Technological advancements have enabled companies to better collect and analyze meetings data, but determining the specific metrics that offer the most relevant insight into corporate meetings programs has proven challenging to many executives.
Buyers have deployed an array of meetings metrics. Some corporations measure per-attendee and/or per-meeting costs in an attempt to create a comparative set, but the wide variety of variable costs in a given meeting often make such comparisons less than direct. Some look to gauge the effectiveness of negotiations with meetings suppliers, an effort often complicated by soft-dollar benefits.
"We still don't have any consistent metrics on the meeting side," said Reed Elsevier director of global procurement Madlyn Caliri, speaking in April during a panel discussion at an Association of Corporate Travel Executives conference. Caliri, a founding member of the Meetings Competitive Advantage Forum, a meetings benchmarking group of nearly two dozen large companies that was formed in 2000, noted that the absence of universally accepted meetings management metrics not only can affect internal meetings analysis, but also can make benchmarking difficult.
"Culturally, companies are so different, and there's probably within your company regional differences--different things that matter in different countries," Caliri said. "Twelve years of struggling with 20 Fortune100 companies, and we've not been able to come up with what everybody should be benchmarking."
[PULL_1]Meetings analysis could cover several different types of events--sales meetings, training meetings, board meetings and large customer events, to name a few--a fact that further hinders effective development of universal metrics. Leonora Valvo, CEO of meetings technology firm Etouches, during the panel contrasted meetings measurement with the development of travel management metrics, noting that the latter is marked with fewer variables and allows for more direct comparison and analysis.
"I was once a consultant in travel management space, and that was easy," Valvo said. "People were getting here to there, and the elements very similar, regardless of why you were traveling. There's a big disparity in corporate groups running these events--why they're running them, what they're trying to get out of them, how much time they have, how many resources they have. It's not just about the metrics or the numbers, but strategic reasons for holding events. It's a much harder number to get to. It's also a bit dangerous to put it in one format with one set of metrics. It's not going to work."
Per-Meeting Pros And Cons
Kimberly Meyer, founder of meetings consultancy Meetings Analytics, recommended exploring per-attendee and per-day metrics.
"In a world where there is a lack of good data and good standards," she said, "some simple ones include looking at cost per meeting per day, or cost per meeting per day by meeting type. It's a starting block, and the hotel spend has to be part of the starting block because it's the biggest part of meeting spend and it's controllable. You can get to audiovisual and ground spend later. Start with one piece and a few simple metrics to move to a more sophisticated program."
Though she doesn't benchmark the figure with other corporations, Caliri said she reports per-meeting costs to Reed Elsevier's senior management, "but always with caveats and cautions." The reason, she said, is that meetings costs contain too many variables to make a truly equivalent comparison, even when the meetings are of identical types and sizes and are held in the same location.
"You have to be careful who you report it to," Caliri said. "The CFO is going to say, 'Why are there not repeatable results? It's the same city and the same number of people.' But it's not the same type of buy every time. Even if you're reporting average daily rate in the city in New York, there could be a $150 room-night differential. I have many footnotes on what I report."
Negotiating Metrics
"One of the reasons we're implementing [a strategic meetings management program] is because we want to see what we're spending," according to Boston Beer Co. senior buyer for travel and events Kristen Smith, speaking during a second panel at the ACTE conference. "In our world, our salespeople are meeting with wholesalers and booking directly with hotels, so something could be going on today that I don't know about. We want to see where are we booking, who's booking these, is there a business reason and what we are spending."
Such hotel spending often comprises the lion's share of a given meeting's cost, but the metrics surrounding the associated negotiations are some of the least precise in the meetings management process.
Metrics designed to measure the effectiveness of a negotiation must include a starting hotel price point, the impact of negotiated contractual clauses like cancellation, and the effect of such ancillary costs as banquet room rental fees. The inherent difficulty of quantifying negotiated savings for these aspects has led some procurement executives down a different path.
[PULL_2]"Savings is hard to measure," said Jennifer Harper, global commodity manager for Intel, during the second panel. "Our finance department, when we say that we have savings, doesn't necessarily see it as savings, instead seeing it as soft negotiated savings. It's not something we use to really justify the program. We use it to say that we understand what's going on and we're driving savings to preferred suppliers, but it's not a concrete measurement we use when we bring this to finance or management."
Reed Elsevier does track negotiated savings, Caliri said, but only after financial executives are presented with set of competitive bids on a meeting from three to five hotels, so that a general assessment of local hotel costs can be included.
"My most strict CFO wanted an original quote to show the ballpark on properties," Caliri said. "I convinced him to do that because our meetings are not always cost-driven. If it wasn't the lowest-cost choice of the three, because their ballroom didn't work or something, here's where we started negotiations at the other one." Other companies have taken the concept a step further, Meyer said, and are tracking negotiated savings for several different components of a meeting, even multiple components within a hotel negotiation.
"As you move along in a program and there's some maturity to it, some companies are getting to the point of tracking individual concessions and tracking individual planner performance in terms of food and beverage, things like that," Meyer said. "Depending on what your CFO will accept, some folks get incredibly granular, while others will start with average daily rate hotel costs. Either way, there's no question that there's 15 to 20 percent savings [to be negotiated] on professional meeting planners and sourcers working together to produce these meetings."
Without universal analytics to measure effectiveness of corporate meetings, the particular metrics devised by financial, procurement and meetings departments will vary by company, but Meyer said some level of quantification of meeting processes is essential for any company embarking on a strategic meetings management effort.
"At the beginning of a process, there's enough decent data--it's not enough truly statistical benchmarking data that enough companies have done before, but you can take that data and make some decent assumptions about the processes and the number of people and resources it will take," she said. "I don't want to say it is easy to do, but it is doable."