Eight years after politicians attacked the meetings industry
as being "frivolous and wasteful," a coalition forged as a defensive response
has morphed into an offensive lobbyist, optimized to "drive and elevate
our industry in a very meaningful way," Meetings Mean Business Coalition
co-chair Richard Harper told the audience at the recent Cvent Connect conference.
MMB launched "Worth Meeting About" in June to
highlight the role face-to-face meetings play in campaigns, elections and
policymaking. At the Democratic and Republican National conventions in July,
Harper said, MMB plans to "target the very audience that attacked us"
by positing a simple question: "Hey, guess where you are?" The advertising
campaign will appear on elevators, benches and billboards.
Within months of the negative rhetoric in 2008, government
bodies, associations, corporations and others who bowed to political pressures
cancelled hundreds if not thousands of meetings. Worse than the job losses,
Harper said, was that the industry had zero messaging, data or spokespeople to
counter the attacks. That has changed since MBB formed in 2009 and gained momentum
in the past year.
MBB has amassed research, data, infographics, spokespeople
and videos of executives extolling the value of meetings. Now, according to
Harper, MBB wants to enlist meetings professionals to an advisory council to "suggest
to us how to permeate this message through your business."
Meeting Pros Get
Serious with Data
Savvy meeting professionals are leading the way by speaking
the language of the C-suite, which comes in just two dialects, according to
Cvent co-founder and president of worldwide sales and marketing Chuck Ghoorah: "How
do you increase my revenues or decrease expenses." Well-managed meetings
can accomplish both, he claimed, citing two client proof points.
With the help of a mobile event app and onsite registration
tools integrated with its CRM tool, SevOne senior global events specialist Kira
Frank identified $1 million in closed business and $1.7 million in pipeline
business that resulted from a quickly planned user conference. "When the
CEO saw this, it completely changed his thinking about the conference," Ghoorah
said.
On the flip side, when a new director asked employees at
Olympus for cost-reduction strategies, Kelly Pettis had been trying to organize
a strategic meetings management program. She saw an opportunity for support and
ran with it. She documented $13 million in unmanaged spending and forged a meetings
department that documented savings of $4.5 million and 2,200 man hours saved in
only six months, Ghoorah said.
These data and concrete management initiatives are the first
steps in a collective effort to emphasize the "true value of meetings and events,
the power of human connection," Ghoorah said. "You know it. I know
it. But I don't think the C-suite knows it as well as they should. And I don't
think the C-suite respects it as much as they should."
He argued that the C-suite doesn't ask human resources,
operations and finance to prove their value with studies, as it requests of
meetings departments. Rather than occupying a seat at the executive table, "we're
at the kiddie table," he said. "That's just wrong." The meetings
industry has relied on general industry studies to communicate value to
corporate executives, but "rather than get frustrated and come up with the
50th study, let's do something different," he urged. "Now you've got
the event technology to help you change the conversation."