In the seven years since the National Business Travel Association's Groups and Meetings Committee first coined the term "strategic meetings management," there have been radical changes in the way some companies track, manage and leverage their meetings spend. For other companies, the many challenges of implementing a strategic meetings management program--from identifying the company's meetings spend, to persuading administrative assistants to relinquish control of their meetings,to creating a mandate from senior management--have discouraged them from taking action.
Recognizing these barriers to implementation, NBTA's Groups and Meetings Committee is creating a comprehensive toolkit to help meeting managers implement SMMPs in every size company and with every level of resources. The toolkit is in the initial stages and will be rolled out at the NBTA convention Aug. 8-11 in Houston. It will include tools to help with all aspects of an SMMP: strategy, policy, meeting registration, sourcing, planning, payment solutions, data reporting and technology. For the first time, meeting managers will have a guidebook to move this initiative through their organizations.
Chapter By Chapter
The most important initial question to ask is whether or not a company should even attempt to implement an SMMP. The toolkit will offer various analyses that meeting managers should perform, including such strategic planning standards as SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) and PEST (political, economic, social and technological) analyses. Writing a business case and creating an executive summary with all the important information senior managers need to know are other important early steps in the process. The toolkit will provide samples of these so users don’t have to start from scratch.
Start With Policy
Establishing a meetings management policy is one of the cornerstones of an SMMP, but where do you start? Templates will help users create a meetings policy that is in sync with their corporate culture, and a meetings policy decision tree will help in the actual building of the policy. A checklist will confirm that all areas of importance to the company have been covered. There is no one-size-fits-all for meetings policies, which has been one of the challenges to successful SMMP implementation.
The first line of defense in creating an SMMP is gathering data about the various meetings that are held companywide. The toolkit will provide step-by-step processes for setting up a system to register meetings, ranging from the most basic--like a registration form for meeting sponsors and manual entry in an Excel spreadsheet--to an internal Web site where employees must register all meetings.
Approximately 70 percent of meetings spend derives from the hotel piece of the meetings pie. Thus, the hotel sourcing and contracting process is one that companies must harness. The toolkit will include both good and bad examples of contracts so users can design their own master contracts and avoid common mistakes. Process flow examples, sample clauses, internal legal process flow, industry regulations and checklists will be available to guide users through the contracting process.[PULL_1]The toolkit also will include sections on the basics of meeting planning itself, including information on outsourcing, solutions to help users determine if the technology they need should be developed in-house or outsourced, and links to organizations that provide education. It will give users control over the every- day logistical decisions that novice/occasional planners within a company make by providing a Meeting in a Box, with standardized packages at contracted hotels.
The payment process is a low-hanging fruit--something that companies can standardize fairly easily. The toolkit will provide a comprehensive definition of payment solutions, ranging from manual invoices to procurement cards to meeting cards.
Finally, one of the most important and often confusing steps for meeting managers is communicating their SMMP strategy up and down the corporate ladder. The toolkit will include communication samples geared toward each employee category (ad- ministrative assistants, senior management, etc.), as well as sample FAQs. Customizable templates will be available to present data to all the stakeholders, from the admins right up to the C-level.
Lynda Garvey is a member of the NBTA Groups and Meetings Committee and business development manager for Maxvantage, a strategic alliance between Maritz Travel and American Express Business Travel.