Install a Solution Before Going to SMM Bid? HRS Says, “Do It.”

In a novel switcheroo of long-held best practices that urge would-be strategic meetings management practitioners to map a precise strategy and only then get your technology in gear, HRS vice president lodging and meetings solutions for North America Kari Wendel advises companies to let technology help inform RFP bids and larger meetings management strategies. In the following interview with BTN vice president of content Elizabeth West, Wendel lays down a few more “mic drop” moments as well as refreshing views on the ease with which SMM might now actually be possible and the value AI-driven processes can return. An edited transcript is below.

Business Travel News: You’ve been growing the meetings team at HRS. Tell me how you are building that out.

Kari Wendel: HRS as an organization is full of smart and adaptable people. No one else [in the U.S. market] really knew meetings deeply, though, so I pulled Heidi Daniels over [from my former company CWT]. She was my head of consulting and ran some of our biggest customers for the better part of a decade. She has deep strategic meetings management knowledge and  a background in hotel consulting. She’s partnering with me on business development and prioritizing clients who want to be first in the door with the HRS platform.

I’ve also pulled over Rachel Lunderborg—a beautiful combination of solutions, design excellence and tech savvy. She’s a bridge between our market and product and can advocate for what we need to invest in and prioritize [in the platform] to drive value to clients and revenue to HRS. This platform, of course, was originally built in Germany for the German market. We’ve been looking at [how we transform that] for the U.S. market. Last but not least, I redesigned the support role for the meetings product to be half operational support and half stakeholder engagement. We know across meetings in general, but especially simple meetings, if you don’t engage with potential users, the volume doesn’t come. Lory Taylor is leading that effort.

BTN: Your role has changed, as well, to include everything go-to-market for the U.S. across transient and meetings. How does that change your perspective?

Wendel: I've always been a loud voice in the industry saying, “Why can't we look at [travel and meetings spending] more holistically across capital? I just think it makes total sense to approach customers from a lens of talking about what's working and not working in your world and whichever side of our equation is most valuable, that's where we're going to dig in.

BTN: Where does that discussion usually lead?

Wendel: The meeting solution has really been the answer most of the time. It's just still an unsolved area. We'll get in however we can and then cross sell over to the other. HRS is super refined in their value proposition. What I've found in market—and we've known this for meetings for a long time—it can be so overwhelming and complex. The simpler we make it, the better it's resonating. This may sound kind of flippant but the approach of “Just say, ‘yes,’ and get started,” can be really powerful. I'm about to write a LinkedIn post about a very real prospective customer who intended to send a bid out early last year. I kept in touch with him all year long and all year long the bid never came. That bid still hasn't come. And it dawned on me: If he had just put a simple solution in place and started to train [internal stakeholders] that there's a meetings solution, he would've already achieved a full year's worth of value to the company. And the return… it’s always over a thousand percent. It's unbelievable. So I'm trying to get this message out there very strongly: If you’re waiting to run the process you have to run, you're losing a massive amount of opportunity. So don't wait. Put something in place—HRS or something else—and let it inform your bid. Let it inform how you decide what the right long-term solution is. HRS would love to be that long-term solution, too, but I'll take the front end, right? I'll take the starting point.

BTN: How big of a problem is that—where a company begins but sort of gives up before the value starts to return?

Wendel: Many companies, when they decide to be serious about meeting strategies, they experience a gap between deciding and actual value being delivered. Over and over again, we see them stop. From that, you have to conclude that Instant value delivery is important—and it is something we can do now. So when we look at the market, we stratify companies based on their maturity with SMM. When they're very mature and they've been at SMM for a long time, it's a very different and longer sales cycle, often including a competitive global bid. Whereas, for companies that have never succeeded with that larger SMM in the past or, if there’s even an individual in a company that “owns” $5 million or $12 million in meetings spend, it's a very different talk track right now. You don’t have to start where everyone started in the past. Those smaller implementations don’t require customizations and, as long as they aren’t breaking any company rules, they can start delivering value and open up that unmanaged spend right away for the company to see.  

BTN: These “quick start” companies must have some structures in place, I assume, that enable them to run faster with a solution.

Wendel: Yes, they do. They need an existing payment solution in place. It doesn't have to even be a meeting card, but they must have a payment solution they can make virtual. They have to have a contract strategy. And they have to have a willing audience, even if it’s small, to be willing to start a pilot. It can be as few as three to 10 people to get started. But they also do need to align with our strategy to help them: Let us go find the people planning meetings, let us drive the community. Of course, the company will approve them, but let us be the extension of the team to incentivize people to refer others, and we’ll make that investment.

BTN: Talk to me about the payment piece. It’s an area that has really excited you about HRS. Tell me how it’s progressing.

