GBTA to Debut New SMM “Wheel”

The Global Business Travel Association is poised to unveil its Strategic Meetings Management 2.0 wheel—the puzzle graphic that the association built to visualize the facets of an SMM program. The updated graphic will incorporate a new focus on attendee engagement and experience. Julie Lehnis, global strategic meetings manager for Apple and current chair of the GBTA Meetings Committee, shared news of the update on a BTN Group webinar on Tuesday.

“We went through an exercise… earlier this year around re-doing the graphics for the GBTA SMM wheel,” she said. “As we were doing that exercise, there was a lot of conversation around whether the parts of the wheel were still correct. In general, the consensus was, ‘yes,’ but many companies where SMM [programs] roll up into marketing felt strongly that attendee engagement and attendee satisfaction were missing.”

Lehnis went on to describe a phenomenon evident in many SMM efforts where the focus on process compliance and efficiencies starts to overshadow the need to engage the attendee. “Apple is a company obsessed with customer experience. To say that we aren’t [passionate] on the meetings side wouldn’t be accurate. But I will say that from the perspective of the person [who] owns the SMM here at Apple, it is easy to get caught up in the processes.”

GBTA’s move to incorporate attendee engagement and experience in the SMM wheel follows recent technology developments to support an organization’s ability not only to track that engagement via mobile meetings apps like CrowdCompass, DoubleDutch, Quickmobile and others, but also to feed that data into sales and marketing automation systems. As those integrations mature and best practice metrics emerge, SMM programs focused on efficiencies may not be enough.

Lehnis suggested the intensity of the engagement focus would pivot on where the SMM program sits the organization. “Where you roll up into the company and what your role is as part of the SMM will determine how much your SMM focuses on attendee engagement,” she said. “I’ve taken a look internally to be sure we focus on that for our [internal] customers—how do we help them achieve great attendee engagement for their attendees. With SMM, if you are not at the table with the person [who] is setting the objectives for the meeting, it can be challenging to help get them there. As the leader of an SMM it’s your job to be at that table.”

To date, the new GBTA wheel has not appeared on the association’s website. Lehnis said it would be available “shortly.”