To manage a meetings
program effectively at a small or midsize enterprise is to balance competing
concerns. Organizations of this size generally want to control meetings costs
while documenting a return on the investment of a particular event. Often,
however, they have neither the internal resources nor the time to implement a
comprehensive strategic meetings management program. Furthermore, their
meetings volume rarely offers strong leverage with the venues that hold their
events.
Compromises are
made: Perhaps a SME implements a limited system of sourcing controls to help
keep costs down, outsources logistical planning or restricts site selection to
a handful of hotels near corporate headquarters. These measures can increase
leverage and reduce risk without adding headcount or forcing a
meetings-management role onto an unsuspecting middle manager.
This state of play
contrasts with the meetings management processes in place at large and BTN
Corporate Travel 100 companies where mature SMM programs often are entrenched,
with organizations looking to take the next steps of development. Some SMEs,
though, are working toward better meetings management.
When asked to offer
program accomplishments for 2014 and goals for 2015, a handful of respondents
to BTN’s survey of small and midmarket organizations named cutting
meetings costs or establishing fully managed meetings programs.
Daunting Data
If SMEs are looking
to their hotel rates for potential cost savings, disappointment might reign.
The major hotel chains for the first quarter of 2015 each reported strong gains
in group and meetings demand, revenue and rates. Starwood Hotels & Resorts
Worldwide reported corporate group demand in North America was up almost 10
percent year over year, while Marriott International noted small-group demand
was “particularly strong,” leading to higher rates; Hyatt Hotels Corp.
indicated the company’s group rates were its strongest in a first quarter since
2007.
“Rising prices and
rising volume are going to take some companies by surprise … and they will not
meet cost-reduction goals,” said CWT Meetings & Events senior director of
global SMM strategy and solutions Kari Wendel, who added that the meetings
management company’s internal CWT data shows increased meeting demand in 2015.
“It’s not just
rate,” said Dick Zeller, SMM practice lead at meetings management company
Maritz Travel Co. “It’s also around terms and conditions. Over the past couple
of years, people have become accustomed to attrition and cancellation policies
being very flexible and [to] discounts on things other than room rates being
very aggressive.”
SMEs don’t have the
meetings volume necessary to extract chainwide concessions, whether on rate or
contractual terms, from hotel companies in such a negotiating climate. To the
extent that SMEs have any leverage, Zeller suggested that consolidating as much
volume as possible with the lowest practical number of hotel companies could
generate some interest in the account.
“When you are in a
position to drive market share, people are very anxious to talk to you,” Zeller
said. “Even in a seller’s market, there is still an appetite among hotels for
those clients who can drive business to certain preferred properties. The
discounts will not be what they might have been, but they are still interested
in talking to you. The smaller the account, you will have to look at a smaller
pool of preferred suppliers.
“You talk to some
people who say they have a preferred hotel program, then they list 10 chains,”
he continued. “You can only have one best friend. You can have multiple
friends, but if you want a true preferred program, you have to limit the number
of hotels and ride it out with them.”
Strategic Supervision
Consolidating
meetings volume with a limited number of hotels, though, requires SMEs to
direct or at least influence site selection. In a segment in which meeting
planning and sourcing often is outsourced and meeting stakeholders hold various
roles, that’s easier said than done.
The notion of
constructing a comprehensive SMM program with policy, technology, sourcing
strategies and payment solutions “can be a little overwhelming for people who
are not in this industry when they look at all they have to deploy,” said
Jeannie Griffin, senior director of product management for meetings technology
firm Cvent.
The solution can lie
in easy-to-deploy aspects of an SMM program that can be done without a great
deal of corporate restructuring. Specifically, Zeller said, SMEs can benefit
from a central meetings registration program in which data from meetings
throughout an enterprise are recorded at a central point. A contract-signing
authority policy, which would prohibit nonprofessional planners from signing
poorly negotiated meetings contracts and those with onerous conditions like
cancellation clauses, also could help.
Central meetings
registration offers an SME visibility into spending for all meetings within the
organization. The company can use that data for more effective sourcing, and it
can deliver fairly rapid returns, considering the smaller organizational sizes,
CWT’s Wendel said.
“SMEs are achieving
faster, broader and more sustainable success because there’s one less hoop to
jump through, less bureaucracy, fewer stakeholders and a clearer path,” Wendel
said. “Everyone’s success is customized [based on] whatever pieces of the SMM
wheel work best for them. Most large companies deploy most components,
especially pharma companies, but smaller ones more prolifically deploy meetings
registration. Most of these companies also are centralizing sourcing but not
planning.”
While deploying such
concepts might yield some savings without too much organizational upheaval,
it’s easy to overdo it, said Cvent’s Griffin. Moving beyond registration and
sourcing to layered, pre-event meeting-approval processes can cause problems
beyond the cost-controlling benefits they can provide, she said.
“People can get
stuck around the policy component of this and sometimes overengineer or overarchitect
policy,” Griffin said. “Keep it pretty basic. Whatever is driving your need to
mitigate risk or harness the data, start with that. [But] looking at
everything, feeling like you have to change all aspects of what is happening,
just puts people on pause and the process gets diverted. You don’t want to get
too stringent in the policy and authorization aspects of deployment.”
Next Steps
Aside from
pharmaceutical companies—where regulatory requirements force the issue of
strict meetings management—there’s no real evidence that tackling meetings
management or implementing SMM concepts is high on the list of priorities for
most SME C-level executives. Griffin, though, sees changes in general business
processes regarding data management and analysis across different technology
platforms and predicted the trend will affect meetings processes.
“Everything is about
business automation and efficiency right now; it’s the focus of every single
company,” Griffin said. “There is more of a focus [among SMEs] on how we can
collaborate all the different point solutions that we have and try to move to a
single platform. It’s not that there are not ways to harness meetings data in
these organizations, but the bigger point of pain is that each stakeholder and
business owner has their own methodology for how they are capturing that
information. Homogenizing that and being able to interpret what those data
points mean is very difficult,” she said, though she noted the SME segment
seems to be gaining awareness of the advantages of a “holistic view” of their
data.
Kimberly Meyer,
founder and principal of meetings data consultancy Meetings Analytics,
predicted that the continued expansion of online expense reporting tools into
the SME market will increase SMEs’ awareness of meetings spending.
“Everyone will get
there,” Meyer said. “It will be easier to see the numbers historically and know
that something isn’t quite right. There will be better data available to the
accounting and other teams that care about the numbers.”
This report originally appeared in the June 1, 2015, issue of Business Travel News.