide it by the meeting cost. You can track over time to see if it’s headed up or down, and compare it with the target. You can benchmark it against industry norms. And perhaps most important, you can share your ROI with the executives upstairs, to prove the value of a specific meeting, or the meetings program in general.
There are other important data points you’ll be interested in following. You may want to know what impact a meeting has had on networking opportunities, customer retention, or the awareness of a product or brand. You may want to pay attention to its ability to introduce you to potential customers. That isn’t ROI in the strictest sense, but it’s vital information about the value of the event.
Choosing the Technology
So you’ve gotten the green light to implement an SMM program. You’ve formulated your strategy and created a meetings policy. Now you need a meetings management software platform. How do you choose?
In one sense, this choice is not all that different from any other technology you’re shopping for, such as a car or phone. You need to first determine what your technologies should be able to do. For example, which major meeting processes will your system be asked to automate? Meeting requests? Workflow and approvals? The meeting calendar? Budgeting management? Sourcing? Spend management? Attendee management? Onsite attendee engagement?
Also, what data will it need to capture, and what analytics will it be asked to deliver regarding meeting activities and spend? What outside systems will you want it to interact with, such as CRM? How scalable must it be? Will its modules play nicely together in an easy-to-use interface that end-users will be eager to adopt?
Talk to Your Technology Provider
Consult your technology provider to ensure the technology will meet the needs of the program you’ve outlined. Start with a simple technology implementation, be sure you’re meeting the needs, and increase your adoption over time.
Excerpted from Strategic Meetings Management for Dummies © 2019 a custom published product produced with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Download the book - Strategic Meetings Management for Dummies
