Meeting planners must adopt procurement-based strategies, such as the use of standard contract language and the establishment of preferred vendors, to prove their value against the growing pressure to commoditize the meetings management process, according to a position paper Meeting Professionals International released Jan. 5. Suppliers were encouraged to move away from relationship-based sales and to quantify benefits to customers through benchmarking and research.
The position paper is the first in a series to be released by MPI's Global Corporate Circle of Excellence addressing the changing business environment in the meetings management industry and aimed to provide practical advice and tools to the MPI membership.
"This project is just one piece of our overall Pathways to Excellence project," said MPI chairman Hugh Lee. "It's been in the works for over two years now."
MPI also released a glossary and online toolkit with samples of budgets and preferred vendor contracts. Lee said the toolkit provides the position paper's practical applications to help planners and suppliers take immediate action.
"MPI really is the meeting professionals' association, so we're the only association out there that has both suppliers and meeting professionals as full members. When we address the industry's needs, we have to address both suppliers' and planners' needs," Lee said.
The position paper laid out career-positioning objectives for both planners and suppliers. Suppliers were urged to remain aware of more stringent regulatory environments at corporations, sparked in part by regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, and to consider bundling services with other suppliers to offer single-vendor solutions to procurement-driven buyers.
Planners were advised to better track results and metrics of meeting management and eliminate the "silo mentality" of their work by collaborating with procurement, travel, legal, finance, marketing and sales divisions of their companies.
"One of the messages to me is that if I haven't started talking to my procurement organization, I really need to, because this is not just a fad where procurement is getting involved, it's certainly a trend," said Betsy Bondurant, associate director of meeting planning and trade shows for Amgen Corp. and co-chair of the Circle of Excellence. "Especially with things like Sarbanes-Oxley and a lot more scrutiny around how we're spending and how we're buying,"
Bondurant said planners need to seek relationships proactively with and establish their value to procurement divisions, to help in buying decisions. The message for suppliers was to avoid becoming complacent with established relationships and that they may need to demonstrate their added value even to long-term customers, she said. The online toolkit is "certainly not complete," but does serve as a starting point for meeting professionals who need to see specific examples of changes they can make, Bondurant said. "Certainly, it's not one-size-fits-all; everyone comes from different environments in their corporation."
Although some meeting professionals may find it hard to adapt to the growing role of procurement, the industry as a whole is not threatened by the pressure to commoditize, Lee said. A marriage between corporate meeting planners and procurement departments is a natural step in the evolution of strategic meetings management, he added.
"We needed to make sure meeting planners understand there is a changing business environment, and therefore what their roles will be and how they can take an opportunity to increase their value to their organization," Lee said.
Other professional organizations have released papers to address meetings management, including an ongoing accepted practices initiative from the Convention Industry Council
(see story) and a white paper released in March 2004 by the National Business Travel Association that specified the fundamentals of a strategic meetings management program
(Meetings Today, March 29, 2004). Lee said the release of the MPI position paper is part of the organization's stated mission, rather than a response to the initiatives of other groups.
"There is pressure on MPI to stay relevant but it has nothing to do with CIC or other organizations," Lee said. "We need to be a continual source of research on the evolving trends, we need to continue to educate our meeting professionals on how they need to position themselves as an added value to their organization and we need to continue to give them skills."