Maritz Travel Co. last month unveiled a new process designed to quantify meeting objectives, then use those metrics to measure how effective meetings are in achieving them. The program is positioned as an extension of a strategic meetings management program, the company said.
The process uses pre-event interviews with meeting stakeholders as the backbone of a survey of meeting attendees, the results of which Maritz uses to create quantifiable objectives for the meeting. Then, the company conducts surveys of attendees during and after the event to measure the effect of the meeting on the predetermined objectives, said Maritz Travel president and CEO Christine Duffy.
In development for two years, the process has been piloted by a handful of companies, including Bayer HealthCare, which used it to assess an annual sales meeting. The process sprung from a separate 2005 tool designed to measure the effectiveness of corporate incentive travel programs and itineraries through employee polling and data analysis, Duffy said
(Meetings Today, Oct. 17, 2005). Along the way, customers approached her, inquiring about using it for nonincentive meetings.
"We go and we sit down with the stakeholders and we get an agreement on the outcome they're looking for," Duffy said.
Through the information gathered from stakeholder interviews, a survey is developed that is given to the future meeting's attendees. Participants are given several questions about their preferences, ranging from type of locale to time spent in education sessions to the length of the event. Participants can choose between two options for each question.
"Our process and this kind of research tool forces people to choose between things, and as they make these choices, you get clarity around what is the best design or choice for the largest number of people who participate," Duffy said.
Once the data from the surveys has been collected and analyzed, Maritz creates a simulation that allows users to see the attendees' reactions to a number of variables. Maritz then can recommend the meeting structure that would be most valuable to the highest number of participants.
"It's aligning your objectives as a stakeholder against what is going to be most meaningful for the audience, and if there are gaps, working through them," Maritz's Duffy said.
She said many stakeholders are unaware of exactly what their audience wants until they see the results. "For a lot of senior executives, it is an 'a-ha' for them. If you're not listening to what participants or potential participants want, you won't see the maximum participation or attendance you're looking for," she said.
The process continues after the event is held. Pre- and post-meeting metrics are measured against one another to see if the goals of the meeting were met.
Pilot customer Bayer HealthCare's meetings budget had not been raised in eight years and was getting ready to face budget cuts, despite rises in costs and the number of events managed, said Bayer's Robyn Renner, who works in sales performance and development. After exploring Maritz's incentive-assessment tool, Renner asked Maritz if her company's annual national sales meeting could be similarly evaluated.
Two months prior to the event, Maritz sent a survey to attendees. "This was the first time our people had actually been asked questions about what they would prefer," Renner said.
Through the process, Renner discovered that attendees did not understand terminology used at the meeting. By tweaking that and the overall design of the meeting, participant understanding was improved and quantified on a post-event scorecard, which Renner showed to senior management.
"We can show that people have more knowledge. I could actually show him on the business initiative that this was an investment," Renner said. As a result, the meetings budget was raised for the first time in almost a decade.
"It's amazing to me still. The nice thing is, once you get the surveys, you can dig deeper," Renner said. She said she won't repeat the design part of the process; instead, for future collaborations, she plans on focusing more on the content of the meetings.
The content comes further down in the process, said Lynn Stadler, strategic meetings consultant for Maritz Travel. "In most companies, until you get the logistics right, you can't focus on the higher strategic value that you're bringing," she said. "You can focus this down to a single event, but you can also apply it to a portfolio," Some customers can choose to develop only objective metrics, and Maritz is looking into developing tools that provide less program depth.
Duffy said the Maritz process was a natural extension of what has become popularly known as a strategic meetings management program, a term coined by the National Business Travel Association's groups and meetings committee to describe corporate efforts to gain more control over meeting contracts, budgets, site selection and payment
(Meetings Today, March 29, 2004).During the development process, the company conducted a survey of 700 people to develop a representative design of a national sales meeting, Stadler said. The data revealed five meeting elements that were of greatest concern: number of required nights, venue, pace of schedule, time of year and salespeople attending. That data can be used as a comparison for other companies, Stadler said.
"This approach will provide the science behind what you know to be the truth," Stadler said.
Peter Moen, vice president of global business development for Carlson Marketing Worldwide, a Maritz competitor, said his firm already employs a similar process. "Six years ago, we developed a proprietary relationship-strength research product called RSx that we use to measure not just return on events. We like to call it a return on investment," he said. The product is used to "help us measure, plan, design and execute an event" and conduct surveys before, during and after a meetings. Most of the meetings managed with RSx are client-facing, although internal meetings can be handled as well, he said.
"Most agencies I know of work with customers to measure the effectiveness of the money that they spend," said Bruce Morgan, senior vice president of marketing and business development for BCD Meetings & Incentives.
"The reason why traditional strategic meetings management is so popular is because it's very measurable from a financial-results perspective," he said. "Customers are saying to us, 'It's very hard to isolate how that individual meeting may have attributed to that critical key performance indicator, but let's work further back in the process to determine how we can isolate that.' "