Marketing Embraces SMMP: Are Travel Managers Ready?

In 2016, Business Travel News will feature a quarterly dialog with strategic meetings experts, ranging from technology gurus to data hounds to corporate meetings managers who have demonstrated practitioner prowess. For the first installment of the series, BTN editor-in-chief Elizabeth West sat down with the virtual founders of strategic meetings management—Lanyon’s vice president of industry strategy Kevin Iwamoto, strategic meetings management coach Debi Scholar and CWT Meetings & Events senior director of global SMM strategy and solutions Kari Wendel—to talk about the state of SMM and how mainstream adoption has evolved the sophistication of the practice. Read on …

Business Travel News: Haven’t marketing events and exhibitions—those client- and consumer-facing meetings—always been included in the scope of strategic meetings management?

Debi Scholar: At some companies they were. But often, people in marketing or other business units considered [their programs] a different animal and that strategic meetings management couldn’t affect the exhibits or the booths or the other activities that happen [because] there was no room to negotiate. In reality, there are plenty of opportunities to negotiate and look at sponsorship differently. More companies are realizing that now.

Kevin Iwamoto: Companies wanted it all at the beginning, but they realized that was way too much to handle. They needed a proof of concept. Now that SMM has become more accepted as the standard, [it has] opened the door. Marketing groups and other groups that were not necessarily included or part of the original category management of meetings and events are joining in. 

Kari Wendel: Marketing departments were often left to last, for a number of reasons. If things were working well somewhere, they tended to be working there. These are marketing and event professionals. There are so many other meeting centers within corporations that traditionally are not managed as well as marketing events, so it made sense to start with the more problematic centers. Plus, marketing historically pushed back harder as procurement got more involved. However, these days, I'm definitely seeing across our client base that marketing events—and the marketing departments—are seeing the value. SMM programs have generated a good internal talk track and high credibility. I've seen marketing departments come voluntarily to the discussion, saying, "Okay, there are whole pieces, maybe transactionally and logistically, of our meetings that we would love to not do if we didn't have to do them and that's going to enable us to focus more on content and the right delivery." We're even seeing a trend in RFPs and consulting engagements being issued by marketing departments at the start of SMM programs, which is new for us.

BTN: Is the involvement of marketing changing the focus of SMM? Traditionally, SMM efforts have prioritized operations above everything else.

Wendel: Many SMM programs are considered successful when they create a pretty solid machine that repeatedly moves meetings through a defined process. There are a nice level of savings and high-quality data but sometimes limited levels of satisfaction. When marketing becomes a true constituent in an SMM program, the bar moves higher for service excellence and for more advanced meeting professionals to really meet the needs of those marketing teams. Secondarily, when the marketing team comes into the fold, the "savings"—I'm using air quotes—that we want to capture from a historical procurement perspective, are not savings to them. They're more meetings, or they're more tools to facilitate their business objectives. That will change, as well, for centralized programs.

BTN: Service excellence, attendee engagement, better content delivery. These terms have gotten a lot of buzz in the past year for meetings. Technology has largely enabled them; marketing is implementing. What are you seeing?

Iwamoto: I've seen a huge shift in the efforts to measure experiential return on investment, return on engagement and return on objective. With current technology—mobile, onsite and other data-capture processes—we see more analysis and strategy emerging. A lot of it is centered on lead retrieval, materialization of those leads, how much revenue did that event capture, how much pipeline did that activity develop. It's a much more analytical approach to managing the business.

Wendel: Marketers spend a lot of time, money, energy and resources in producing their meetings. The people that I've known that are best at measuring return on investment and engagement over the years have been constituents of my own SMM programs, who were in marketing. They were already measuring returns before SMM ever began because they needed to prove that the investment-heavy meetings they hold are successful. With today’s technology, we can do more and it’s getting easier.

Scholar: A couple of years ago, I did a study with a financial services client, using a [mobile] meetings app. Over the course of several months, we were able to identify the clients who participated in one meeting or multiple meetings, who downloaded available presentations, etc. etc. And what we found was that [the ones who participated more] actually produced more revenue for the company.

That’s the type of data that we want to get. You want to bring all your marketing tools together. You can find out when were they in the room, when were they on a virtual meeting, whatever delivery method we choose, how are they getting the content, how many meetings did they go to or shows did they go to. Then, how can you use that data to show if they attended once, if they attended twice, if they attended three times; how much did they interact within the meeting app; how many documents did they download. Then, as a result, did they actually buy something? That really shows not only the return on investment but also return on engagement.

BTN: With marketing coming more readily into SMM, what is the role of travel management, and how can travel managers work well with marketing?

Wendel: Travel managers … need to be sound business professionals who are interested in being collaborative partners. As long as they take that approach and listen, and do their best to understand the perspectives that the marketing professionals are coming from, everyone's going to be fine.

Scholar: There are at least four different areas where a travel leader has the ability to influence marketers. One of them is group travel and the reasons why group travel should be booked through the preferred travel management company. Not only is it fares; it's also duty-of-care risk.

Another area is hotels. There's a lot of ability to leverage transient hotels with group hotels. If a company has a good program in place and can see the synergy, the travel manager should be able to work with marketers to explain which hotel properties might offer marketing events an even better deal, which potentially would allow the marketer to use reinvestment money.

Automation is another. If we can help educate travel leaders on the technologies that are in place today, those technologies have a lot of marketing capabilities. Plus, the automation helps the travel leaders because there's integration with the online booking tools.

Last, the marketers would benefit by the travel leader's ability to direct card. If you're using a [purchasing] card or a meeting card or a corporate card ... often, travel leaders are managing the card products and marketers might have visibility into the ways things are purchased or how budgets are spent.

Iwamoto: I'm surprised at the level of noninteraction there is between marketing and transient travel. There have been several times when we, as a third-party supplier, have separate contracts with both groups and have to make the internal introduction for them because they have not reached out to each other or even tried to work together or look at potential synergies.

To that point, I want to emphasize something Debi said: Leveraging transient spend with the meetings and events spend. That's the last bastion of negotiated savings leverage that travel buyers have today. The law of supply and demand, unfortunately, and for the last four years and for the next year or two, looks like it's going to be on the supplier-advantage side. The only way that travel or procurement managers can continue to negotiate decent levels of discounting is to combine the transient spend data with the meetings spend data and make deals happen from that vantage point.

So if travel managers haven't introduced themselves [to marketing], they really should. Marketing has buying influence, and travel managers bring a lot of program discipline and reporting discipline.