ICPA's New Prez To Help Members Prove Their Worth

As the Insurance Conference Planners Association continues to change the face of its membership by including planners from financial services companies, the association plans to develop tools not only to prove the value of meetings and incentive travel to corporations, but also the value of the people who plan them.

ICPA will hold its annual meeting Nov. 3 to 7 in Seattle, where Mutual of Omaha manager of sales incentives and recognition programs Ken Juel will assume the association's presidency for a one-year term, replacing American Fidelity Group's Brett Barrowman. Though the association's direction is charted by its board of directors, Juel has several initiatives he would like to lead. "I'd like to see our objectives and directions get to the next strategic level," Juel said. "As an organization, we need to get better at helping individual planners sell themselves to their individual companies. They need tools to help them do that, to help them capture the concessions they receive in negotiations and to show how much they save their companies."

Juel would like to see the association develop a mechanism for individual member planners to offer strategies of how they demonstrate their worth to the company. "We have a plethora of corporate planners that justify the existence of their convention services departments to their companies," he said. "We don't need everyone to reinvent the wheel. The association needs to capture that."

Juel also hopes to develop the association's chapters and encourage the participation of veteran members in their operations. ICPA also recently relaunched its Web site.

The Seattle annual meeting also will mark the second anniversary of ICPA's watershed, and then controversial, vote to acknowledge the increasing consolidation between insurance and financial services companies by inviting planners from the latter to become members. Though the controversy has died down considerably, Juel said, and between 25 and 50 financial services company planners have joined ICPA, the structures of their companies' meeting services departments has been somewhat of a surprise.

"Unlike large insurance companies that have large departments and many planners, a lot of financial services companies have small, independent departments that are made up of one individual," Juel said. "That's what's been showing up in our ranks. It's different than many of us had envisioned. We assumed they were peers with big offices, and they're not."

The association would like to grow its roster of financial services members to 100, Juel said. "We have had a difficult time locating these planners. We want to find them and communicate what ICPA is all about."

ICPA limits the attendance of suppliers at its annual meeting to maintain a ratio of suppliers to planners of about one-and-a-half to one. Included this year is The Exchange, an extremely popular but at times controversial planner-only session in which members can share details of their programs and experiences with suppliers. The Exchange was dropped for a time last year, as the association then noted the session's content had damaged certain supplier programs, but the session was overhauled and reintroduced.

"The Exchange is back and here to stay. It's a very valuable tool to meeting planners," Juel said. "About 99.9 percent of the time, it was very positive. A planner would ask for help finding a destination management company in Ireland, for example, and two or three people would speak up to say one they use does a great job. It's a great research tool for small companies, because they do not have the money for extensive onsite research."

Juel said participants are asked to keep their comments on a professional and constructive level. "We've brought in a professional moderator. We encourage people that we want honesty through direct, specific and non-punishing comments. If you had bad luck at a property, here are the issues and the year it happened. Keep it at a level where you're not piling on or feeding off each other."

Interestingly, given the instability in the meeting industry as a whole, Juel said the insurance sector has remained fairly constant. "We don't go anywhere. This industry is steady," he said. "It recognizes the value of incentive travel, because in a down market for sales, motivation is important and it's wrong to take away from salespeople what gives them good feelings."