Wendel: It's progressed in terms of just depth and breadth. We have more partnerships with more card providers—we’re literally at 80 percent or 90 percent [coverage], having partnerships in place with any card you have. It’s a bring-your-own-bank solution; whoever you partner with, we can work with generally speaking. We want to drive adoption by convenience, so we make this easy and valuable. If the user doesn’t have to worry about paying or reconciling anything, it’s more valuable than even I thought it would be. What facilitates that is our bring-your-own-contract strategy. We load all your contracts and digitize them by chain, by property level and by preference. So these are new evolutions that just make it quicker and easier to get a customer on board. The policy is sort of woven into the contract terms, if you will, so once that is loaded and the supplier invoices are submitted via a link in the required format, the system triggers on the event date and automatically processes payments that are approved, flags those that aren’t and reconciles instantly in an auditable invoice by virtue of the contract comparisons that were already done.

BTN: And VAT reclaim, then, triggers from there, I gather. Do all companies benefit from VAT reclaim for meetings? What are the common misconceptions?

Wendel: That’s one of the things that's been interesting, even internally—the perception that U.S. companies aren't going to get the benefit of that reclaim. It makes me a little crazy. Every company I’ve every worked for has significant “Outside the United States” spend. Even what we at HRS call “Lighthouse Customers”—some had given up on reclaim. The regulatory components change by country and the detail required with the invoices can be really granular. But for large companies, this can be millions and millions of dollars. We have a partner called Fintua and because of our AI-driven reconciliation, we can guarantee mid-90 percent of the VAT reclaim. It’s just sitting there—and we can make sure you grab that. For the right companies, we’ll go get the prior year, as well. It’s really because of the AI comparisons and line-item level 3 data and invoice reconciliation process that we can optimize this opportunity.

BTN: So I want to go back to the RFP process because now we are talking about large companies again. How is HRS doing with being included in and winning bids in the U.S. market?

Wendel: We're seeing more RFPs, and I think it's because our name is being connected with meetings in the market now. We also see RFIs that result in awards that don’t go to RFP. I will say in general, the RFP scope [that we currently see] speaks to a lack of real understanding of what we do… because it’s often [for] services and technology. HRS is a SaaS company. We're not seeking to be a service company. I'm not going to have 10 people at a call center. Having my procurement background, I do understand what’s going on: Corporates are in the hamster wheel of “this is just how you do it” and they are seeking companies to compare. However, I would offer that RFPs [we receive] are often over-engineered, and most of them have relatively few questions about what's really revolutionary about what we do related to digital contracts and AI driven payment and reconciliation and VAT reclaim, so it’s hard to capture the value. Plus, since no one else does what we do, I would argue, you can't go out to bid. How can you go out to bid? You have no one to compare us to.

BTN: But you do still have to tell that story. How are you finding the selling process in North America as compared to Germany—you have told me previously it’s very different.

Wendel: You have to start with the product. So we've gotten to a point where we've got a really beautiful inventory of what's needed in Europe and what's needed in U.S. and where that crosses over. So that's been fully done in terms of product development functionality and prioritized. The product isn’t exactly where we want to end, but we know clearly when each thing is going to happen, which is really important. Our strategy this year is very meetings forward. I think we're sponsoring most of the BTN Strategic Meetings Summits, and we’ll do other meetings-related conferences. Concur Fusion is coming up, which is very transient focused, payments focused conference, but we are going to have a big front foot related to meetings as well because … payments. But also, we can’t leave the lodging side out. It is important. The type of company, the characteristics of a company that will really benefit from our lodging solution is narrowed and it is not for every company. It is really valuable in the tech space, for example, and we have a really refined scorecard of who we are trying to sell to. Not everyone is ready for it. I like to say only the coolest kids are ready for it.

BTN: So that’s good insight about the product, the channels and your sales profiles, let’s say, but what’s the difference between the markets?

Wendel: I'm learning every day that the two markets buy differently. North American-headquartered companies buy differently. We go through the bids and even my legal team in Germany, who are wonderful, reasonable business parters, they're so flummoxed by what we have to do. Every global bid is going to ask us to redline their agreement. They want to know if there's any showstoppers. In Germany, this is considered a waste of time; why would we do this [before getting to that agreement stage]? Well, we have to for North America. People also buy a relationship in North America, even if they say they don’t. They buy consultatively. They want to talk to someone who has stories and knows the lingo. They want concise, high-level discussions and not every single detail. Companies need every single detail in Germany. They really do.

I give super kudos to our CEO Tobias Ragge, who didn't necessarily know all this and who empowered me to understand what's going to succeed in the North American market. He said, “I want to hear it. I want to do it that way. Go make it happen.” That's a big leap—and he’s been nothing short of aligned on our new team doing that.

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Correction: BTN originally referred to HRS's VAT reclaim partner as "Venta." It has been corrected to Fintua.